The Test Quacks

THE BRAIN WATCHERS (304 pp.)--Martin L. Gross--Random House ($4.95).

Please answer the following questions to the best of your ability. There are no right or wrong answers, and one answer can be just as good as another. 1) I need a drink or two in the morning (True or False?).

2) Do you like climbing along the edge of a precipice (Yes or No?).

Do you like snakes? Do you like poetry?

3) About how many people have you disliked or hated very much? a) none; b) 1 to 3; c) 4 to 10; d) 11 to 50; e) over 50.

Now draw figures of a man and a woman on separate sheets of paper.

These questions and statements are samples from personality tests. Millions of Americans take such tests every month, and their answers help to determine whether they get jobs, whether they are promoted or fired if they already have jobs, or whether they are fit to enter college. Obviously, if this is so, the second sentence of the instructions is a lie. Answers can be right or decidedly wrong.

Fears & Pains. This is not the tests' only falsity, at least in the opinion of Bunkraking Author Martin Gross. A freelance writer turned test-tester, Gross argues convincingly that the personality sieves are 1) unscientific. 2) immoral, and 3) harmful to individual and corporation. Worst of all, he says, the tests do not work. The hugely profitable testing industry sells two kinds of omen analyzers. The first sort consists of printed questions that can be answered with check marks and graded by anyone who has a key. Such tests cost relatively little--as low as $7 an employee--because they do not require the tester to meet the testee or to spend much time on his evaluation. Nevertheless, say the testing outfits, marvelously accurate results can be obtained in long-distance detection of paranoia, screening out alcoholics (Question 1 above), homosexuals (Question 2; real men like precipices and snakes but dislike poetry) and "alienated" prospective employees (Question 3).

More sophisticated (and more expensive) testers smile pityingly at such questions, pointing out that no booze hound, no matter how shaky he feels when he fills out the test, is going to admit to his future boss that he takes a slug when he wakes up each morning. The sophisticated testers are more "psychological," although many of them are not psychologists. They rely on supposedly cheatproof tests, asking their subjects to complete sly sentences ("My greatest fear . . ." "What pains me . . ."), flashing Rorschach inkblots, or as in the sample above, asking the testee to draw figures. Author Gross includes a key for scoring figures. A button nose on a drawing is an indication that the artist is immature; limply hanging arms show a Hamlet-like personality (very bad); buttons drawn on clothes reveal inadequacy and dependency; if the female figure is clothed or flat-chested, the artist is sexually disturbed (but it is normal to put clothes--presumably without buttons --on a male figure).

Wait Till Supine. Such "analysis" can be done by mail, but some testers supplement it with "depth" interviews lasting an hour or more. The chief psychologist for the "management engineering" firm of Stevenson, Jordan & Harrison told Gross that "we set up a sort of doctor-patient relationship to put employees at their ease. I try to make the man feel as much at home as possible.'' A testing psychologist at George Fry said: "I wait until I have him almost supine. After that, he reveals himself quickly and I learn a great deal about the man." The Hippocratic oath, of course, does not enter into this variant of the "doctor-patient relationship," and the tester tells all to management, as he was hired to.

Author Gross writes a clumsy brand of English ("grizzly" for "grisly" is one of his more entertaining errors), but his book does suffering testees a service in exposing the statistical cheating and psychological fakery of their less scrupulous tormentors. Gross's attitude, in the jargon of the testers, is woefully low in "nurturance" (that is, he is unfriendly), and the reader, as he learns of the testers' nonsense, may feel his own nurturance running low.

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