Personality

I know atleast two friends who will disagree with me when I say that personality assessment and classification tests and the current psychology-based self-help stuff is bullshit.

For (too) long, special seers, swamis and babas and witch-doctors and even gypsies have enamoured people by predicting the future, making personal assessments and assuring them of rosy forecasts. Palm reading, crystal gazing, psychological counselling, all these have helped people walk away from the couch with higher confidence, with a gut feeling that they know a wee bit more about themselves than they began with.

But how is it that a person, or a computer, running on formulae tends to know more about you within the span of 20 minutes (or 20 generic questions) than you have yourself known for the entire life?

The Barnum effect tells what I think about this accurately. Simply put, it is the ultimate example of successful marketing - selling a non-existent product. To quote Michael Crichton on medical journals, it is a "highly skilled, calculated attempt to confuse " the victim by offering explanations that the person believes are specific to him, but are so highly generic as to apply to anyone. The human brain's power of correlation then takes over, and matches the vague phrase to his/her own specific experience.

And this is precisely what makes psychology so powerful - the inner conditioning to stimuli. Everytime the brain recieves a stimulus of this sort, it relates back to how it can be justified, and how this 'new found knowledge' can be used for its own betterment. By activating the right desires in the brain, we stimulate ourselves to justify the explanation by living in a certain way, a way chosen by another person.

So how is this knowledge useful to me? What if I always look at positive phrases... even mumbo jumbo? ...Will it activate the correct parts of the brain?

My grandma used to say.. "Think positive"....