Personality Tests: Survival of the Phoniest

Having recently finished a novel I've been meaning to get written and now finding myself in need of more money to supplement my shoddy income as a videographer, I have been sending applications out to various places in hope of getting some retail work for the holiday season. Make more money. Comfort myself with more financial security. Contract some H1N1.

One thing I noticed during the application process was that several retail places no longer administrated their own hiring process. For efficiency's sake, they have outsourced the tedious task to a third-party "workforce management" company called Kronos (see Kronos.com). The Kronos company, according to their website, specializes in giving companies "the tools they need to help them control labor costs, minimize compliance risk, and improve workforce productivity". More importantly, it ensures that organizations "hire the best people and make smarter decisions".

One of the ways Kronos has gone about finding "the best" workers for their client companies is by developing an electronic employee application that includes something called a Unicru personality test (Unicru was the company that initially developed the test, but was bought out by Kronos in 2006). Many of you out there are probably familiar with this test, as it is reportedly used by nearly 16% of all retail organizations in the United States. The test consists of a series of statements and you are supposed to respond to each statement with whether you strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree. For example, there will be a vague statement like, "Any trouble you have is your own fault" or "You are careful not to offend people" or "Your moods are steady from day to day" and you're supposed to choose whether you agree with what is said.

Upon completion, the tests are "graded" by Kronos with three colors: green, yellow or red. Green means the applicant passed the test with flying colors. Yellow means they did so-so. And red means they failed. This color-coding system is used with the intention of making the hiring process easier for the employer. Instead of sifting through an enormous pile of applications and looking over each applicant's work experience and education background and references etc., all the employer has to do is look through a Unicru report, see who the "greens" are and then call those people for an interview, for it's the greens that (according to the test) are the best candidates for employment.

Of course, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what is wrong with this kind of shallow, oversimplified means of hiring employees. In the words of one flustered personality test-taker quoted in a recent Wall Street Journal news article, the test is "just a way for companies to hire robots. A lot of people who scored green just figured out a way to cheat the system, or are just the 'yes' people, and I don't believe it makes them more capable than anybody else."

With statements like "You agree with people more often than you argue", "You are careful not offend people", "You avoid arguments as much as possible", "You finish your work no matter what", and "You are somewhat of a thrill-seeker", it's clear that the intention of the Unicru test is to weed out the people who are most likely to be 'insubordinate', get in the way of productivity and, in turn, decrease company profits. In other words, the test ends up favoring those who never argue, upset others, disobey orders, offend people, seek thrills...in short, those who are the least human. Kronos apparently believes that the most dehumanized individual will make a company run at its most productive level, like an ever-predictable mechanism within a large machine.

But its favoring of dehumanized individuals isn't all that's wrong with the Unicru test. As I personally took the 99-question test - determining whether I agreed with the various statements - I found myself inwardly conflicted when coming up with my responses. On one hand, I knew what my honest responses were to the various statements...but I also knew that my honest responses were not what the Kronos people were looking for.

For example, when I was faced with statements like "Many people cannot be trusted", "People do a lot of annoying things", "People do a lot of things that make you angry", and "There are some people you really can't stand", my first inclination was to "strongly agree" with all of the above. I mean, yes, a lot of people out there really bother me and do a lot of annoying things that make me angry, and I'm sure the majority of people out there share this sentiment. But I knew that "strongly agreeing" with those statements would only make me look like a negative malcontent and wouldn't test well with Kronos. So I essentially found myself forced to choose a phony response that I knew would ensure my chances of passing the test. I knew that the 'right' answer was to "strongly disagree".

In other words, I came to the realization that lying was the only way I was going to get the job. And I'm sure I wasn't alone in feeling this way. I'm sure most people who take these tests find themselves responding dishonestly for the same reasons, especially in the midst of today's horrible economy where people have never been so desperate to get the job. People will do whatever it takes to get an interview, even if it means lying and bullshitting their foot in the door.

So, in effect, what the Unicru personality test really ends up doing (intentionally or not) is it weeds out people who tell the truth and rewards those who lie. Where the test's intention is to act as a kind of Darwinian means of selecting 'the best' to work for a company, what it really does is ensure that the liars and bullshitters and phonies thrive in our society while the honest people get left to rot in the gutter. It's a selection of the phoniest, not the fittest.

Now, it's very possible I'm looking too far into all this...but I don't think I am. Look at the gravity of the situation on a greater scale: I guy gets a job because he is dishonest on his personality test. He leads a dishonest life as a dishonest employee. He is never truthful. He never says what he really means. He never argues. Never offends. He acts the way his employer wants him to act, not the way he wants to act. He makes a dishonest living at this dishonest job and starts a dishonest family, and teaches his children to be dishonest so they, too, can get a dishonest job and make a dishonest living and start another dishonest family. One dishonest generation after another is born. Over time, the world turns into a completely dishonest place where nobody exists as their true self; they exist according to how others (in this case, their employers) want them to exist.

Of course, things haven't gotten this extreme...yet. Only 16% of retail companies have subcontracted their hiring process to Kronos Corp., which is a high percentage, but it could be much worse. And although personality testing is reportedly a $450 million industry (and expanding by 10% every year), not everybody's using the tests; in fact, a lot of companies (Whole Foods, Spencer Gifts, among others) have come to realize how flawed the test really is.

However, with the economy in the condition it is - a condition that will more than likely get worse before it gets better - companies are becoming more and more desperate to find the "best" employees, which means more and more of these companies are going to use personality tests that, they think, will make it easier for them to do this. And, with people becoming more and more desperate to find a job, people will do whatever they need to do to survive, submit to the test, even if it means lying and being a phony.

It hasn't quite happened yet, but our culture is undoubtedly headed in a direction where it will become its phoniest ever. In today's job market, 'truth' has become an inconvenience, something that only gets in the way of our financial survival. But 'truth' is, always has been and always will be the most important thing to preserve, even if it makes life a tad more financially insecure. In the words of Martin Luther, "Peace if possible, truth at all costs."

To see the complete Unicru personality test I took, click here.

Reflections on the Meaning of Life

I just finished another interesting book called MANY LIVES, MANY MASTERS by a psychiatrist named Brian L. Weiss. Maybe it was serendipity that I discovered this book now (it was written about 25 gears ago), especially at a time when I've been pondering the meaning of my life and the point of humankind on earth in general. This book begins to shed some light on these issues.

In 1982, Weiss took on a client named Catherine who was having all sorts of personal problems. She suffered from extreme phobias (everything from fear of water to closed spaces to swallowing pills) and also experienced anxiety attacks on a daily basis. Something was clearly wrong with her, so she was referred by her physician to Dr. Weiss to see if his psychiatric practices could shed any light on the situation.

Initially, Weiss attempted basic psychoanalysis to try and get at the root of Catherine's problems, hoping to pinpoint childhood traumas that would explain her phobias. But with the exception of a few minor improvements, Catherine's phobias persisted.

Weiss then took things a step further and tried regression therapy, hoping this would tap into Catherine's subconscious and reveal a repressed trauma or other incident that would explain the phobias. But something unexpected occurred when he did this. Instead of accessing Catherine's subconscious, he accessed something else: what he refers to as her "super-conscious".

While under hypnosis, Catherine started experiencing strange memories that didn't pertain to her current life in any way. She remembered being a girl in Ancient Egypt who embalmed the dead, and then being a little boy in the Ukraine whose father was wrongfully executed in prison, and then being a prostitute in Spain, and even being a Nazi German soldier who died in WWII. Weiss eventually concluded that these memories were of past lives - what he eventually determined to be a whopping 86 lives in total!

But what was even more interesting about the regression sessions was that Catherine would remember the time in between her many lives: that is, she would re-experience floating out of her body after a death, going into a bright light, becoming a spirit in the spirit world and evaluating her life from beginning to end - what she learned, what she did right...and where she went wrong.

And that's not it: to make things even more amazing, Catherine found herself able to convey super-intelligent spirit messages to Dr. Weiss during these "in-between-life" experiences - messages dictated to her from highly evolved spirits (what Weiss refers to as being "the masters"). In other words, she acted as a medium, helping Dr. Weiss communicate with the spirit world. The messages to Weiss were spoken poetically, and they described a spirit world comprised of seven levels, where the lowest levels were for poorly evolved spirits and the highest levels were for the highest evolved spirits. Life, the masters explained, is about learning, and each soul comes to earth to learn a particular lesson that can only be learned in human form. We choose when we want to live and what kind of life we are going to live and what we need to learn during that particular life. The overall meaning of our lives on earth is to obtain as much wisdom and knowledge as we can, so as to become as "God-like" as possible. Each soul grows during each life, and - eventually - everybody reaches the highest spirit levels in the spirit world, as long as we learn what we need to during our various human incarnations.

After several of her regressions, Catherine ultimately freed herself from her fears, phobias, and anxieties. Weiss determined that her dramatic improvements were due to a combination of pinpointing certain past-life traumas and also becoming more spiritually aware through the process of her regression. She came to realize that our souls live forever, and that there is nothing to be afraid of in life, because we never die. There is a greater purpose to our existence: to evolve to the highest level possible.

All in all, Many Lives, Many Masters is an incredibly intriguing book, even if you're skeptical of whether it's all true. One particularly interesting discovery Weiss makes during his time with Catherine is that souls "hang out" in groups and manifest themselves as human beings at similar points in time. This means that people we know in our present life most likely played a role in a past life, but not necessarily the same role. In Catherine's case, her lover in her present life (a man named Stuart) was a father in one of her past lives, and in another past life he was actually her murderer. Yes, it seems strange that a murderer in one life would be a father in another life, but Weiss learns from "the masters" that this occurs because a soul becomes indebted to people they are unjust to in another life. Catherine's murderer, in other words, wanted to repay her for his injustice, so he appeared as a more nurturing father in another one of Catherine's lives.

This all seems very far out, but one can't help but wonder if there is any truth to Weiss' discoveries. After all, why is it that we seem to gravitate towards certain people in our lives? What makes us choose our friends? Lovers? Colleagues? Is it because we know them from another life? Or from several other lives? Do we keep on befriending the same people over and over again? Are we all a part of a greater spiritual journey where we're trying to help each other evolve spiritually?

Overall, MANY LIVES, MANY MASTERS is an incredibly interesting book. It sheds a brighter light on the human identity and the meaning of life in general. According to Weiss' discoveries, we are placed on earth in several different incarnations to learn several different lessons, and we learn these through trials, tribulations and - most importantly - a lot of pain. In a culture where we are supposed to be happy all the time, where we're conditioned by happy-ending Hollywood movies and books like The Secret that teach us to ignore negativity and "think positive", Weiss' book suggests the complete opposite: that it's our PURPOSE on earth to experience hardship and painful times, as it's through these difficulties that our spirits grow and evolve. Only through pain do we become more highly evolved spirits, and, thus, closer to God. What a radical way to look at life.

Debbie Downer: the Power of 'Negative' Thought

I recently read a brand new book called EMPIRE of ILLUSIONS by Pulitzer-Prize-Winner Chris Hedges and it was basically about all of America's problems right now, like economical, health, environmental and yada yada yada, but one thing he focused on (which I found particularly interesting) was the new wave of "positive psychology" that has been pervading our culture lately. This is the power-of-positive-thought-type of philosophy that best-selling books like THE SECRET talk about. This type of psychology has become particularly popular during the current economic crisis when all is going to hell and people find themselves faced with nothing but negativity in all aspects of their life. People turn to the positive psychologists who convince them that they must implement the "power of attraction", think happy thoughts - like Peter Pan would say - and all the negativity will eventually disappear. Life will get much better.

Of course, all this 'power of attraction' rhetoric is all hogwash for the most part (THE SECRET, after all, was written by the same weirdo who invented the now-notorious "sweat lodge"); and such a psychology has several detrimental effects on people as well. Primarily, Hedges argues in his book that the "positivity" these psychologists preach about paradoxically has the negative consequence of deluding people from reality and, yes - despite what our 'Disneyfied' culture would have you believe - retreating into fantasy when the going gets rough is a bad thing. If we blind ourselves from life's problems, the problems only grow worse in the long run.

Hedges also argues that positive psychology has the negative result of making people passively complacent, where they end up becoming (what he calls) a "corporate collective" - that is, a mass of like-minded people who agree with everything and lose the individual capacity to question the mainstream. In other words, positive psychologists label 'dissatisfaction' with the status quo as being 'negativity', the ramifications of which are dire. After all, dissatisfaction is the emotion that influences a person to promote change, either in their personal life or in society. If people are constantly forcing themselves to be satisfied, then they no longer possess the capacity to change, which, in a sense, leads to their (spiritual) deaths.

In his book, Hedges points out that the corporate elite - in particular - are huge advocates of "positive psychology" (several major companies pay good money to have these psychologists come and speak at company conventions). The elite use the "power of positivity" to essentially trick the working class into thinking they are happier with their place within the capitalist system than they really are. Employers like a psychology that labels 'dissatisfaction' as 'negativity', because it fools exploited workers into thinking their disgruntlement with things like low wages and long hours and monotonous work and lack of good benefits and poor retirement pensions is a result of them being pessimistic malcontents. In other words, positive psychology spins employee exploitation in a manner so that it looks like it's the worker's own fault that they are unhappy. They are forced to look at the bright side of their exploitation, even when no bright side exists.

As many of you know, "Saturday Night Live" had a recurring sketch a few years back that featured a nerdy, unattractive-looking woman who turns every conversation with her friends into something negative. She always saw the glass as half empty, so to speak. She was called "Debbie Downer". Although it was rather humorous, the sketch was a reflection of a society already conditioned by positive psychology. As the Debbie Downer caricature insinuates, a person who points out the flaws in society is perceived as nerdy and unattractive - a foolish malcontent...and this is the problem. If everybody is afraid of being a "Debbie Downer" then nobody will ever admit to both themselves and to others that they are dissatisfied in life, which means that everybody will lose the capacity to become proactive, change their life, and make a positive difference.

Yes, as strange an idea as it seems, the world depends on the "Debbie Downer" in order to be saved from its downfall. People must realize that feeling depressed or dissatisfied is - in a lot of cases - actually a good thing. It's a healthy thing. Contrary to popular belief, dissatisfaction doesn't necessarily mean we should go to the doctor and be prescribed Prozac or some other anti-depressant (which is another thing the corporate elite would prefer to see you do). And it certainly doesn't mean we should read THE SECRET and learn how to attract wealth and prosperity with our happy thoughts. No...it simply means CHANGE is needed. And you need to do something in order to trigger that change.

To put it simply, positive psychology is a quack psychology. Without "negativity", there would be no positive change in the world. Without the Debbie Downer, nobody would make a difference.

Strong Advocate of Piracy

As a long-time Itunes user, I've been noticing more and more often now that the price to download a song has been going up to $1.29 (from 99 cents) and it's starting to tickle my mustache a bit. On one hand, I can understand why musical "artists" want to earn the money they deserve for the songs that they create. They spent a lot of time and thought and, hell, it's their creation. Right?

But are most of these artists really "artists"? When I turn on Kiss 108 radio, just about every song I hear is about going to the clubs and checking out the girls with the fur boots and taking them into the bathroom or riding a "disco stick" and "see you at the hotel, motel, Holiday Inn" and "you spin me right round" and "going down-down" and "sucking it like a lollipop".

And if it's not sexually explicit lyrics, you get some rapper talking about how 'gangsta' he is and how he's the king of New York and God's gift to the world and Jesus Christ himself, not to mention any names Jay-Z, Kanye and Lil Wayne.

Don't get me wrong: I like most of these songs (so doesn't my money-maker), and I don't consider myself to be a conservative prude who gets all flustered by sexually explicit material. However, I think the hip hop/dance industry (i.e. whatever's played on Kiss) has gone a little overboard with all this sexual stuff. It's almost been done to the point of getting REALLY annoying. You can just see the managers of these musical artists gathering in a conference room and trying to come up with the most sexually provocative dance song they can devise.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want my teenage daughters exposed to all those songs...or teenage boys, for that matter. When you have Britney Spears singing about threesomes in her new song "3", I don't find it surprising that parent groups have been giving her a lot of guff. I think they should be. (As an aside, I doubt Britney's even having threesomes. I think she's just singing about them in attempt to be "bad-ass" and because that's the kind of thing everybody else is singing about these days.)

But, more importantly, I think it's a bit stupid that these musicians are considering themselves to be such great artists and that their songs are worth the $1.29 people have to pay for them on Itunes. I think that's ridiculous! I would experience no guilt in ripping these shallow songs off for free. Yes, I would take great pride pirating a song that says nothing but "evacuate the dance floor" over and over again (again, great tune, but stupid as anything).

I recently saw Lil Wayne's "Behind the Music" special on VH1 and he said at the end of the program that - first and foremost - he was an artist and "if you give an artist a canvas, he's going to create art." What a bunch of horseshit. Maybe I'm judging him in an oversimplified manner, but writing a song that's about having your garbage sucked like a lollipop is not art. It's a commodity manufactured with the thought in mind that SEX SELLS.

The next college student who gets fined for downloading free music could probably present a good case to the judges that he didn't feel he should be paying money for music that is about NOTHING. After all, there shouldn't be an issue of protecting "artistic property" when you're not dealing with art to begin with. Maybe once the "artists" actually start making actual works of art (not commodities) the music will be worth a little money. Until then, I'm not paying $1.29 for that crap. No way. No how.

My tribute to Michael Jackson

Natty Ice also seems to give me awesome dancing abilities, as you can see in the video below: