Personality Plus

I can remember some years ago a period of time when churches jumped on the personality typing bandwagon. As part of identifying spiritual gifts churches were taken through a program of personality testing. One of the most popular of these is the Myers-Briggs personality profiling test. Personality testing is big business but how much can they really tell us? The September issue of Annals of Psychology has an article exploring this question called Personality Plus. Malcolm Gladwell, the author of the article, explores some of the problems and pitfalls of personality profiling. He concludes that the problems don't mean we should stop searching for ways to profile personality. But, in the end, to really know someone, we need to actually live with them in the most challenging moments of life. You can read the full article here.