“The study investigates the relation between people’s personality and the content and style of their writing…” – email from Washington University in St. Louis.

We Judge, and Hopefully Well

Eminem wasn’t the first person to shrug his shoulders in exasperation and say “I am whoever you say I am”.  Humans have a long history of expressing frustration with other people’s perceptions of their character and personality. We warn each other not to judge — a book by its cover, lest you be judged, hastily — or even slightly because, after all,  “who are you to judge?”

Yet it’s imperative that people judge each other, and that we do it proficiently and well if we wish to avoid the type of trouble that comes from failing to accurately assess another person’s character or intentions. The question isn’t why we judge, so much as how. What criteria, besides the obvious ones of intuition and appearance, do we use when forming opinions about another person’s personality and character?

In day-to-day life, we have the opportunity to study one another’s general way of existing in the world. We watch actions and reactions, and ask each other questions in a give-and-take sort of way. Our impressions are usually not based on answers alone, but also on tone and expression.

Popular personality tests like the Big Five O.C.E.A.N test (an acronym for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), remove the eyes, ears, and experience from human study, and claim to offer an objective and accurate analysis of personality based on the types of scaled questions discussed in part one.

I wanted to test the accuracy of the Big Five test, not just against my own self-assessment, but against the impressions of my real life friends.  I was also curious what judgments total strangers might form about me based on nothing more than my answers to a series of random questions.  I wondered how much variation would exist between real-life impressions, the judgments of strangers, and test results.  What I found was surprising.

But First, Let Me Tell You Why I Have A Problem With This…

Personality tests like the Big Five were originally devised as a therapeutic resource for psychologists. I have no issue with tests like this being used by psychologists and their clients as part of therapy, where there is face-to-face interaction and the give-and-take of discussion. However, personality tests have worked their way into the mainstream, most harmfully in the field of employment, where some companies weed out applicants based on nothing more than a short Q&A test — which can be highly misleading, if not in many cases wildly inaccurate.

Does a person who enjoys her solitude make a lousy customer service representative? Not necessarily. She may simply cherish being alone at night after a long day of work and mothering.  Will a person who loves museums and art be open to a company’s continuous changes? Maybe not. Perhaps their appreciation for art is based on its traditions rather than its fluidity. Will a person who keeps their desk clean be the most conscientious employee? Or simply the office neat freak, who is more interested in color-coordinated paper clips than in the company’s bottom line?

Of course, many people who take these tests in the course of employment are familiar with what answers are expected, and fill in the blanks accordingly. Those who want a job aren’t likely to tell a prospective employer that they’re  messy, uncomfortable around people, and easily stressed out. Yet,  human resources offices around the country continue to rely on personality tests in order to help inform their hiring decisions.

A well-known coffee shop is one such employer. Their online application process includes a personality test. If you fail the test, your application will not be processed and your name won’t make it to the list of potential hires.  I tested their system by filling out two applications with the information of real people. I answered one personality test truthfully, and one as I imagined a “perfect employee” might answer. The fictional “perfect employee” made the list. I did not.

Real Life Judgments vs. Test Scores

I believe that Washington University’s study would be more accurate if they simply asked writers to rate themselves on the Big Five scale of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. The saying “no one knows you better than you know yourself”  tends to apply when the people in question are generally rational and lucid. I know, for instance, that while I don’t mind talking to a lot of people at a party, I likely wouldn’t accept the invitation in the first place. I also know that while I procrastinate over chores, I’m one of the first people my friends call in an emergency.

The Big Five test I took for the University pegged me as being more neurotic than 63.3% of others, more open to experience than 82.3%, and more extroverted than 63.6% of others. According to the test, 82.7% of other people are more conscientious than I am, and 74.3% are more agreeable.

In other words, according to the Big Five, I’m a highly-strung, open-minded, gregarious person who can’t be counted on. I can’t think of an employer who would want that particular combination in an employee, can you?

Being familiar with my own strong points and shortcomings, I thought it would be interesting to see how others, strangers and friends alike, would rate me on the O.C.E.A.N scale. The friends part was easy — I simply asked three people who know me well to look at the definitions of the Big Five traits and assign me a score from 1-10, with 10 being the highest. Averaged, my friends rated me:

8.0 – for Openness
6.0 – for Conscientiousness
5.3 – for Extroversion
4.7 – for Agreeableness
5.6 – for Neuroticism

My friends tended to agree with the Big Five’s assessment of me as open but not highly agreeable — but they disagreed that I was more extroverted, far more neurotic, or far less conscientious than average.

Having strangers assess my personality was a bit more difficult. I questioned whether I should use the 60 questions from the Big Five test, but then decided no — I wanted to use the type of questions that real people ask in the day-to-day when they’re more interested in getting to know something about another person.

A psychologist would argue that the questions aren’t specific to the Big Five categories, therefore it would be difficult, if not impossible, for lay people to accurately assess O.C.E.A.N. traits from homegrown Q&A’s. My argument is that in real life people form impressions and make judgments not through  pinpointed analysis, but through a much more diffuse and intuitive set of criteria. A question like, “Mayonnaise or Miracle Whip” may not work for the cause of clinical psychology, but in human interactions, answers like “mayonnaise, preferably homemade or organic” tell us something about a person. Some may think the answer indicates a person who is health-conscious; others may think the person is a snob; still others may think this is a person who puts way too much effort into making a sandwich.

It is as often the minutia of another person’s existence that informs real life judgments. The person to whom health is important may assign extra points in conscientiousness to the person who makes their own mayonnaise — while the person who thinks it’s a waste of time to make what can easily be bought may view the mayonnaise maker as more neurotic than most.

The larger question is — on average –  are the resulting judgments made by strangers  based on nothing more than a random series of Q&A’s, markedly different than the results of psychology’s Big Five test? How far off are the results of strangers vs. friends, or a self-assessed score?

Interestingly enough, only one person who was familiar with what I was doing doubted whether they could judge the Big Five traits based on random Q&A’s — and she’s a friend who majored in psychology. None of the five strangers who participated expressed any hesitation or difficulty in assigning O.C.E.A.N. scores based on my answers to 40 Questions Asked by Readers.

Here are the averaged scores assigned to me by strangers, who are not readers of this blog, were not informed that the answers were written by me, and who did not know the reason for this experiment. Their assignment of points is based on their own perceptions of my answers and a provided description of each of the five traits:

7.8 – for Openness
7.4 – for Conscientiousness
6.6 – for Extroversion
5.8 – for Agreeableness
6.0 – for Neuroticism

Looking back on how my friends rated me, I was surprised to find that perfect strangers — based on nothing more than a series of random Q&A’s — rated me similarly in every category. There was a difference of .2 in Openness, 1.4 in Conscientious, 1.3 in Extroversion, 1.1 in Agreeableness, and .4 in Neuroticism.

The University’s Big Five test would seem to agree with friends and strangers alike that I am more Open and Extroverted than average. Friends and strangers, though, both rated me significantly higher than the Big Five would seem to in the categories of Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, and roughly about the same in the category of Neuroticism.

My self-assessed scores (7.5 for Openness, 6.0 for Conscientiousness, 5.5 for Extroversion, 5.0 for Agreeableness and 6.5 for Neuroticism) were highly similar to the scores given to me by friends — so similar that there is not a full one point difference in any category. However, the assessments by strangers also come very close, with the only significant differences being that they gave me 1.4 more points than myself in Conscientiousness and and 1.1 more points in Extroversion.

My Judgment

While personality tests may have their place in psychology, I don’t believe they are accurate enough to use as a tool in studies like the one being conducted by Washington University, nor should they be used in guiding employment decisions.

When a group of perfect strangers can more accurately glean information about another person’s personality through a blind reading of random Q&A’s than a standardized psychological test can, it’s time to reevaluate not just the accuracy of such tests, but how they are being utilized, and to question the conclusions drawn from their use.

While inaccurate theories sprung from the Big Five test on subjects like the personalities of writers may be fairly innocuous, personality testing in other realms, such as employment, are not.

Had I taken Washington University’s test in the course of a job application rather than for a study, I likely would not have been hired by any company looking for conscientious, agreeable, non-moody personalities.  Also, as previously discussed, according to recent theories, (Pt. 1) many geniuses — who are said to be largely introverted and somewhat hostile — would also find themselves unemployed.

While the coffee shop may not want or need a high I.Q. barista, few highly intelligent people start out at the top. Many work dead-end jobs to pay for college or to support themselves while working on other projects. There are also millions of  people who fall in the spectrum between capable and genius. The artist who works in a factory. The banker who’s messy at home but proficient at work. The 21 dealer who spends his weekends meditating.

The ability to perform at a job well often depends much less on a person’s personality than on their basic abilities and desire to earn a living. I can give a pretty good speech, although it’s one of my least favorite things to do. I can — and have — cleaned up after horses, driven a frozen foods truck, soldered diodes to a circuit board, managed an office, bought media, created advertising campaigns, managed million dollar budgets, ghostwritten a book, and delivered mail. I’ve done all of these jobs proficiently, either utilizing parts of my nature and personality, or working around them.

Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to fake a personality test, but the point is that they are misused, likely to be inaccurate, and sorely out of place in human resource offices. They are simply too full of interpretive holes, too black and white, and too narrow in their definitions of what constitutes positive and negative personality traits.

Eileen F. had an idyllic middle-class upbringing.  Reared by two loving parents, both professionals in their fields, she attended Ivy League schools and went on to become a teacher.  Now 58 years old and partially disabled, Eileen struggles to pay the $700 per month rent on her small cabin in upstate New York.  She supplements her $463 disability check with odd jobs she can do at home, like transcribing the minutes from town meetings and editing newsletters for a non-profit group.   She earns, on average, a little over $600 a month from these jobs, bringing her income up to about $1100 a month.

It’s a life Eileen never expected, and one she says smashed her expectations, leaving her feeling oddly embarrassed and filled with anxiety.   On occasion, she has to borrow $10 or $20 from better-off friends to pay for basic necessities.  Even though she is insured, she is afraid to get the hip replacement she needs for fear of losing income during the recovery period.

According to national government standards, Eileen F. does not statistically count as one of the millions of Americans living in poverty.  Her yearly income of $13,200 is $2413 above the 2008 poverty threshold for single adults, ages 65 and under, as determined by the U.S. Census Bureau.   The threshold caps at $9,944 for singles over the age of 65, and at $13,540 for a family of two.    It is this threshold that determines national statistics on the number of people living in poverty in the United States.    Last August, the U.S. Census Bureau issued a report stating that 37.3 million Americans, approximately 12.5% of the population, were living in poverty in 2007, a slight increase from the 2006 figure of 36.5 million.

The model used to determine poverty thresholds was born from studies done by Mollie Orshansky for the Social Security Administration in the 1960s.  The Orshansky method has often been criticized,  but has not substantially changed since its adoption as a federal standard.  One of the major flaws in Orshansky’s method, which is based on minimum-level food consumption,  is that it assumes that others costs, such as housing, transportation, and daycare, can be cut back in hard times at the same proportion as food.

In effect, Orshansky started her food-costs-to-total-expenditures procedure by considering a hypothetical average (middle-income) family, spending one third of its income on food, which was faced with a need to cut back on its expenditures.  She made the assumption that the family would be able to cut back its food expenditures and its nonfood expenditures by the same proportion. This assumption was, of course, a simplifying assumption or first approximation, as she herself recognized. However, she had no data to support a specific different relationship between food and nonfood expenditure cutbacks.  Under this assumption, one third of the family’s expenditures would be for food no matter how far it had cut back on its total expenditures. – Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 4, Winter 1992, pp. 3-14.

There are many arguments that can be made against the Orshansky method, but the end result is that millions of America’s poor are not counted in the official statistics.  Variables, such as geography, non-cash benefits, and actual cost-of-living expenses make it difficult to gauge the number of people who subsist in our society with inadequate resources to meet essential daily needs. However, it takes no great leap of logic to understand that the figures used by the government grossly underestimate the number of those living in poverty.

Outside of the Census Bureau’s national statistics, which are most often quoted by politicians and the media, there is the matter of who is financially eligible for federal aid programs.   Every year, the Department of Health and Human Services publishes their own poverty guidelines in the Federal Register, employing an adaptation of Orshansky’s threshold.  In 2008, those guidelines were $10,400 for a single adult, $14,000 for a family of two, and $21,200 for a family of four.

Peggy Wireman, Ph.D. has extensive experience with government, economic, and social policy, and recently authored the book,  Connecting the Dots, which “addresses the complex relationships between family and community, and between community and other players affecting family and community life.”  Dr. Wireman, who has a keen understanding of governmental statistics, says that the definition of poverty has been out-of-date for decades.

“It was based on the assumption that people spent one-third of their income on food. Thus, food expenditure was then multiplied to account for everything. The problem is that relatively speaking, the cost of food has gone down while the cost of housing and health care has gone up.  A more realistic approach was developed by Wider Oppurtunties for Women.  They calculated what it would cost a family to live without government subsidy and without charity on a modest budget.  Modest meant housing, food, child care, health care, and a car which used to go to work and for one shopping trip a week.  The budget does not include funds for savings, education, entertainment, or any meals outside the home.   It is about twice the (official) poverty level.”

There is a persistent myth that assistance for poor families is easy to get and readily available.  While States and Counties employ their own guidelines, as well as the federal government’s, in determining who qualifies for various programs, they are all based on models that cut countless poor people off from the possibility of assistance.

In Minnesota, for example,  applicants for emergency assistance in the most populous county, Hennepin, must prove that the assistance given will be cost-effective and offer long-term (12 month) resolution to the immediate problem.  What this means is that those who find themselves in an emergency situation –- such as unexpectedly losing their job –- must show the County reason this won’t happen again next month, or the month after that.  Those who haven’t secured new employment have no way to guarantee this, so the County denies emergency assistance to them on the grounds that it would not be cost-effective.

Also disqualified are applicants who pay more than 40% of their gross wages for rent.  Under the county’s guidelines, a single head of household earning $8/hr. could pay no more than $554 per month for shelter. Outside of subsidized housing, a decades-old mortgage, or a dwelling in which the costs are shared by others, a $554 per month family apartment in the Metro area simply does not exist.

Bootstrap theories abound and are widely accepted, but Dr. Wireman has a different take after dedicating years of her life to studying the economic issues of American families.

“Most Americans,” Wireman says, “feel that people are poor because they don’t work hard enough.  Unfortunately, this is a myth.  If all workers who are making poverty-level wages quit tomorrow the country would shut down. We would have no child care centers, no hospitals, no restaurants, no stores.  Unfortunately, too, the myths that prevailed about welfare have been extended to cover all single parents. Working harder at lowly paid jobs does not lift people out of poverty.  The reason so many people are struggling today is that the productivity of workers is no longer being shared equitably with the workers.   The minimum wage corrected for inflation was $10 a hour in 1968. Eighty percent of American workers work in manufacturing of non-supervisory service jobs.  Their wage increase per hour since 1973 has been 35 cents.  Productivity has been rising.  Between 1995 and 2005 it increased by one-third, but two-thirds of this went to top management and the stock market. Only one-third of the increase was shared with the workers.”

In Connecting the Dots,  Dr. Wireman exposes the changes in business practices and public commitments that have made the American Dream unrealistic for millions of workers, both blue and white collar, and lays out a framework that she believes may help undo the damage.

In the interim, the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer, and women like Eileen, and other people I’ve spoken with in the course of writing this series, including single parents and the elderly, often feel invisible in the colorful, abundant landscape that is the American Dream. They nurture their hopes, and tend to their crises paycheck by paycheck, looking less for temporary handouts than for a long-term way up, and out of the vicious cycle of poverty.

Note: A condensed version of this article was published by the Huffington Post.

Next: Part IV, The Health Care Crisis

Leaning back in the cheap office chair, his hands behind his head, the Bastard tries to defend the indefensible. If pressed by the God he believes in, he would have to admit to being drunk with power and high on self-satisfaction, but God is a long ways off and he has years of Sundays left to repent. For now, in this 11×14 room, he fears no retribution, and all the glory belongs to him.

His greasy hair is tucked under a baseball cap but it’s his brother’s team, not his. I settle on this detail for a moment, and know that if I were a more cunning person, I could use it to my advantage. If I were more like Jesus, I might even find some compassion for the Bastard. In either of those scenes, I might start off telling him about my millionaire sister. The one born to favored status because my mother dreamed that the ghost of her beloved sister, Olga, entered her womb during pregnancy.

So pretty, my mother would say of Dianne Olga, like an angel. The angel worked for six years of her life, married two men of means and retired early. Wearing blinders, she waxes passionately about bootstraps and hard work, and how her tax dollars shouldn’t go to people who are too lazy to buy health insurance.

The Bastard’s brother was a famous baseball player, a World Series champ, whose fourteen year career left him set for life. The Bastard, who grew up playing the same game in the same Minnesota fields, isn’t even a real supervisor, but a 204B – postal lingo for a mail carrier acting as a temporary supervisor.

His act is rough and unpolished. He can’t hide his smirk or his love of power, no matter how fleeting or temporary. He peels the schedule he so carefully crafted from the clip board and hands it to me.

There are rural carriers in the postal service who are losing their homes to foreclosure and writing bad checks for groceries. Unlike city carriers, who are paid an hourly wage, rural carriers are paid based on yearly mail counts, which are always held during the lightest season of the year. This year, the count was in March. No holidays, no back to school ads, no spring clearance sales. The mail count was so low, that the pay for almost every route ended up being cut by one to three hours a day. It doesn’t matter how many hours the carrier actually works to deliver the mail – he or she will be paid for the hours calculated during the annual count, no matter how heavy the volume for the rest of the year.

A large number of the rural carriers employed by the USPS are relief carriers – people who passed the exam to become a regular carrier, and who are waiting for an open route. In the interim, they work at a lower hourly wage with no health insurance or retirement benefits. The wait for a regular opening can take years.

The schedule the Bastard hands me is meant to add injury and insult in equal measure. He has taken to punishing the relief carriers he does not like, while giving full-time or nearly full-time hours to those he does. He has bent and twisted official rules and a scheduling matrix to meet his goals.

Houses are being lost.
Cars are getting repossessed.
Lives are being fractured.

He smirks. Adjusts his baseball cap. Points to a regulation he interprets as giving him the ultimate power.

Christianity is everywhere in the government building. It is taped to the walls, inviting people to morning prayer meetings. It is on a box of prayer requests. It hangs from USPS keychains, and is tacked to work areas. The Bastard is one of those that leads the charge. Thursday mornings will find him hunched in a corner, hands clasped, praying to the God whose forgiveness is a sure bet.

The very Catholic postmaster nods his head in approval, knowing that he has bent rules and convention to hire the daughters and sons of favored workers, while extending punishment or goodwill arbitrarily – with tendencies that favor the religious.

The union meant to protect workers is an association. The National Rural Letter Carriers Association. They publish a newsletter with inspiring messages from their official chaplain. Their mammoth failure to negotiate a fair contract for their members is glossed over with talk of God, ethics, pride, and the value of hard work.

Relationships are falling apart.
Anxiety and hopelessness are setting in.
Suicide has been quietly talked about.

The saying “life isn’t fair” has never caused me to shrug my shoulders in apathy. Life is not fair, but most of us know it should be, and can be, much fairer than it is.

This fight is not mine. It’s too big and encompassing and too dirtied by bureaucracy, politics, religion. Ignorance is bountiful, and poorly intentioned people are everywhere, but there are limits to what any one person can do in response.

Instead, I wait for the day people take the blinders of religion and arrogance off, and come into their own humanity. To be forgiven or not based on their intentions, to be loved or not based on their actions, to be blessed or not based upon their merits.

In the meantime, the Bastard smiles like he’s hit a home run in the fourth quarter and the bases were loaded. His parents and God are sure to see that he’s really every bit as good as his brother, even if the cheering spectators are limited.

I plan to escape like Charles Bukowski. Bukowski was 49 when he quit the postal service, saying “I have one of two choices — stay in the post office and go crazy … or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.” He starved brilliantly, becoming one of the most prolific writers of his generation. His experiences with the USPS provided him with many anecdotes and characters.

Knowing that I will soon starve my own way into bliss makes the Bastard less dangerous to me. His darting eyes, paunchy gut, and greasy hair become details for some future story that speaks to the anti-Christ of men who believe their salvation is assured by virtue of Jesus keychains and weekly prayer meetings.

I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s celebrations. One day rolling into the next, despite a single digit change in the date, has never caused me to want to put on a plastic party hat and revel with the masses.This year, though, I feel a pressing need to obliterate not only 2007, but much of the entire decade before it. To crush it, stomp it, and scream it out of existence. I’ll raise my glass in a toast of “never again” and mean it, both in relief and as a rock solid resolution.

Economics and the Average Jane

I don’t need an Ivy-league think tank or a swarm of economic experts to tell me what the financial status of the poor and middle-class is in this country. Having vacillated between a few classes myself, I’ve gained some pretty stunning first-hand knowledge. In 1996, I bought a small but well-kept home in a bucolic suburb of Minneapolis. I paid $69,600. My mortgage payments were $597, including taxes and insurance. That same home today, just twelve years later, would sell for $175,000 – a difference of more than 150%. However, during the same time, my wages rose only by a paltry 13%.

For the poor in this country, the cost of living goes far beyond the basics of food and shelter. The poor are also victims of mindless discriminatory practices, which seek to part them from any chance at financial betterment and disposable income – if, that is, they are lucky enough to find decent employment.

In the 1990′s, both insurance companies and employers took to using credit reports as a weapon, putting the poor in “high risk” or undesirable categories based on nothing more than their personal financial status.

I’ve yet to see a statistic that a thin checkbook causes one to be a reckless driver, but when it comes to nickel-and-diming the lower classes, predatory and often senseless practices are abundant and rarely successfully challenged.

This senselessness has extended to the employment sector, where it is now commonplace for companies to force applicants into signing a release form allowing their potential employers to view, and make employment decisions based upon, personal credit reports.

The argument that credit reports reveal something about an applicant’s skills or character is weak at its best, and broadly discriminatory at its worst. Logically, it is the employment record and accomplishments of an applicant that most speaks to his or her value in the workforce – not whether he or she has been late with their student loan payments. Ethically, the practice of preferential employment treatment for those with good credit scores is exclusionary and elitist – and a type of discrimination that’s very difficult to prove. While there might be some merit to running the personal credit reports of those who will be in charge of a company’s finances, this has not been the extent of its use. Instead, the practice has extended to nearly every sector, from factories to boardrooms.

Politics – and What the Hell Were Americans Thinking?

It appears that the right-wing brainwashing of the American public is winding down its cycle. Even Americans who swallowed the unthinking rhetoric of “with us or against us” seem to be near the point of understanding that asking reasonable questions is not, as they had been led to believe, an unpatriotic act.

It helps that the over-long reign of Bush and his greed-soaked Republican goons will soon end, but future generations will have plenty to remind them of his corrupt administration. From his WMD lies, to 3,901 dead Americans , to a soaring debt that is nearing $9,000,000,000.00, Bush and company have played fast and loose with the future of America and its children, who are now born owing approximately $30,000 as their “share” of the national debt.

Add on the costs of high rising consumer debt, including an increase in defaulted credit card and mortgage payments, and the financial situation of this country is clearly spiraling toward catastrophe.

I encourage people to get mad. Being mad is a reasonable response to being lied to, misled, used, and plundered. Here are some articles that will help you reach the appropriate state of anger if you’re not already there:

Hey Buddy, Can You Spare $1000 Trillion?

Bush Gets What He Wants — At a Cost

Only Suckers Pay Their Bills

As a Democrat, I’m often tagged with the over-used and all too convenient label of liberal. However, like so many other Americans, I don’t swing in either the far-right or far-left field, but somewhere closer to the left of center, where individual liberty, a humanitarian-based ethos, and common sense prevail.

There’s no liberty in being a debt-ridden nation, or a nation whose citizens are steeped in debt. There’s nothing humane in provoking war, especially with weaker countries, and leaving future generations to pay the social and financial costs of that war.

There’s no liberty or humanity in making health care inaccessible to millions of Americans, or in adding to the financial burdens of the poor through unreasonable insurance, lending, and employment practices.

There was a lack of common sense during the Bush administration that seemed to have a green light effect on corporate greed and impracticality. The grab-it-and-go period of banks, corporations, oil companies, and manufacturers has left Americans strapped with high housing costs, the necessity of higher taxes, and for many in the middle and lower classes, a bleak economic future.

I’m not over being mad, and probably won’t be in my lifetime, but I’m hinging my hopes on the 2008 election and trusting that other fed-up Americans from all parties will step up to the plate and vote this country into brighter days.