Nadezhda Moroshkina: “You do not pick up a team according to the signs of the zodiac?”

Most managers believe that the success of teamwork depends, among other things, on the atmosphere in the team and the compatibility of the project participants. Someone forms a team based on personal experience, someone tries to find a theoretical basis for their decisions, dividing people into categories, and sometimes even turning to testing.

We talked with Nadezhda Moroshkina, a scientist and candidate of psychological sciences, about how to predict whether colleagues will work out, whether it makes sense in psychological tests for hiring and whether people can be classified by personality type.

- The very idea of ​​the existence of psychological types of people is associated with an underlying need for classification?

- This tradition is really very old. Attempts to classify people in order to understand how to behave with them can be found in antiquity - just remember the distinction between types of temperament. In clinical psychology, more or less successful attempts have also been made repeatedly to connect, for example, a somatotype with a specific psychotype. The general idea is that a person has a set of permanent personality traits, traits or dispositions, beliefs, attitudes, thanks to which he will behave in a similar way in a variety of situations. And if we manage to measure these constant characteristics in any way, this will allow us to predict human behavior and, in principle, will explain to us why people can behave differently. The very attempts to describe a person and determine the set of his properties were based on a variety of bases.

In the first half of the twentieth century, statistics develops - a mathematical apparatus appears that allows quantitative measurements. Following this, the development of a variety of tests begins. Many probably heard about the 16-factor Kettll personality questionnaire, the Minnesota MMPI questionnaire, the Freiburg FPI, etc. All of them are based on the self-reports of the subjects. That is, you give the participants of the experiment a questionnaire, they answer questions from the series “how sociable you are” or “how sociable other people think you are.” Further, using statistical methods, we can try to identify some deep variables, the value of which affects individual groups of answers. These variables, perhaps, are precisely the very personality traits we are looking for. Actually, the 16-factor questionnaire is so called because

- The number 16 is not connected with the four types of temperament in the ancient tradition?

- The factor structure implies orthogonality - it is important that these deep variables are not interconnected. Their number is displayed inductively. First, you collect a huge amount of empirical data, then you look for internal connections and correlations in them, then you try to describe this structure. It is clear that the same data set can be described using different models, taking any number as a basis: at least four, at least 16, at least five. Today, the Big Five is just more popular - the Big Five, which everyone who is interested in psychology has probably heard about.

There is quite a popular concept, including for some reason among engineers, the concept of socionics - it is often correlated with the Myers-Briggs questionnaire, also created based on the Jung classification. It is less recognized in the scientific community and is not very favored, although I know the work where it is used. There are many unverified and unproven things in it, including, this theory of personality types is designed more for the average man than for a serious specialist.

- Is there the most correct methodology for psychological testing? And can the test passed by the candidate help direct him to the most suitable job site?

- In the first half of the last century, there were a lot of such questionnaires, and verification shows that they can be quite reliable. A person answers questions, makes a self-report and independently determines his belonging to a certain type. After a while, you again give him a test created using the same methodology - and the percentage of coincidence of the results of the two polls will be quite large. The authors strive to create a technique with the greatest test reliability and internal consistency.

But we are more interested in another aspect - the prognostic capabilities of the methodology: can we use it to predict human behavior, for example, will it work well. Everything turned out to be not so optimistic here. For example, we measured a person using a psychodiagnostic technique and found out that he is honest or kind, or, say, an extrovert. How much can we predict that in a particular situation he will be more sociable than another test subject who turned out to be an introvert by the method? It turned out, not particularly successful. The correlations that we achieve are 0.16, 0.2, and a maximum of 0.3. This means that the coefficient of determination (explanatory power) does not exceed 0.3 squared. That is, only 9% of the variance can be explained using this psycho-diagnostic tool.

“So the tests don't explain anything at all?”

- Very little. If you show two correlation clouds, one of which corresponds to zero correlation, and the other to 0.3 correlations, you are unlikely to distinguish them by eye. Communication is very shaky.

Prior to the distribution of the tests, the researchers did not require self-reports from the subjects, but observed their behavior, trying to find cross-situational consistency. For example, in the 1920s, Newcomb watched teens at a summer camp to determine how strong personality traits they had. Suppose there is such a characteristic - sociability, extroversion. If we consider a person to be sociable, we think that he will talk a lot in the dining room, during a quiet hour, and on a walk. That is, we assume the manifestation of quality in different situations. But, according to observations, the consistency turned out to be exactly at the level of 0.14 - very low at the level of real behavior. That is, the level of real behavior is very low.

Moreover, the consistency of behavior within the same situation can be great - for example, if someone is talkative at lunch today, he will most likely be at lunch tomorrow. But whether he wants to talk after a meal, we are actually unable to predict. And the presence of a stable personality trait suggests its manifestation in a variety of circumstances.

- Does the problem rest on the quality of measurements?

- Poor quality measurement procedures have long been trying to improve. But today it is assumed that situational variables are much more important for understanding behavior than personal ones. If we know something about the situation, we can better predict the behavior of people than if we know something about the people themselves.

“But Big Five and various personality classification theories are not 100% mistaken?”

- Let's go on the other side. We ask ourselves: what idea of ​​the nature of man lies in the theory of personality dispositions? For example, trying to understand the behavior of a person who has shown aggression, we think: “This is probably because aggressiveness is one of his personality traits.” Doesn't that sound weird? Instead of explaining the behavior, we simply postulated the presence of a certain entity, which supposedly is responsible for this behavior. It is like thinking about some physical or chemical reality, popular in certain eras. Why is opium euthanized? Because it has "sleeping pills." Why is a person aggressive? Because he has "the essence of aggressiveness." But, in fact, this is only the introduction of certain entities against which, as you remember, Ockham protested. Strictly speaking, the theory of personality dispositions does not explain anything. At some stage of psychology, it was useful because it allowed us to describe a certain phenomenology. But by and large, the theory itself is based on ordinary ideas.

- Like “well-fed” - means “good”?

- Yes, this is just the idea of ​​the relationship between somatotype and psychotype. Postulating entities does not make it easier for us to predict behavior. This all very much resembles phrenology: this woman has a lump of amorousness - therefore, she is engaged in prostitution. And this man has a lump of genius - therefore, he makes scientific discoveries. Today we just smile when we hear this. But at the same time sites on phrenology can still be found.

- If the application of an exotic theory - the same phrenology - accidentally proves successful, it remains only to finally believe in it? Is this the secret of the popularity of psychological tests?

- This also needs to be dealt with. If the dispositional approach works so poorly, why do people have such powerful expectations about the intrapersonal consistency of behavior? At the same time, it was confirmed that people expect a very high cross-situational coordination of the behavior of others, although in the experiments themselves it is not observed. But if we constantly saw that others behave unpredictably, we would hardly begin to label them with certain features. This means that perhaps this internal consistency is indeed present in life, although its nature is not at all connected with the false idea of ​​a constant set of personal characteristics of a person.

The low prognostic ability of personality tests provoked research in this area, and the results suggest that in life the consistency is higher than in experiments. The fact is that in experiments the variables are isolated from each other, because we are trying to simulate a “clean” situation. But in life such situations do not exist, situational and personal factors are constantly mixed here. The same person more often falls into the same circumstances, but not because he is like that, but because that is the reality surrounding him. For example, we usually observe familiar people within the framework of some standard set of situations in which there are a lot of invisible factors.

For example, at work there is a status factor - who is the boss and who is the subordinate; there is a demographic - whether there are more men or women around, etc. You regularly observe a colleague in some kind of repeating situation, and, seeing that he behaves in a coordinated manner, ascribe some character to his character. In fact, the extremely constant coincidence of the same situational factors may be important. But the person for you is a figure, and the situation is just the background. Therefore, there is a feeling that dispositional theories of personality are confirmed, which reinforces the further expectation of high consistency.

“But then, two people in similar conditions can behave completely differently?”

- Most likely, in this case the situation is not the same for them. In addition, situational factors are not presented in their pure form. A person’s personal history, past experience, upbringing, scenarios adopted in those companies where he had to communicate - all this affects the interpretation of circumstances. But it is likely that a well-known person in an unexpected situation will surprise you - expectations based on personal dispositions will turn out to be inadequate in this case. Another thing is that with well-known people we find ourselves in unusual situations extremely rarely.

Another aspect is that it is convenient for us when the people around us - those with whom we work or live - act predictably. Therefore, we encourage consistent behavior and do not encourage inconsistent. Agree, "you behave inconsistently" - this is a rebuke. That is, the sequence is more important than whether you are doing well, from the point of view of the interlocutor, or badly.

Therefore, the shortcut problem is so acute. For example, if at school a guy once fell into the category of hooligans, the environment begins to work so that he will always be hooligans - this is what they expect from him. Nobody will allow him to easily jump into another category. In turn, a person with free will can himself choose the environment that will contribute to his internal coherence. It turns out that in reality the consistency is quite high, although its reasons are not at all in the type of personality.

- But does personality still exist in a person?

- A person has common abilities - for example, intelligence - and special abilities - for example, music or sports. By testing them, one can fairly reliably predict academic performance, possible successes in singing or athletics. Abilities are more determined by biological factors: behind this are hormonal features, features of the nervous system, etc.

- Can it be, for example, that a reaction to stress can not be determined by biological factors?

- The contribution of individual features here will be rather small. Take some trait - for example, courage - and observe all the situations in a person’s life, where it could manifest itself. We will see that a person does not behave equally boldly everywhere. In principle, we can build a distribution of courage and even calculate its conditional average value. The problem is that the variance will be so great that it will not help us predict the behavior of the subject. Somewhere he can behave like a coward, somewhere like a desperate brave man, and on average he seems like the most ordinary person

Plus it’s not quite right to say that such an entity as “courage” exists in principle. It is more correct to consider human behavior in typical circumstances. Because his behavioral scenarios are strongly tied to situations that a person has encountered or has not encountered in the past.

- That is, a person’s biography will tell us about his potential aggression or determination much more than any test?

- Of course. It is a trend in modern organizational psychology to rely on biographical methods more than on personal ones.

- But quite serious and technically savvy people even believe in color tests.

- Color tests or tests with Rorschach spots are in principle the least reliable, there is almost no evidence of their validity. Since there is no replication of their results — they are in no way consistent with each other if the tests are carried out by different people.

That is, the use of, say, the Rorschach test will allow you to justify the decision you made earlier on hiring a person. But the question of the effectiveness of this solution remains open. And the test reinforcement to the answer does not bring us any closer.

- Maybe the benefit of studying tests and reading literature on psychological types is simply that they help to understand: people are different?

- And from this point of view, probably reading is not about tests and types, it would be much more useful, say, a book by Lee Ross and Richard Nisbetta “Man and the situation”. Now in psychology, a qualitative analysis of human behavior is gaining momentum. There is an idea behind this: people comprehend the world in different categories, and if we manage to get these categories out, we will come closer to understanding how a person perceives this or that situation. At the same time, he really evaluates her differently from us. The ideographic approach in principle assumes that each person is unique, and pushing people on the shelves is a hopeless task. I was always touched, for example, by 12 zodiac signs. Returning to the forecasts, one may ask - you don’t find out who is Aries and who is Leo when applying for a job?

- Surely you can find a manager who admits that he recruited his team that way. And it worked.

- If someone uses such schemes to justify their decisions ... Well, if only the person would like it. Our psychological culture is such that in the representations of people there are many para- and pseudo-scientific representations that mix. In the same way, a variety of tests can be involved, precisely in order to bring an allegedly theoretical base under someone's authoritative opinion. And here there is a danger of overestimating the reliability of their forecasts. Indeed, to check in a real situation whether you have made a good decision is sometimes impossible. Suppose you did not invite a candidate to work - what do you know about him now? Maybe he would be an excellent colleague for you and would bring serious profit to your company. But if the one whom you have chosen instead of him is more likely to cope with the tasks, you again reinforce the hypothesis of the correct selection algorithm. With whom do you compare it?

In life, there are a lot of such traps that allow you to gain a foothold in the initially erroneous decision. Psychological experiments perfectly show how strongly developed the installation to confirm their own hypothesis. People tend to see only that which corresponds to it, and not to notice facts that do not fit into it. You can, on the contrary, see facts that actually exist only in the imagination. A classic example of false correlation is that you remember your friend, and at that moment he calls you. You think: telepathy! But, to confirm this correlation, you need to consider all the cases when you thought about him, but he did not call, and all the cases when he called, although you did not think about him at all. When we collect all the statistics, it turns out that his last call is a coincidence. Just all the other calls and cases when you thought about your friend,

When building a scientific research, we cut off such things. But in life, it all works. So re-evaluation of their forecasts by people is quite high, and to hide behind tests in this case is a protective function. Also, any success story is an appeal to dispositional theory. It is based on the idea that a successful person supposedly has special properties. But if we restore the situational factors that coincided in his life, we will see that these circumstances developed so that it was for this person that it was possible to achieve what he had achieved.

- It turns out that the decisions we make when forming a team are an absolute lottery? It is clear that there are professional competencies according to which you select people. But how will they work with each other or the customer, from the point of view of psychology, is unpredictable?

- You may or may not be lucky. But in life, the consistency of behavior is still quite high - which means there is predictability - due to the fact that situations are repeated. Therefore, if you can observe a colleague in the situations you need for some time, the accumulated data will be a good basis for forecasting. A person most often uses proven patterns of behavior, if they have formed, then when the situation repeats, he will most likely turn to them. Which, however, does not mean that he is not capable of anything else.

- Now, in serious studies, psychologists resort to questionnaires and tests? Can their results be of scientific interest?

- This tradition has not died completely, although it has been shaken - many continue to work in a dispositional manner. In the end, this approach also gives correlations, they just are very low. And just from a research point of view, this can be useful. For example, if we want to predict the statistical trend of a certain community of people, we can get a result. Another thing is that tests cannot help us predict the individual behavior of any member of this community. In science, we often study a certain average person who, of course, does not occur in life.