The Trouble With 'Preference'
What’s your favourite food?
Mine would probably be steak or ice cream (I’m not a complicated animal).
If you followed me around for a week and kept a food log, what food do you think I would eat the most?
I don’t really know, probably chicken. Definitely not ice cream, I only eat that in the summer and steak is not an everyday thing.
What about you? Is your favourite food the thing you eat most often?
What am I getting at? The unreliable nature of preference and why it’s right to be sceptical of preference-based approaches to personality.
This is a well-studied phenomenon but unfortunately pretty well ignored by the leadership and management industry. In his book about Behavioural Economics - ‘Misbehaving’ - Richard H. Thaler explains the difference between ‘expressed’ preference and ‘revealed’ preference.
Expressed preference is what people say, revealed preference is what people do. Do people always do what they say? Absolutely not, which is why the difference between expressed and revealed preference is significant.
Think about opinion polls for elections – expressed preference. The revealed preference is how people actually cast their votes in the privacy of the voting booth.
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Nate Silver, once the darling of election polling hasn’t had such a good run of late. Using polling he accurately predicted the outcome of the 2012 US election in something like 50 states. In 2016, again using polling, he got it wrong, quite badly.
Sometimes expressed preference matches up with revealed preference and sometimes people say one thing and do completely the opposite.
So, back to personality. What if some of the most popular approaches to personality are simply measuring expressed preference? What if they are just opinion polls?
What if there is very little significance to how people answer the questions in some personality tests?
What if my ‘personality preference’ told you as much about how I’m likely to behave as steak and ice cream tells you about what I’m likely to eat?
Ethically, should tools that measure expressed preference be treated like they are measuring revealed preference?
What if the flaws baked into this approach to personality are indicative of flaws baked into other popular tools, ideas, and approaches in the world of leadership and management development?
Andreas Wettstein
Human beings cannot be taken at face value. We are complex creatures that have, for the sake of containment, tried to slice up our consciousness into layers and compartmentalise awareness into boxes, organs or neural clusters. I observe that Psychometrically assessed Preference, whether revealed or expressed, needs to be seen as a parameter of Surface and Sub-Surface Personality influenced by an underlying Ego. Deeper than our Ego may be less ephemeral Preferences and more Perennial Priorities and Purpose. Surface Interests are seen as legacy intentions wrapped around new rings of growth or 'heartwood' intentions. Surface Behaviours are seen as the Bark of a deeper trunk of Being. Most psychometric models are so driven by Western models of Psychology with little integration from wisdom traditions of other cultures, let alone deeper scientific principles beyond neuroscience. I attempted many years ago to create a unified psychometric model, one that if effective, would be able to have other existing models be derived from it. Just as laws of Physics all answer to the one inviolable Law of Conservation of Energy, we need a parent psychometric that all others are answerable to and which is culturally accountable and universal.
William, thanks for sharing this, if we are not yet connected, please send me a request as I would love to hear more from you.
I found 'the cult of personality testing' by Annie Murphy Paul a very useful read to help me explain to others why many of these tests are unreliable.
Great thought provoking post Thank you for sharing