How might personality test be misused?
Answer:
to get into a better clique/ a hotter gf
... the list goes on and on forever... haven't u seen any tv shows?!?!
Psychological tests can be misused in several different ways. The first, and most avoidable, is not properly understanding a test's purpose, the group upon which it was normed, and its limitations. I'll go through examples of each below.
Norms: The old MMPI was normed on people in Minnesota, many of whom, as you would know if you saw the movie "Fargo," come from Norwegian or Scandinavian backgrounds. Such a test would not necessarily be all that helpful to say, a Black person living in a poor neighbourhood in Los Angeles. A recognition that the original sample used to norm the MMPI was somewhat limited led to the development of the MMPI-2.
Limitations: One can get an idea of a person's personality on an intelligence test; for example, how persistent that person is, how that person responds to stress, even pro- or anti-social sentiment. An intelligence test is not, however, a personality test. Another example: the MMPI-2 requires a reading level at or around Grade 8; this test will not be helpful in a population with low education, such as, for example, most prison inmates, where the reading level is typically much lower.
Purpose: The Meyers Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) is a fairly popular test for personal exploration; it has even been used in things such as personnel selection. It would be inappropriate, however, to use this test in determining whether a prison inmate had antisocial tendencies that would make releasing him or her risky because the MBTI was not designed to measure "antisocialness."
Another way in which a test could be misused is when one uses an outdated test. The MMPI, as mentioned before, has been replaced by a revised and improved version, the MMPI-2. Using the original MMPI would be inappropriate in most situations.
A way in which a test can be misused involves the legal system. In court, you're much safer to use a standardized psychological test, such as the MMPI-2, which has "true-false" answers that can be objectively scores, than a test that uses subjective scoring, such as the famed Rorschach "ink blot" test. Anyone can nail you on how you interpreted the ink blots; it's much harder to argue with scores on an objective test.
Finally, you're on very risky ground if you use an automated scoring service that gives you a canned interpretation of the results, as opposed to looking at scores on various scales and coming up with your own interpretation.
Hope that helps.
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