Sociology of testing

In this project, we will analyse personality tests and test practices used in working life. The analyses disclose an image of the ideal subject coded into the tests. We understand personality tests as technologies, which establish distinctions and meanings linked to gender, age, class, ethnicity, physical capacity and sexuality. Seemingly, the subject of the tests is a universal human, an employee, who is analysed purely as a sum of their traits and qualities whilst the tests produce, for example, gendered and class-bound ideal subjects.

In everyday life, the tests often appear as abstract, detached from their connections and unproblematic. However, psychological personality tests were developed as a means to classify, govern and control people. The project aims to dismantle the tests’ self-evident nature by using different materials and approaches to demonstrate the kinds of experiences, social relations, practices of power and resistance, forms of interaction and values as well as remnants of historical meanings the tests are connected to. The project studies personality tests as cultural texts as well as forms and practices of interaction.

This project develops the sociology of testing, which approaches testing primarily as attached on the one hand to the prevailing cultural orders and meanings and on the other to people’s situational actions. Personality tests convey cultural meanings whilst also being interactive between the tester, the test interpreter and those being tested. Personality tests are understood in the project as governing techniques which are used to help organize individuals. However, individuals have the opportunity to act against the tests by challenging and interpreting the results against the grain and utilizing them as a resource for resistance.

The project aims to

• trace the meanings historically built into the tests and analyse what kinds of notions and meanings personality tests produce on gender, age, social class, ethnicity, sexuality and physical capacity
• analyse and describe the process that shapes test results in practice and how testing procedures and technology impact the results of the test
• increase information on how personality tests as cultural texts shape people’s self-understanding and how they structure, explain and steer the course of life
• produce new methodological tools for analysing personality tests as cultural texts as well as situational interaction
• participate in the public debate on the significance of testing as part of neoliberal working life and politics
• create in cooperation with testing parties new ways of understanding personality assessment in a way that would observe the contextuality of the answers and to question the salience of personality