BBC iPlayer - Child of Our Time: The Big Personality Test: Episode 1

Thanks for this heads up Giulio. I used to love stuff like this then starting learning and doing NLP. I'm one minute in and can already start to feel slightly irate at the "fixed and stable" notion of personality. Well at least basing the fixed point on the myers briggs anyways. Does a person do a test to be told they actually are neurotic, its your personality, nothing can be done. What are your thoughts on this?

Hi Alistair,

Yes..i have mixed feelings about this show and reflect your concerns. I can't help wonder what will happen to these children after being labeled and televised to the nation under such a label. The show seemed very strongly biased to me...for example...the word conscientiousness was show as a girl with awards and flute practise as good and a boy playing his console as bad! This is not my understanding of the word conscientious...to tow the line in regards of societys agenda. Morality was more my understanding of this word but then i am not familiar with the myers/briggs format so had not seen this label used in this way before.
I completey agree with your feelings about questioning the "fixed and stable" notion of personality and can't help but wonder how this personality profiling would fit into the nlp model, especiallly Robert Dilts logical levels. What harm could be done by a "professional" telling an impressionable youth they are neurotic and then televising him as such? And telling him this is genetic?
Would personality profiles like this be Identity, Values and beliefs, or even skills and strategies? I guess our closest match would be the meta programs?
On the plus side, i have taken a personality profile designed by mensa to see how well i would cope. I have recognised family strengths and weaknesses and learned something about my youth!
So i guess psychometric testing is just a tool, like any other, that could help an individual gain insight about self and other but when applied from outside could have its down side. I am still thinking this one through and will post the new link to the second part of the show.

best wishes...

BBC iPlayer - Child of Our Time: The Big Personality Test: Episode 2

Cheers Giulio I'll check that one out as well. I think an excellent and controversial study would be if you take take a personality test with people and see if you can "change" it with NLP. There's another slightly misconceived notion of genes being fixed and stable as well, untrue!! Not sure if you have read Ernest Rossi's e book but I found it intersting in terms of gene expression... http://www.ernestrossi.com/documents/FreeBook.pdf