A Note on Psychometrics: A Critique of CBT as Ideology (Part 4)

As a final word on epistemology, it is worth noting that the prop which keeps CBT concepts upright, and which supports most of empirical psychology, is the area of psychometrics. Psychometrics is psychology’s proudest achievement, and perhaps the only body of knowledge unique to it. As with CBT, however, its epistemological base is as dubious as the uses to which it is put. To simplify things, we can divide psychometric tests into three broad categories: those that measure performance (the IQ tests are the most famous example), those that measure personality ‘traits’ (the Rorschach and the MMPI, for instance) and those that measure subjective ‘states’ (such as the Beck Depression Inventory, or BDI-2). Each suffers from similar problems. Each is predicated on a naïve scientific realism, in which the psychometrician presumes that his or her quantification corresponds to some underlying thing, which exists unmediated in nature, simply waiting to be measured. In every case, this process of reification is then propped up by correlative statistics (the various forms of validity and reliability), as if mere correlation was tantamount to proof. That the statistics are often bountiful and complex demonstrates only that methodological rigour is, as a rule in psychology, inversely proportional to the intricacy of one’s statistics. Human subjects are implicitly presumed to be mere bundles of data, waiting to be mined by psychometricians, who neglect to consider that their very exercise might change that which is supposedly being measured.

No doubt, one can measure performance – the question is whether (and how, and to what extent) said performance reflects some underlying factor. Even if it does not, perhaps one could argue for the benefits of performance testing (for instance, to assess a person’s cognitive decline). These benefits do not hold for the testing of ‘states’ and ‘traits’, both of which arguably do not even exist. To identify a ‘state’ in a system in perpetual flux is a conceptual and linguistic manoeuvre that allows for articulation of affect, but there is nothing scientific (or non-arbitrary) about it. Again, to use a BDI-2 to gauge a person’s depression is to force that person to shoehorn their subjective experiences into Beck’ language and categories. That it is a matter of indifference to Beck and his followers whether a depressive regards herself as ‘melancholic’, ‘broken-hearted’, ‘flat’ does not, on that strength, make it irrelevant altogether. Indeed, given that depression is a subjective experience par excellence, the language with which it is articulated is constitutive of it as an experience. There is no evidence to suggest that such ideas trouble our earnest quantifiers, or that there is anything to be gained from such testing that could not be better learnt through a discussion.

The pursuit of ‘traits’ is even more ridiculous, and is a clear return to 19^th Century facultyism and phrenology. There is, after all, no agreed-upon definition of a ‘personality’ in psychology, another fact which the psychometricians blithely ignore. The personality testers devote statistical analysis to a series of hypothetical constructs, but not one iota of ontological analysis to the sort of being to whom such constructs might apply. The relentless focus on the quantitative tends to efface the possibility of a qualitative assessment, or an historical assessment, which are then ignored altogether. Imagine if a patient presented at an emergency ward with a pain in his right side. The staff assessing him may undertake tests, such as x-rays and blood samples, but may also wish to know something about the history of his pain, its phenomenology and subjective qualities, whether it might be appendicitis, gallstones, a hernia, and so forth. If the medical staff in question were psychology researchers, their focus would, instead, be on the patient articulating a subjective quantum of pain (i.e. ‘9 out of 10’), since this is the only datum of which mainstream psychology can make any use. Unsurprisingly, this is diagnostically useless, if not dangerous, and is another example of an alienated subjectivity being forced into the incoherent categories of a pseudoscience. This is precisely what occurs with a BDI-2, for example, which constructs a number to correspond with a person’s depression, but which does not and cannot distinguish between qualitatively different elements, such as the presence of an arrested grief, a psychotic versus neurotic depression, and so on. Where a subject’s particularities ought to be of interest to a psychologist, these are dispelled in favour of bland and useless generalities.

If psychometrics are, as I have argued, a bizarre and confused conceptual apparatus for assessment, why use them at all? To answer this question, we should, as ever, ask Cui bono? In this regard, Foucault is illuminating in Discipline and Punish (p. 193) –

All the sciences, analyses, or practices employing the root ‘psycho-‘ have their origin in this historical reversal of the procedures of individualization. The moment that saw the transition from historico-ritual mechanisms for the formation of individuality to the scientific-disciplinary mechanism, when the normal took over from the ancestral, and measurement from status, thus substituting for the individuality of the memorable man that of the calculable man, that moment when the sciences of man became possible is the moment when a new technology of power and a new political anatomy of the body were implemented.

In this vein, psychometrics can be compared with Orientalism, except that where the latter provided the intellectual prop for colonialist endeavours, psychometrics concerns itself with the biopolitics of different subjected populations. This is clearly reflected in the uses to which most psychometric technologies are put. Above all, psychometric measures benefit the academic psychologist, lending researchers a veneer of scientificity (presumed, uncritically, to be tied to quantification). Moreover, there have long been perverse incentives that subjugate academic psychologists to the publishing machine, and this is inextricably linked to obtaining ‘positive’ results. The more measures one takes, the greater the opportunity for this, since there is greater ability to indulge in post hoc fishing for statistical significance. Since psychologists, as ‘scientist practitioners’ take their cues from the academics, this corruption pollutes the discipline as a whole, and not merely the tenured pseudoscientists.

And where else are such measurements required? We should look to the courts, which need quantification as a basis for coercion, discipline and surveillance following their judgements; the HR departments, who wish, pre-emptively, to eliminate potentially non-compliant workers; and for the vast bureaus of health, in the form of insurance companies and government departments, for whom diagnosis and treatment are a financial burden, and, at bottom, a numbers game. It is for these entities and their power – the dominions of petty tyranny – and not for some vision of science that psychometrics serves as an ideological buttress.

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