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Saturday, October 5, 2019

The Reluctant Psychoanalyst gets tested: Aptitudes as understood by Johnson O’Connor




Thirty years ago, while in the middle of post-doctoral training, a number of friends and my now ex-wife traveled to Chicago for aptitude testing at the Johnson O'Connor Institute.  I was not excited about the prospect of learning that I might be in the wrong profession after having devoted as much time as I had (and was) to training, so I did not invest in learning more about my own aptitudes then.  Now, with retirement looming at some point in a rapidly oncoming future and with kids who are trying to figure out what to do with their lives, the reluctant wife and I decided to see what this aptitude stuff was all about.  Though there are centers in major metropolitan areas around the country, the reluctant son is going to school in Chicago, so we booked two Thursday/Friday testing sessions with a joint feedback session Friday afternoon and decided to stay through the weekend to enjoy Chicago and have some family time.

Much to my surprise, Johnson O’Connor, the founder of the institution, was not a psychologist, nor are the folks who administer, interpret, or do ongoing research on the battery of tests that he developed.  He worked for General Electric in Boston in the 1920s, which I knew, but he was an engineer, not an Industrial-Organizational psychologist, as I had assumed.  I learned from the materials that were handed out at the end of the testing that the plant where O’Connor worked needed to figure out how to hire people who would do well there, and he came up with some tasks that assessed skills needed to do industrial work.  He approached this as an engineer – which is essentially the same as an I-O psychologist’s approach.  He gathered data and looked at how well the tasks he used (two that are still in the battery today – tasks that I massively failed at doing well in) predicted the productivity of potential workers.  Well, they did predict as he thought they would.  And soon, with GE’s blessing, he opened a non-profit research group to look at how to help people match their aptitudes – or basic skills – with the work that they would be doing.

My understanding of his theory – which does not seem to be articulated in the current book – and may be flawed as twenty years have passed since I heard my friends talking about it – is that he believed that we would be happiest when we are doing what we do well.  He also, as I remember it, believed that we would NOT be happy if we weren’t using the parts of our brains that work the best – we would essentially always feel that there was an itch that needed to be scratched.  So he looked for tests to add to his battery that would tap into a wide variety of aptitudes – or basic abilities.  He believed – and apparently gathered data to support – that the tests to be of most use would not be tapping into learned skills, but into abilities that we are essentially born with.  So a recent test has been added that taps into aesthetic sensibilities – and to determine if it is really doing that students at the Chicago High School for the Visual Arts (or something like that) were tested when they entered and when they left and their performance on the test did not change.  This was seen as evidence that the test was not something that is based in learning some sort of skill or perspective, but on something inborn.

A quick caution from a psychologist is in order here.  In the first half of the 20th Century, we thought that IQ tests were based on aptitudes alone, and this caused us to take all kinds of positions that are today totally indefensible.  I do not know how the O'Connor staff has researched or what their thoughts are about the intersection of experience more broadly - cultural and class experience - with aptitude, but I think this is an area for study rather than assumption.

To return, though, the second part of O'Connor's hypothesis – the idea that people would be happy when they were doing work that tapped into their skill sets - he ascertained by testing people doing a variety of jobs and measuring what the job required of them, what their aptitudes were – and the fit between these – and how happy the people were.  He also evaluated how productive they were.  Not surprisingly, the “natural” salesmen in sales jobs rated their happiness highly and they were productive.  But a “natural” salesman working as an isolated researcher was less likely both to be happy and productive.

Normal Curve


A final piece that I remember is that, in order to find the “natural” part of ourselves, O’Connor was looking for tests that had a particular unusual statistical quality: instead of people being normally distributed on the tests, the way they are on IQ tests or with weight or height, he wanted to find tests with a U shaped distribution – that is people either do well or poorly, but not so much in between.  Now I don’t know if this is true.  In the interpretation of the results of our tests, Michele simply referenced the percentile scores and said they were interested in the tests that were high – above the 70th percentile, and those that were low – below the 30th percentile.  So, whatever the distribution of the tests, it is the things that we do well and those that we do poorly that are of most interest.
u shaped curve


We arrived at the building – which is right off Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile and is an old, somewhat seedy place, with a salon on the first floor and a design studio of some sort beside it, with an architecture firm somewhere in the back, but a brass plate over the door stating that we were in the right place.  We came into the lobby and, after trying the wrong door, found the sign to ring up and we were buzzed in and told to come to the second floor.  The stair case tilted a bit and felt like it might fall out of the wall at any minute, but once we got to the office, the floor was steady enough, even if the area looked well used in, as the reluctant wife put it, the way that a graduate student office looks well used.  We spent Thursday afternoon and Friday morning being traded back and forth between sitting in front of a computer screen to do paper and pencil tests in response to visual and auditory feedback and then working with one of the staff on tasks that they presented to us in person and evaluated as we went along.

The staff were friendly and deeply engaged in their work.  A few other people were being tested at the same time and everything moved quickly and efficiently.  As the in-person testing proceeded, we were given feedback after each test both about what it was measuring and about how we had done on it.  The staff seemed to have drunk the water – they seemed really to believe that what was being tested was not something we could study for (test scores don’t improve much when people retake the tests) nor was a result of anything other than an aptitude – and we all have some aptitudes and not others – and what the testing can do is help us realize what our strengths and weaknesses are – and this will help us lead better lives.  So there was not a sense that we were being negatively evaluated when we didn’t do well – it just was what it was.  Nor was there a sense of praise for having a skill – again, it was what it was and it was useful to know that we had that.

The feedback session, then, was quite helpful.  I have not had a chance to review all of the materials – to let all of the ideas sink in – nor to integrate the materials with a master life plan, but even at what is the beginning of a process, I have a sense that the information will be helpful as I work towards whatever it is that comes next – and it helped me understand some things (like why it is that blogging has been so useful to me that I have kept it up for six years despite having more than enough other things to do) and, somewhat surprisingly, it helped illuminate some of the areas of friction between the reluctant wife and me – places where our ways of functioning are determined by our differing aptitudinal patterns – and I think this will help us navigate some of the predictable pinch points that will continue to come up with slightly more grace and aplomb.  I think we will be able to say something like – "Ah ha, this is a place where you are ready to move ahead with a plan and have already come up with a sense of how to get from here to there, but I am still generating options and thinking about how we might skin this cat from a very different angle."  Perhaps we will be able to laugh about this rather than to simply devolve into being grumpily frustrated.  In any case, a guy can hope…

The feedback is primarily focused on vocational applications, but quite a bit of it has avocational implications as well.  One area of assessment, for instance, has to do with musical ability.  And there are many ways that one’s musicality is related to vocational performance.  A sense of timing, for instance, is going to play a big role in that natural salesman’s ability to close a deal.  But it also has implications for avocational interests.  Timing plays a bigger role in some sports than in others.  And O’Connor is very interested in people using their musical talents – if they have them – as an important component of that elusive quality of becoming happy.  The assessment of musical aptitude includes tone sensitivity as well as sensitivity to melody and different musical instruments are recommended depending on the abilities of the person tested.

Traditional career counseling is based in preferences rather than aptitudes.  My own thinking is that preferences are likely related to aptitudes, but not as directly as we might imagine.  The last exercise was to engage in a standard preference test – the Holland Self Determined Search test.  This asks about one’s interests and self-assessment of abilities to engage in a variety of activities and careers.  I last did something like this when I was in 7th or 8th grade.  It was interesting to take a preference test, then, as an adult and recognize some things that I might have thought of as glamorous or interesting earlier were just drudgery as I have had to do them at some point as an adult, and other things that I thought I would do well at I wasn’t particularly well suited for.  One of the uses of the Self Directed Search is that it will recommend many occupations - and these can be checked against the aptitudes for fit.  There really is a sense of open ended exploration in the process.

The results of the testing as a whole, while not surprising, were also not predictable.  I learned not just about individual aptitudes, but about what it means to have two or three in combination and there were various strategies that were proposed that would help me scratch some itches that have largely gone unscratched.  Psychoanalysis – the practice of coming to understand the unconscious functioning of the mind – does not tell us much about things that we are better measured objectively than subjectively.  The objective measurement of this testing led to the beginning of a different kind of insight based on (what I hope will be) growth.  I think the two kinds of growth should be complementary – indeed synergistic.  Of course, part of the way I work (I learned from Johnson O’Connor) is to think that more data is almost always good.

One of the central reasons to undertake the testing at this point – how to plan for retirement activities that will allow the reluctant wife and me to plot a course where we can utilize our aptitudes together – is still very much a work in progress.  Of course I will probably still be thinking about permutations on it long after she has settled on a plan.  One of the realizations we had as we discussed the testing during one of the many breaks is that having a sense of what each do well might be something that we should do more of – and not feel guilty when the other does that (or resentful when it is ourselves) as long as there is a general balance.  So I will continue to do more of the cooking (and gardening) as we move forward. 

What we might end up doing – what kind of work we might do together as we drop some of the time consuming things that we engage in to make a living – is much more complicated than just doing things that we do well.  It also has to do with investing ourselves in things that we feel passionate about.  Finding the overlap between our separate passions and abilities will be complicated, but having data – and a feedback session focused on how our abilities overlap and intersect – feels like an important component of that process.

In the meanwhile, the Johnson O'Connor group is going to sell the building they are in.  So if you go to the place in Chicago it may look new and spiffy.  They assured me it would still be downtown.  Some of the testing materials are based on stimuli that have proved tried and true, and have been around a very long time - much like my dearly beloved Rorschach test and some of the other instruments that I use.  They are likely to feel out of place in a new building, but be reassured that they come from a place that has been much loved and cared for as it has grown worn and creaky from useful service.




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