What a profile does not predict
A well-built self-description informs. It predicts neither a career, nor a relationship, nor a future reaction, and claiming otherwise is a methodological fault.
Describing and predicting
Describing consists in situating a person on dimensions, at a given moment, relative to a sample. Predicting consists in announcing what will happen. The two operations require neither the same data nor the same proofs.
A descriptive measure is validated by its stability and by its structure. A predictive measure is validated by follow-up: you measure, you wait, you look at what happened. Very few instruments circulated to the general public have been the object of such follow-up.
The weight of the situation
Half a century of social psychology has shown that the situation explains a considerable share of conduct. Research conducted by experience sampling adds a finding of the same order: the variability of one person over the course of a day often exceeds the average gap between two people.
A profile describes an average tendency. It says nothing about what you will do on Tuesday at five o'clock, after a dense day, facing an interlocutor who cuts you off for the third time.
Prediction for two
The most persistent illusion concerns relationships. Comparing two profiles to anticipate whether people will get on presupposes that compatibility is a property of individuals taken separately. The available work on this point, notably the large-scale work on matching data, finds no appreciable predictive gain.
What this work does find are effects tied to what happens between people: the way disagreements unfold, the way requests are received. In other words, the relationship, not the profiles.
The effect of the figure
A result expressed as a percentage produces an impression of precision that corresponds to nothing. A percentile presupposes a described sample, and it comes with a margin of error generally passed over in silence. A gap of a few points between two dimensions is almost always below that margin.
Added to this is an anchoring effect: a figure announced once is retained, repeated, and ends up serving as a self-description. The role of a serious report is to say what is clear and to leave unsaid what is not.
What a description brings all the same
The value of a structured description does not lie in its predictive capacity. It lies in its function of putting things into words: naming a position, situating it relative to others, seeing the cost appear of a way of functioning one took for obvious.
That return is real and needs no promise about the future in order to exist. An instrument that adds that promise does not become more useful, it becomes unverifiable.
Key points
Describing and predicting require neither the same data nor the same proofs.
The variability of one person over the course of a day often exceeds the average gap between two people.
Comparing two profiles does not predict whether people will get on: what counts plays out between them, not in their scores.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
And you, where do you stand?
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