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iarwain1 comments on Open thread, 11-17 March 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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A while ago I read through a lot of Gallup's Strengths and Wellbeing books. They looked good to me, but I don't know enough statistics to understand their technical reports, so I couldn't even begin to assess how accurate they were. Also, I've never studied positive psychology on anything more than a popular book level, so I can't bring sophisticated domain knowledge to bear either. Could someone look over the following and comment?
StrengthsFinder 2.0 (StrengthsFinder test is available for $10 here. They also have an entrepreneurial-focused version at the same location.)
Wellbeing
There might be more, but those are the studies I was able to find.
Also, I'm curious if anybody else here has taken the StrengthsFinder assessment. What were your thoughts? Did it help you in any way? Care to share your strengths with the LW community?
I took the assessment twice (they don't really allow that - the second time I submitted a different email address), about a year apart. The first time the top 5 results were Futuristic, Learner, Ideation, Intellection, Input. The second time it was Intellection, Strategic, Futuristic, Learner, Input. I'm not sure what that says that it gave me two different results. On the one hand 4 out of 5 were the same. On the other hand they were all in a different order. But slightly different results seems to be what's expected, from what I could pick up from the research reports.
I took StrengthsFinder 2.0 soon after a new manager was hired for my office. I was skeptical of it, but not negative. The Strengths it gave me were unsurprising. The most use I got out of the exercise was from insights gleaned from a roundtable discussion about these strengths from the outside view of coworkers who had known me for a few months to more than a year.
Were your colleagues able to understand you better because of the assessment, or was it just the fact that you were discussing each others' strengths the important part and it had little to do with the assessment per se?
When I took the assessments I too found that it didn't tell me all that much about myself that I didn't already know. But it did help me in three ways:
1) I was able to express myself better and more precisely when talking about my strengths with others.
2) It turned vague notions in my head into more precise formulations that I could think about more constructively on my own.
3) Perhaps the most useful part was getting other people to take the test and then discussing their strengths with them. That was a real eye-opener. In many cases I simply could not imagine that someone else could view things so differently than me. So for me the assessment functioned as a terrific antidote to the Typical Mind Fallacy.
The value was mostly due to hearing others' opinions and perception of me, where you don't usually get that kind of feedback. The assessment really only provided the framework and context.
While I didn't really utilize them myself, I'd agree with those benefits.