The Martians(6)

More formally, he administered the Revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, giving the questionnaires in groups of ten. Hundreds of questions, calibrated to give statistically significant personality profiles. Only one of several different tests he was giving over the winter; testing was one of the main ways they passed the time.

They were taking this test in the Bright Room, which was lit by scores of high-wattage bulbs, until everything in it seemed incandescent, especially people's faces. Looking at them as they worked, Michel suddenly felt how absurd it was to be schoolmaster to this brilliant crowd. And he saw very clearly in their glowing faces that they were not answering the questions to tell him what they were like, but rather to say what they thought they should in order to get to go to Mars. Of course reading the answers with that in mind would reveal almost as much as if they were being sincere. Still it was a shock to see it so clearly right there on their faces.

He shouldn't have been surprised. Faces revealed mood and much else with extreme precision, in most people anyway. Perhaps all people; a poker face reveals someone who is feeling guarded. No, he thought while watching them, a whole language might be developed from this, if one paid proper attention. Blind people hear actors' voices as completely artificial and false, and in this world they were all blind to faces, but if they looked . . . it might yield a kind of phrenology of sight. He might become the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

So he watched their faces, fascinated. The Bright Room was very bright indeed; time spent in such spaces had been shown to ward off the worst of seasonal affective disorder. In this luminous glare each translucent face seemed not just to be speaking to him, but also to be a complete rebus of that person's character: variously strong, intelligent, humorous, guarded, whatever, but in any case the entire personality, all right there on the surface. There was Ursula, faintly amused, thinking this was just one of the many silly things psychologists did; she as a medical person recognized that it was both ludicrous and necessary, she knew all the medical sciences were as much art as science. Sax, on the other hand, was taking it all very seriously, as he seemed to take everything: This was a scientific experiment to him, and he trusted that scientists in other disciplines were honestly dealing with the methodological difficulties of that discipline. All right there on his face.

They were all experts. Michel had studied NDM, or Naturalistic Decision Making; he was an expert on the subject; and he knew that experts took the limited data available to them in any situation and compared it to their vast fund of experiences, then made quick decisions based on analogies to past experience. Thus now, in this situation, this group of experts were doing what they would do to win a grant, or to win over a committee judging a tenure-application package. Something like that. The fact that they had never faced a task quite like this one was problematic but not debilitating.

Unless they considered the situation to be unstable beyond the point of prediction. Some situations were like that; even the best meteorologists could not predict hailstorms well, even the best battlefield commanders could not predict the course of surprise attacks. For that matter some recent studies had shown that it was much the same with psychologists when they attempted to predict people's future mental diagnoses from their scores on standard psychological tests. In each case there weren't enough data. And so Michel stared intently at their faces, pink or brown summaries of their personalities, trying to read the whole in the part.


Except it was not really true. Faces could be deceptive, or uninformative; and personality theory was notoriously vexed by deep uncertainties of all kinds. The same events and environments produced radically different results in people, that was the plain fact. There were too many confounding factors to say much about any aspect of personality. All the models of personality itself—the many, many theories—came down to a matter of individual psychologists codifying their guesses. Perhaps all science had this aspect, but it was so obvious in personality theory, where new propositions were supported by reference to earlier theorists, who often supported their assertions by reference to even earlier theorists, in strings all the way back to Freud and Jung, if not Galen. The fascinating Psychoanalytic Roots of Patriarchy was a perfect example of this, as was Jones's classic The New Psychology of Dreaming. It was a standard technique: Citing a guess by a dead authority added weight to one's assertions. So that often the large statistical tests administered by contemporary psychologists were designed mostly to confirm or disconfirm preliminary intuitive stabs by near-Victorians like Freud, Jung, Adler, Sullivan, Fromm, Maslow, etc. You picked the earlier expert whose guesses seemed right to you, then tested these intuitions using current scientific techniques. If going back to the original either/or, Michel chose Jung over Freud; after that he was partial to the whole utopian self-definition crowd—Fromm, Erikson, Maslow—and the matching philosophers of freedom from the same era, people like Nietzsche and Sartre. And the latest in modern psychology, of course—tested, peer-reviewed, and published in the journals.