Way back in 1984, when there
were 3 million computers
in homes in the US and perhaps 8 million in the world, a
program with the unusual name Mind Prober
sold one quarter million copies. Extending to those figures to
2002, the program if released today would sell about 15
million copies. Of course there weren't many software
titles to chose from back then so it certainly wouldn't
make those marks - and there are programs that do
something - well almost like it.
Mind Prober was the first program that didn't crunch
numbers or act like a glorified typewriter. Instead, it
did an analysis of an individual's personality. And it
did it in a five range report that ran the gamut. Some
of the categories included: "What you see", "What You
Don't See", "Bubbling Under the Surface", "What Dr.
Freud
Would Say About You", "Career Leanings", "Attitudes
Toward
Sex", "Habits and Additions" and several other revealing
sections brimming with personal information about the subject
of the test."
The program resembled a frequently used psychological
test called "The Adjective Checklist" in which you
select from a series of adjectives such as
"worrisome, cleaver, optimistic, inventive,
argumentative, etc" those that are either like you or not like
you. Based on psychometrics, a precise science which is
part of experimental psychology, very accurate
evaluations resulted from combining these answers using statistical
algorithms.
Dr. Johnson tells the story this way:
"After a brief stint as a graduate student in
philosophy at Berkeley, I ended up with a job
as a systems engineer at IBM. For four years
I learned to write programs and design
computer systems before I left IBM to enter
graduate school in psychology in 1968. Quite
by accident, I chose the University of
Minnesota's clinical program. Here Paul Meehl
was the intellectual leader and personality
testing with MMPI was the focus of the
clinical training program. By the time I
received my Ph.D. in 1972, I had written my
first MMPI scoring program and had completed
the basics for an automated interpretation
program.
At about this time, Tom Williams had just
become the Head of Psychiatry at the VA
Hospital in Salt Lake City. He was interested
in developing a computerized pre-admission
screening. Results showed that our computer
based approach to intake decision-making led
to improvements in treatment outcome, reduced
overall costs, and resulted in greater
patient satisfaction.
At about the same time John Griest in
Wisconsin was developing numerous computer
programs for psychiatric diagnosis. Between
our two research groups, we were beginning to
produce a large number of scientific
publications as well as generating a
significant amount of general publicity. This
brought students and even more mindware
developments.
In 1977 Williams and I moved to Eastern
Virginia Medial School with a programmer
named Ken Hansen. There we started a private
company in our spare time to develop and sell
minicomputer based assessment systems to
independent psychologists and psychiatrists.
By 1983 this company had mini-computers for
psychological assessment (costing
$20,000 - $50,000 each) installed in more than
300 offices around the United States and was
testing thousands of patients a week. In 1979
I became head of Clinical Psychology at the
Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
There many of my graduate students became
interested in computers and in the
development of mindware. We had ongoing
research projects that ranged from computer
based psychotherapy to Rorschach
interpretation. Thus, the uses of computers
in the area of psychology became even more
widespread.
MIND PROBER HITS A HOMER
In 1983, Johnson left the
world of academia to head out west. He put down stakes
in Palo Alto California and established a software
company, Human Edge Software. After creating several
business oriented programs, he created Sales Edge which
was his first Best Seller. But with Mind Prober, Johnson
hit a home run.
Dr. Jim goes on to tell give his account of what happened:
The year 1983 was a turning point for me. I
was becoming more interested in
microcomputers and less interested in
teaching psychology. I moved to Palo Alto to
start my own company, Human Edge which
developed and sold mind ware for the
microcomputer.
Our first programs were for standard business
situations such as selling, negotiation,
communication and management. In each case
the program asked for information from the
users about themselves, the other people
involved and the situation. Then the computer
printed a detailed strategy report that told
the user specifically how to approach (e.g.
sell, negotiate with, manage or communicate
with) the other person in the most
advantageous way. These programs received
tremendous amounts of publicity and were
featured in publications such as Newsweek,
Fortune, Forbes, Time and the Wall Street
Journal. And our first program, The Sales
Edge, became the first mindware ever to
become a top seller.
In 1984 my wife Cathy and I wrote a program
called Mind Prober that asked users to rate
themselves or other people on a series of
adjectives and it computed the results and
printed a three-page report describing the
person. Mind Prober became an overnight hit.
It was featured on the cover of InfoWorld and
numerous other publications. It sold more
than 250,000 copies. And it was named the
educational program of 1985.
Mind Prober was even featured in InfoWorld - which next
to PC Magazine was the top selling of the handful of
publications devoted to the PC in those pre-Internet
days, put Mind Prober on the cover of their magazine.
There was a picture of then president Ronald Reagan and
a kind of Orwellian Box to the side had snippets from
his Mind Prober profile. Some of its observations: "this
man wants to be liked" and "Ronald would make a good
actor or politician." Seriously, that's what it said and
it was taken straight out
of the programs printout.
The published reports weren't from the President taking the
test but from a reporter who knew him from a few encounters
on the campaign trail and answered the questions as if
he were Reagan. Acceding to the tests developers, if you
know someone for half an hour - even watching them on
TV,-- you can develop a fairly accurate understanding which
will reveal an accurate profile - just as if the person
took the test themselves! And it is impossible to tell
what the final report will say by choosing adjectives.
There is thousands of combinations possible depending
which of the 40 adjectives a person chooses.
Get a Peek at Other People's Secret Thoughts and
Feelings This leads to a surprising but major use
suggested for Mind Prober. There was an additional
possibility. People discovered that in addition to being
able to get the inside scoop on your own personality;
you could also gain some deep insights into to others.
As the author's say on page one of the Mind Prober
manual "If you previously used your computer only for
balancing numbers or for word processing, then you will
be amazed. People who thought that computers were either
glorified typewriters or calculators now discovered a
new use for the computer -- to probe another human's
mind and discover things that proved true. The Mind
Prober package will increase your understanding of
personal dynamics and will enhance your perceptions of
others. Now you will be able to have a secret look at
the ideas and attitudes of others. And the bottom line
was - it was true - -- answer the questions about the
person and you could for someone you knew and come out
with a pretty accurate personality portrait of them. If
nothing else, it is great fun at parties where a group
of people know each other pretty well. Of course, the
most fun is if the test really reads the person's well
know traits, then everyone smiles as they read the "secret
traits" section.
For those of you who want to see a well layed out
version of the some of the results, a chronicler of film
star Louis Brooks publishes her results on the web
here.
BRUCE'S STORY
Around the time that Mind Prober was big
news, I was working on my doctorate in psychology at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. I was one of
the earliest computer enthusiasts. We had used those big
mainframes with punch cards as undergraduates and in
grad school; we used UNIX terminals which had replaced
the card readers. I'll never forget the day that at our
Graduate Department meeting, the chairman unveiled an
Apple IIe and made us each put a floppy disk in it and
boot it up. The next year I bought one for $4,500
without a hard drive but which included - a dot-matrix
printer.
As a graduate student I collected psychology and mind-
related software. Nearing my Phd and living in Santa
Cruz, California, I decided that instead of pursuing a
traditional psychology job, I would start a catalog
collecting all of the various software programs which I
dubbed mindware. In 1988, when I was putting together
the first Mindware catalog, I tried to call Human Edge
and found out their phone was disconnected. They had
tried to IPO but had some problems and the company
dissolved.
The next year, at a Whole Life Expo -- at which I was
lecturing -- I met Jim Johnson at one of the exhibit
hall booths where he was selling copies of a program
called Mindviewer. Mindviewer was an updated but still
DOS version of Mind Prober. I asked him to put
Mindviewer in the catalog. He told me that when the
company failed to go IPO, he had taken to direct mail
and sold 50,000 copies of Mindviewer with the name "Dr
Shrink." Thus began a long time friendship and Jim was
an advisor for me throughout my seven years publishing
the print version of the Mindware catalog. Johnson came
out with a few more programs such as Capability Prober
and Dream Analyzer but he found his niche in direct
marketing. He retired last year, with his company the
largest direct mail agency for software companies in the
country, with accounts including Symantec and even his
former employer, IBM utilized his advertising skills. He
sold Dr. Shrink to Dexxa International which is a
company which has some affiliations with mouse-maker
Logitech. Dexxa came out with a slightly less "erotic"
version of Dr. Shrink called Mindviewer.
During the last year when I was publishing catalogs,
in 1994, Jim decided to come out with an upgrade to the
famous Mind Prober. Since there had been two versions at
Human Edge, Jim in collaboration with his programmer Rob
Campbell came out with the program for Windows. He
decided to make it a four- in one program, incorporating
work he had done with his IQ Smarts intelligence
software and his Dream Analyzer software and added a
forth module to help people with career choices.
ARE YOU READY TO PROBE YOUR MIND?
Johnson doesn't step up to the plate often but he takes
a mighty swing. He managed to be one of the first
electronic downloads on America Online which now has 30
million subscribers. Mind Prober and his test was a
winner. Mind Prober became the most popular AOL download
and again was starting to achieve the acclaim that it
had experienced. So in 1995, before the Internet
revolution transformed the way that software is sold,
AOL was what most people called online and they bought
Mind Prober 3 and had some of the same experiences as
the earliest adapters to computers had felt in 1983.
And this time they didn't have to experience it in DOS
CGA graphics - they got the
full colorful graphic capabilities of Windows.
What is it that has made Mind Prober continually
fascinating? The answer is fairly simple and may yet
have important implications for our development as a
species. A future article will take a look ahead and
speculate on these possibilities.
BRUCE's STORY CONTINUES
The best way to describe why people like
Mind Prober is to give a bit of my personal history. Let
me fill in a bit from the perhaps incomplete time-line I
gave above. I came to Santa Cruz in 1977 because its
natural beauty and at its relaxed and friendly
atmosphere. But more importantly I came back in order to
drop back into college. I had dropped out in 1969 -
leaving with an almost complete major in Political
Science - just short the last year. But I reentered
college because I had realized that political
organizations were made up of people and I had graced
myself and others with the perhaps lofty goal of
discovering ways that we could improve upon ourselves.
If we had better people, than the societies they
inhabited would be better.
Santa Cruz was the birthplace of the weekly free
"entertainment" tabloids that are now distributed in
cities and towns throughout the country. Good Times was
the name of this publication aimed at a younger crowd
looking for something to read or do on weekends. Two
decades after its first issue (in 1971) Good Times
founder Jay Shore made a fortune selling the newspaper
and it still beats out the "chain" newspaper completion
from over the hill in Silicon Valley - called the Metro.
The number one reason that people picked up the free
newspaper every Thursday was the weekly horoscope! Every
week, Robert Cole (a clever young astrologer who passed
away several years ago) would write a page with a
summary of the week according to the stars and two or
three paragraphs about each of the well-known twelve
signs, which of course are assigned to us at birth.
Now I admit that like the Beatles and others of my
Generation, I had traveled to India in search of answers
to life's mysteries. My interest in the science of
psychology had sprung out of interests in self-
discovery. But eastern gurus weren't the only
significant figures that were interested in self-
discovery. At the time when astrology was first
conceived, Socrates was telling his students to "Know
Thyself."
The ancient science of astrology was one of the first
written systems that acknowledged we each have different
personalities and that those personalities could be
classified into general types. But since there was no
scientific or systematic way of measuring people's
personalities, the Greeks turned to the more developed
science of astronomy in order to classify people. "As is
above, so is below" was how the old adage goes. And
perhaps it was to arouse skepticism of these kinds of
beliefs that the pattern of the sky above us at birth
that the famous quote from William Shakespeare's Julius
Caesar, "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars
but in ourselves." Shakespeare also
alluded to what psychologists call the "Nature/Nurture"
split. That is, how much of our personalities are
accounted for by our genetics given at birth and how
much is based on the experiences we have as we grow up
including our family, culture and education. In
astrology, if you're Pisces like me, most books will
tell you that you tend to be "emotional, flowing,
poetic, mystical etc" and if you're a Leo you're vain,
strong-willed and above all an actor.
Well many of us don't believe in these sorts of
simplistic notions while others seem to take them for
granted. But the astrology column in Goodtimes was
popular and still is - even though there have been at
least a half-dozen writers who have taken over the
position in the quarter century since I moved to this
beach town with redwoods by the sea.
Astrology is so popular that it is mandatory for just
about every daily newspaper in the country and you can
find your horoscope whether you tune into Yahoo, MSN or
Netscape Center. You can have your horoscope delivered
daily by hundreds of web based services for free.
But Mind Prober isn't
astrology. As I noted above, it is based on
psychometrics which is perhaps the most scientific study
within what I consider the "wanna-be" science of psychology.
It uses complex statistical analysis of real people to
construct test which can measure everything from the
standard IQ and personality tests such as the MMPI
(which of course nobody wants to take because it has
over 500 questions, some of them gross and embarrassing)
to newer tests such the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
based on the personality model of psychiatrist Carl Jung
which is deceptively simple but actually one of the most
sophisticated ever described (and Jung was a medical
doctor and not even a psychologist).We have discovered
that there intelligence and personality aren't
disconnected so now we have tests for Emotional
Intelligence (which also could be described as social
intelligence) and creativity.
We recognize that a person with say 160 IQ which is in
the "super-genius" category may actually be very logical
and bright but not very creative. And also they may
score low on the Emotional IQ tests which measure the
ability to read other people and establish social
rapport. There are actually disorders - think of the
movie Rainman -- in which a very high IQ is paired with
low EQ.
So today there is a range wide variety of tests - many
using very sophisticated statistical modeling to compare
groups of people rated by others and dong a much better
job than the newspaper horoscope or even one you get
from a real astrologer. These days of course, the
horoscope they hand you will probably be done by a
computer program. But while increasing the accuracy of
the astronomy aspect of a chart and adding all sorts of
extra features like rising sign, planetary signs,
aspects etc, they don't make them more accurate than a
psychology test. After all, a psychology test is basing
its results on the responses that people give it. So
that made Mind Prober so amazing for people who were
used to books like Sun Signs by Linda Goodman which put
people into categories based just on the position of the
stars at their birth.
So far the only good argument in favor of the mystical
approach to reading people and their situations was
given by Carl Jung in a forward to a translation of the
I-Ching. He coined the term synchronicity in which he
tried to show how at any given point in time, every
event in the universe is linked to every other event.
Quantum Physics says the same thing and so does Chaos
Theory which explains that there is a relationship
between a single flap of a butterfly wing and the price
of Pork Sides on the Commodity exchange. But to drop to
the bottom line, a little bit of input, like agreeing or
disagreeing to a series of adjectives such as Mind
Prober does goes a long way toward making a better
description of a person that the finest of astrology
charts.
PERSONALITY SOFTWARE SINCE MIND PROBER
There have been some fairly sophisticated follow-ups to
Mind Prober. During my seven years publishing the print
edition of the Mindware catalog, I found several. I
tried to find in 1988 when I started the catalog -
listed in my Ziff-Davis software list as Bridges to
Greater Professional Success. The program publisher was
Three-Sixty Software - a company mostly known for its
War-Strategy computer games.
Well the program has to go down as a record vaporware.
When I contacted the president of Three-Sixty, it turned
out that their offices where just a short hop over
Highway 17, which connects Santa Cruz with San Jose and
the rest of "Silicon Valley". We eventually had lunch
and he told me about this test called the Kahler Process
Model developed by Dr. Taibi Kahler in 1978 at the
request of NASA.
For well over a five year period, I watched the program
evolve from static "alpha" to buggy beta and those were
the days before testing beta software became a national
pastime. Finally, as Mindware Catalog 9 was being
prepared, we were shown the final product. However there
was a problem. During the development of the program,
Kahler's wife would not permit the program to be
distributed with unlimited use of the Kahler test. They
had developed a very lucrative seminar program using the
test - and believed that if the test were distributed
freely, then they would lose seminar attendees. (See
http://kahlercom.com/ for information on what they are
doing now.
So they told the publishers that we could only
distribute to uses of the test. It was like an early
version of what Microsoft is doing now with their
registration programs for Windows XP and Office XP. But
in 1994, people had grown sick of copy protection. We
sold more of these programs than any - except of course
Mind Prober 3.0. But we had lots of unhappy people who
returned the program when they found they could only use
it twice and that we had no program for giving them
extra uses.
The program was actually quite an effort to complete.
It offered insights you probably didn't get in Mind
Prober but they weren't in quite a digestible form. Mind
Prober's chatty five page printout was a winner.
When the web came along, the staff of Mindware felt as
if someone had anticipated our fondest dream. We had
even investigated electronic catalogs shortly before the
web explosion.
MYERS-BRIGGS GOES MULTIMEDIA
In putting together the first online Mindware catalog
on our new Mind Media Life-Enhancement Network page, we
found that the personality test had taken another leap
forward. One of the first multimedia CD-ROM companies
had published a program called Multimedia IQ Test. The
test was sold to big chains like Costco and Walmart and
sold hundreds of thousands of copies retail. On the
basis of this, the company changed their name to Virtual
Knowledge and some venture capitalists gave them three
and a half million dollars - and this was before the
days of "dot coms". Well, they used the money to publish
16 more multimedia CD-ROMs that fell into the Mindware
genre. I worked out a joint venture with the company and
was able to pick what I felt were five of the best. They
are available here.
By the way, I
priced the Multimedia IQ test on several sites and it
was considered a classic and going for more than a
hundred dollars.
Among the top selections Virtual Knowledge Series
there is the Deluxe Edition Personality Test
which is based
on Carl Jung's personality model. The program's test
incorporates both the Myers-Briggs and Keirseian models
of personality theory which many people are familiar
with from the books Please Understand Me or Type Talk by
Otto Kroeger and Janet M. Thuesen first published in 1992.
Both used the original Jungian 16 personality types.
Those two books also fit into Mindware history as
Please Understand Me by David Keirsey, Marilyn Bates
was a best selling hit when it came out in 1978 later
was published as DOS software by Cambridge Career
Products and actually was one of our top selling
programs for several years. David Keirsey has published
a follow up and you can take the online version of the
Please Understand Me test if you sign up as a member of
the "Advisorteam.com" web site. Typewatching was a
software program we based on that version of Jung's
basic type system and you can find out more about where
that group is at here.
Both use a deceptively simple personality system
developed by Dr. Carl Jung in the 1920's. He had four
"poles" which he rated people on: Introversion vs.
Extroversion, Thinking vs. Feeling, Intuition vs.
Sensation, and Judgment vs. Perception. Several of
these categories are self-explanatory. Introverts like
to keep to themselves and a few others while extroverts
are the life of the party. Thinking types make decisions
based more on the "head" while feeling types are based
more on the "heart". If this has you confused, I suggest
reading one of the books, taking one of the seminars or
even taking the online test mentioned above.
ONLINE "APPS"
Now the web has taken another leap and online
applications and services are beginning to be used more
and more to replace traditional computer-based software.
The online version of the Keirsey Temperament Sorter of
Advisorteam.com
is an
example. For this article I looked around for some other
examples and was surprised at the amazing explosion of
new tests I found a bunch of great tests. Some of these include some free ones which we list in our Personality Test Directory. A
sophisticated yet free test is
here which goes
into some of the kinds of tests we have already
discussed. For a very comprehensive list of test, the
"queen" of sites is were there
are many personality tests among the hundreds listed.
There are even specialized online applications for the
kind of tests you take for employment
Where the legacy of Mind Prober will lead us in the
future is the subject of a future article. But so far,
there have been more colorful tests, simpler and more
sophisticated tests, online and CD-ROM tests but there
has never been anything that has quite captured the
imagination of people like a softwaretest with the odd
yet fitting name Mind Prober.
You can find out more about Mind Prober 3.0 the latest version on CD-ROM here or download it instantly here.
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