The Eternal Allure of Personality Tests

The question of what is personality

is a question that's gonna get any two psychologists

that you get together arguing for the rest of the week.

I think that the obsession with personality assessments

tells us that humans really do love labels

and categories and ways of identifying ourselves

and each other.

But there's a problem with personality assessments

in general because what does it mean to be you?

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Today I'm talking about the Myers-Briggs personality type.

Takes four letters.

ENTP, INTP.

Oh, this is my type.

Be sure to like this video if you're an ESTJ, like me.

People have been trying to define personality

I think since, as long as we know.

Aristotle, Plato, you have a lot of people

who've been trying to break humans down

into types, into categories, into humors.

I am a type C.

Morgan is a type U.

We're scientifically impossible.

So starting from the late 1800s to the turn

of the 20th century, people started looking under the hood

so to speak and there was a real boom

in trying to figure out personality with the rise

of people like Sigmund Freud who said, okay,

it's not just what you see.

People have motivations, there are subconscious things,

there are unconscious things.

The first really scientific assessment actually happened

during World War I, and this was observing soldiers

in different situations and trying to figure out

basically are you battle worthy?

How are you going to respond?

Are you someone we want to send out in battle?

No one really knows when the first personality quiz emerged.

Some of the earliest ones that people have found

were in women's magazines.

And they had to do with marriage and with being a wife

and with suitable marriage material, you know,

are you a good wife?

Or find an ideal husband.

Historically, women were not really allowed

in the work force, they were staying at home,

they needed things to fill their time.

They needed other ways to signal I'm alive,

this is me, this is who I am.

And quizzes were a way of doing that,

whereas men had their careers.

They had their work friends, they had so many things

outside the home that could define them.

It's very funny that the more things change,

the more they stay the same if you think about

some of the quizzes these days,

they're still quite similarly themed.

So this is the Myers-Briggs group.

It's just wonderful to see everyone here.

I know some people are relatively new to Myers-Briggs,

some people more advanced.

Who wants to get started?

I first discovered Myers-Briggs like five years ago,

and I could say with confidence that

I'm INFJ, and I just find myself like a pit bull

and I just dig my teeth into the theory

and I haven't let it go for like five years now, so,

that's my story.

I type pretty consistently as an ISTP,

although I'm not sure if I am.

I think part of the issue is that I'm an ISTP female

and all the descriptions sound very masculine, mechanic.

The Myers-Briggs became the golden standard.

This mother-daughter team Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers

decided to create an assessment.

It'd help women transition into the workforce.

People still use it actually to assess how someone

is going to fit into their organization.

It's a test that purports to tell you what kind

of a type you are.

Are you introverted?

Are you extroverted?

I'm a linear thinker.

Whereas NEs are more likely to jump around different ideas,

they wanna pursue different things.

Ultimately the test has absolutely zero validity.

Has zero correlation to what people are like.

It fails to replicate in the sense that

you can test as one thing and then as another thing.

All of the questions that are being asked are very vague.

I enjoy being in groups.

Well, if I'm answering that for myself,

that answer can be sometimes, right?

I enjoy being in groups when I'm in a social mood

and when that group is my close friends.

I don't enjoy being in groups when I don't know anyone.

So because that kind of subtlety is entirely missing

from tests like the Myers-Briggs,

their ability to predict real-world outcomes

is basically non-existent.

To me the proof is, is a framework something

that makes people feel like, yes.

I see something about myself, I see something in the world

that I didn't see before.

So there's kind of a comfort that comes from knowing

that the way you are is the way a lot of people are.

You're not alone.

Other people share kind of the patterns that you experience,

and there's probably solutions that

maybe you haven't thought of.

Over and over you see very smart people saying,

oh, this test got me.

This assessment is accurate.

I'm exactly like this personality type.

It ends up that you can make almost any

personality assessment feel like it applies to you

if you frame the questions

and the answers in a specific way.

So the Barnum effect is in effect where you think that

a personality quiz applies to you specifically,

whereas in reality, it is completely random

and had nothing to do with the results

of the test that you took.

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Everyone has the new test for predicting

who's gonna be successful in your organization?

Who is going to make the best worker?

Who is going to be the best student?

That's someone making money off of this idea

that you can predict someone's outcomes

based on where they fall into a certain typology.

Every time you take something like that,

you are giving just reams and reams of data

about yourself to third parties who can then

sell that to advertisers,

or maybe they are advertisers themselves.

Actually some of these quizzes were created

by companies that have products to sell.

So all of a sudden you're giving a very good profile

of yourself to others and they can use it

to target ads to you, to sell you things.

To target political ads to you,

to try to persuade you, nudge you in different directions.

This includes the basic responsibility

of protecting people's information,

which we failed to do with Cambridge Analytica.

So a lot of the data that Cambridge Analytica used

was made available because people took a quiz.

They actually opted in to take a quiz on social media

that was supposed to tell them something about themselves

and the moment they clicked on that quiz,

they opened up their profile and their friends' profiles

to Cambridge Analytica.

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It's very difficult without labels to just

go about the world.

We want to know what to call something.

We want to know what category it fits into.

Otherwise, it's just too amorphous.

It's uncertain.

One of the things psychologists have learned

over the years is that the human brain

really doesn't like ambiguity and uncertainty.

Those are two things that scare us

and that make us very uncomfortable.

But what if I don't label myself,

what if I don't actually choose one thing?

All of a sudden, I can be all of these different things.

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