One more time.
Personality tests are useless.
So, why do so many
companies still use them?
So, the other day I got an email
from a former student of mine.
Did you know I was a full-time
business school professor?
I don't talk about that often.
"Dear, Dr. Burkus..."
Did you know I have a doctorate?
I don't talk about that much either.
"Dear, Dr. Burkus, thanks
so much for your advice
"years ago in class on
acing the job interview.
"I'm now at the final stages
of the interview process
"with my dream company
"and I need to take a personality test.
"Do you have any advice for
acing the personality test
"and getting the right personality
type to get the offer?"
I do actually have some advice about this.
My biggest piece of advice:
Ditch the company.
You don't want to work there anyway.
I know it's your dream job,
but it's gonna be a nightmare.
See we use personality tests a lot.
Okay, most of them we
use for harmless fun,
we take it with our friends
to figure what Hogwarts house
we're supposed to be in
and that sort of thing
but companies use personality
tests prolifically.
Somewhere close to 2.5
million people a year
take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
The most popular and also one of the worst
personality tests out there.
89 of the Fortune 100 companies
subject their people to some
form of personality testing
at some point in their career.
And we use them for a
couple different reasons.
Yeah, we use them often in
hiring because we think that
we should have certain personality
types for certain jobs.
Or we think that we need a diversity
of personality types on our team.
We use them for team building activities
or conflict resolution cause
we think that if we could just
understand the differences
in personality between people
then we would end up getting along better
or working together as a team.
And both of those assumptions
are, well, they're wrong.
Personality tests, most
personality tests anyway,
the kinds that put you
in a certain "personality
type" are useless.
They're completely meaningless,
they're of dubious origin,
dubious methodology,
and yet we still use
them time and time again.
Like I said, most personality
tests are of dubious origin.
Consider one of the
more popular personality tests
in the work place is the DiSC.
D-i-S-C personality assessment.
Although, to be fair to the people at DiSC
they would say they are
a behavioral assessment.
And the idea of the DiSC test,
started with a gentleman
named William Marston.
William Marston also
did two other things--
he was the one that did a lot
of the early research in the,
now discredited, polygraph test industry.
And he gave us Wonder Woman.
The Wonder Woman thing
is actually pretty cool,
we won't hold that one
against him, for sure.
But he theorized that there were basically
four different types of people.
Four different ways that people respond
in certain situations
and then disciples of
Marston's actually took that
and developed it into a test
to put you into one of
these four categories.
Most of this happened
almost 100 years ago.
100 years ago,
think about the state
of science as a whole,
medical science, and
especially personality science,
100 years ago.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
for example, the MBTI,
we like to think of this
as a super scientific one
because the people that market it,
do a great job making it look that way.
But the MBTI started with two
women, a mom and a daughter,
who basically loved gossiping
about their neighbors
and other socialites.
They had read Carl Jung and
Carl Jung's ideas that there
were three basic personality types,
and for some reason they added a fourth,
and started labeling
everybody around them.
Eventually, they developed
a "test" that they could ask
people to put them into
these different categories
based on these different dimensions.
But again, we are talking about
two untrained psychologists
who were devotees of Carl
Jung, over 100 years ago.
100 years ago, when we
thought that giving lobotomies
to angry or depressed housewives
was a suitable cure for anything.
One more test that is
gaining in popularity
and starting to make
inroads into the workplace
is the Enneagram assessment.
The Enneagram of Personality
it's often called.
Now if you thought that DiSC
or the MBTI had dubious origins;
this test is fantastic.
The Enneagram sorts
people into nine different
personality types and those
nine personality types,
well, those were basically theorized from
a South American occultist
who liked to get into
hallucinogenic trances by
taking Mescaline and Ayahuasca.
You think I'm making this up but I'm not.
And one day believed that
the Archangel Metatron
told him that there were nine
different personality types.
He mapped those nine different
personality types along this
ancient symbol and, boom,
the Enneagram was born.
Later, devotees, I don't know
if they did Mescaline or not,
would develop a test
that would sort people
into these nine categories.
But I think we get the point.
Most of these tests are of
incredible dubious origins
and yet we still buy into them.
For reasons we'll talk about in a second.
First, let's talk about how
dubious the methodologies
behind these tests are.
So while most of these
tests have dubious origins,
their methodologies are even more dubious.
Most of these tests, the ones
that sort you into different
personality types, all start the same way.
They start with a theory
of how many different
personality types there are.
In the case of the DiSC,
it was four based on four behaviors.
In the case of the Myers
Briggs, the MBTI, it's 16
based on one of two areas,
along four different dimensions.
Jung only actually theorized
that there were three
but for some reason they added a fourth.
And in the case of the Enneagram,
remember it was the Archangel Metatron
that told us that there were nine.
So you start with how many
different categories you want
and then you dream up a bunch
of different questions that
would help you sort out
whether or not somebody belongs
in a certain category.
We're talking hundreds of questions.
You write out all these questions,
you start to give those questionnaires
to lots of different people,
and then you run a bunch of
statistical tests to figure out
which questions actually did sort people
into those categories and
which ones we can illuminate
'cause they don't add any
additional sorting ability.
You run all these
different statistical tests
and you arrive at a much smaller test.
In the case of the Myers
Briggs, for example,
it's 93 questions.
The end result is that
now you can take that test
and you can find out that you
are such-and-such personality.
Based on basically the scientific
rigor of a Buzzfeed quiz
about which "Saved by the
Bell" character you are.
The science of personality
doesn't actually work that way.
Legitimate personality
researchers will tell you
that there are no personality types,
there are only personality dimensions.
And every personality
assessment that they developed
is designed to show where
you exist along a spectrum.
Now the most well-researched
and most rigorous personality assessment
is what we often refer to as the Big Five.
Five different personality dimensions
that most people exist
somewhere in a continuum.
So instead of just one
different personality type,
you actually have five different ones:
Openness to experience,
Conscientiousness, Extraversion,
Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
And in the end what you
arrive at is a score,
actually five scores,
that show where your
unique personality sits
along these continuums.
Now we should specify here
that since they came out
a lot of these tests
have added a little bit
to their phrasing to try and
look a little bit more like
the Big Five.
So the DiSC will mention
that it's a preference
which of these that you are,
the MBTI will actually
give you the results
where you exist on the spectrum
of four different options.
But that's in later pages of the report.
The very first thing
you will see is still:
Which of the sixteen categories you are?
In the Enneagram added
this thing called wings
where you're now basically two
different personality types
and later descriptions of it
will say that all of the nine
are represented in everybody
but to different degrees.
Which is, I mean, that's
pretty much an admission
that your sorting hat isn't putting people
in the right Hogwarts house.
And in trying to make themselves
look a little more scientific,
that actually speaks
to why we believe them.
At least one of the reasons
we believe them so much--
we believe them because
they appear rigorous.
The devotees of the DiSC
will talk about Marston,
will talk about the psychological research
that goes behind it, and
there is a little bit there
but not enough to make career decisions
or even run a team building event on.
The creators of the MBTI will talk about
their statistical reliability
which basically just means
that the test actually sorts people
into the right categories.
They'll never mention, of
course, that those categories
are basically meaningless
and not based on actual dimensions.
And the Enneagram will
speak to the idea that
it's a 2,000-year-old wisdom tradition
passed down from Sufi Mystics,
even though the Sufi's aren't
2,000-years-old.
And the Christian Desert Fathers,
even though those Fathers wrote
about the Seven Deadly Sins,
not the nine personality types.
And none of those Fathers
believed in an Archangel named Metatron.
And there's another reason
beyond just the appearance
of scientific rigor
or historical reliability,
that we believe these tests.
Hang on.
The reason we believe most of these tests
is that when we read our results,
our results read like a fortune cookie.
You don't have pile of
fortune cookies at your house?
You're missing out.
I mean watch.
(cookie crunching)
Tolerant and flexible, quiet observers,
until a problem appears,
then act quickly to
find workable solutions.
Is that the fortune cookie
or is that the description
of ISTP from the Myers Briggs website?
How about another one.
(cookie crunching)
Easy going, self-effacing type, receptive,
reassuring, agreeable, and complacent.
Fortune cookie or the
description of Type Nine
from the Enneagram?
I mean you get the point,
most of these are written
like fortune cookies or like horoscopes,
and it's actually a well
researched phenomenon.
It's known often as the Barnum Effect,
the idea is that you can
appear to be dialed in,
to be really specific
predicting someones future,
or predicting their personality type
by giving them a written
or a verbal description
that is actually so vague
it could apply to just about everybody.
That's why one of my friends
and colleagues, Adam Grant,
coined this term that:
"most personality tests
are horoscopes for nerds."
I mean they're literally about as valid
but about as persuasive
as a fortune cookie.
Why do we keep using them?
Well, like I said we use them in hiring,
based off this faulty idea
that maybe there are certain
personality types that lend
themself to certain jobs.
We use them in conflict resolution
because we think that if people
can understand each others
personality, maybe they
would get along better.
And the truth is there's
not a lot of research behind
either of these uses in the workplace.
Every attempt to take even the
most scientifically rigorous
personality assessments.
The Big Five, OCEAN, that
we talked about earlier,
showed that there's
basically no correlation
between your personality type
and your performance at work.
Now, a side note here,
there's a little correlation
between conscientiousness
and your performance at work
but it's really not
significant enough to be making
hiring decisions based off.
And there's also not a lot
of research that suggests
that understanding each
others personality types will
lead to less conflict in the workplace.
I mean face it, most of
the conflict on your team
or in your entire organization
is not the result of
different personality dimensions.
It's the result of really
vague descriptions of roles
and responsibilities,
diminished resources,
so every department is having
to fight for resources,
really poor communication around
timelines and expectations,
and a myriad of other systematic reasons
that put people into conflict.
And just finding out that
someone is a Sagittarius,
that's not going to be all that helpful.
So now you see when I'm
talking to my student,
why I'm advising her to skip that company
and move somewhere else.
I mean yes, I get it,
that it is her dream job
but the truth is, if this
organization thinks that they're
gonna pick the right candidate
based on a personality type
or they think that they're
going to manage her career
based on where she fits
on some bogus test.
Well that dream jobs gonna
turn into a nightmare.
Why?
Because that company is dreaming.
