Around 80 million people complete (predominantly) self-reported personality tests each year, which make up an industry predicted to be worth more than $10 billion by 2027.
Of these, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is by some way the most popular, and it has been estimated that up to 80% of Fortune 500 companies and 89% of Fortune 100 companies have employed it. Such tests are often used by employers to discover candidates’ potential strengths and weakness, and how they might interact with a current team. They are also used on existing employees to gauge where and how improvements could be made within the workplace.
CODING
The MBTI, inspired by the theories of Carl Jung, creates four-letter personality codes for each individual using eight characteristics: extraversion (E) or introversion (I); sensing (S) or intuitive (N); feeling (F) or thinking (T); and judging (J) or perceiving (P). Through a series of questions, participants discover which half of each pairing most applies to them, resulting in that final four-letter sequence.
Of the 16 possible personality types, research has shown that those whose codes end with TJ to be the highest earners – with ESTJ coming out on top (famous faces include Henry Ford, Margaret Thatcher, and, er, Saddam Hussein). Jessica Butt, Myers-Briggs expert, and author of Live Your Life from the Front Seat, says that this is because thinkers (Ts) and judgers (Js) are steered by their heads rather than their hearts, and are more likely to be driven, headstrong, and extroverted.
“We live in an extroverted world,” she tells CNBC. “Our companies are, our corporations and schools are set up to reward extroversion, so I think that’s a big factor in terms of people’s success.” Certainly not a defining factor, however, with notable ‘introverts’ including Mark Zuckerberg and Hillary Clinton.
TESTING, TESTING
The French psychologist Alfred Binet created the first intelligence test in 1905, which sparked interest in measuring other human traits. The very first personality test was developed by the US Army during the first world war as a means of predicting which soldiers would suffer what was then known as shell shock (now called post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD).
Within two years of the US entering the conflict, more than 1.7 million soldiers had been tested, many using a set of yes-no questions developed by Professor Robert Sessions Woodworth of Columbia University. Around 2% of the soldiers were rejected owing to psychological concerns. “The experience of other armies had shown that liability to ‘shell shock’ or war neurosis was a handicap almost as serious as low intelligence,” observed Woodworth. “I concluded that the best immediate lead lay in the early symptoms of neurotic tendency.”
Around this time, writer Katherine Briggs, along with her daughter, Isabel, were working on what would become the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Other tests include the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), developed in the 1930s and still used by mental health professionals today, and the Five-Factor Model, developed in the 80s, which, according to the Harvard Business Review, is the “gold standard” of personality research which, unlike the MBTI, “can reliably predict job performance”. Also known as the “Big Five”, this test splits personalities into five (obviously) categories: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Studies have shown personalities to be influenced by both biological and environmental factors, with maturation also playing an important role.
A QUESTION OF INDIVIDUALITY
Studies have shown personalities to be influenced by both biological and environmental factors, with maturation also playing an important role. And though adulthood generally leads to a stabilisation of traits, they do continue to evolve with age. People often become less open to new experiences and less neurotic as they get older, for example, but may develop a greater capacity for agreeableness and conscientiousness with more laps of the sun. And herein lies one of the industry’s many issues: personality tests assume traits are fixed.
Such issues are explored in the 2021 HBO Max documentary, Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests itself influenced by the 2018 book, The Personality Brokers, by Professor Merve Emre. It tells of how since the 1960s, 50 million people have taken the MBTI test, with up to 70% of the American prospective workforce forced to test today.
“Personality tests are useful for individual people sometimes on journeys of self-discovery,” says disability justice advocate Lydia XZ Brown. “But when they’re used to make decisions by other people affecting someone’s life, they become dangerous tools.” The tests, she adds, are built to be ableist, racist, sexist, and classist.
In 2012, Kyle Behm was rejected from a supermarket job application following a personality test that indicated he was likely to ignore difficult customers. “I was taken aback because I’ve worked in customer service before and one of the things I’ve learned is to completely separate your personal feelings from the job,” says Behm, who has bipolar disorder. “It’s not fair that by answering honestly about things that were related to my mental health I was excluded from work.” Complaints were duly filed with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
In 2015, the EEOC learned that Target had been using pre-hire employment assessments to discriminate against candidates based on race, sex, and disability, in violation of both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Nearly US$3 million was paid out to the thousands of negatively impacted candidates.
Those that find the concept of personality testing for a job application intimidating look away now, in development are video-interview platforms that analyse words, speech, and facial movements – something that Brown describes as more “pseudoscience”. Documentary maker Tim Travers Hawkins warns that personality testing is becoming more prevalent with “more windows for this technology to be inserted at different junctures of our interactions”. While it’s human nature to be drawn to systems that offer neat, neutral explanations, he adds, we should “be wary and to think about where these instruments come from”.
Jessica Butt is adamant that leaders are not certain personality types, rather, what’s more important is that we are in the right career for our personalities meaning “you can make as much money as any person, because you will naturally become the best at your position”.
Perhaps Carl Jung – the ‘father of analytical psychology’ who inadvertently inspired the daddy of personality tests, the MBTI – best summed it up when he said, “Every individual is the exception to the rule.”
