personality Yeah, you’ve got

Discovering what’s true about you

In its earliest use in the 13th century, “personality” referred to the quality, character or fact of being human. By the 18th century, the word pointed to the traits that made a person a distinctive individual. The 19th and 20th centuries saw the rise of systems designed for the mass classification of human beings, including personality tests. Today, these tests are more beloved and far-reaching than ever, especially on websites like BuzzFeed and Facebook. These tools and typologies are based on powerful, enduring misunderstandings about what personality is and how we can measure it. Here are five.

1. PERSONALITY IS INNATE.

To many practitioners of and believers in personality assessment, personality is forged in the “dreamlike chaos” of infancy,” as Katharine Briggs, co-creator of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), liked to say. “Every one of us is born either an extrovert or an introvert, and remains extrovert or introvert to the end of his days,” she claimed. Personality inventories like the MBTI or the Enneagram (which classifies people as one of nine personality types) claim that they allow their subjects to discover their “shoes-off selves,” as Briggs’ daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, referred to the true, immutable and essential you. One of the first and only major studies of personality development concluded that a child’s genetic makeup had a stronger influence on his personality than did his upbringing. Yet longitudinal studies have reached different conclusions about when personality becomes fixed: during one’s school years or upon one’s entry into the workforce; at 17 or 21 or 25 or 30. Many of the systems of personality classification we use today (the MBTI, the Big Five) are based on flawed experimental design. Their conclusions were derived by studying subjects—medical students, research scientists or Air Force officers— whose results were not at all generalizable. More important, the idea of a fixed personality is defined by and through the systems we use to assess it. Each system has its own language, its own historically and ideologically inflected understanding of what traits are determinative. Is it extroversion and introversion? Is it agreeableness or openness to new experiences? Do we assess these through multiple-choice questionnaires, checklists of self-descriptive adjectives, ink blots, life records