Five myths about personality tests

Your job depends on it, your marriage compatibility gets a cue from it, and your outlook is coloured by it. But are these tests valid?

Your job depends on it, your marriage compatibility gets a cue from it. But are these tests valid? |

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 distinctive individual. The 19th and 20th centuries saw the rise of systems designed for the mass classification of humans, including personality tests.

Today, these tests are more beloved than ever, especially on websites such as BuzzFeed and Facebook. These tools and typologies are based on powerful myths about what personality is and how we can measure it.

Here are five myths about these tests.

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 or MBTI (see

box), liked to say. “Every one of us is born either an extravert or an introvert, and remains extravert or introvert to the end of his days,” she claimed.

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’s 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 their personality than did their 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, for example) 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 generalisable.

There is nothing innate or natural about the way we discuss personality; it is a human invention.

2 Personality assessments are based on the science of psychology and designed by psychologists.

Personality tests are used by psychologists and counsellors. They are taught in psychology, education and business courses, and featured in textbooks.

But some of the most popular personality assessments were produced by amateurs and autodidacts. Take the MBTI. It was created by two American women Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers.

Myers had no formal training in psychology or sociology. They were wives and mothers who believed that their daily domestic labours — managing their households, tending to the emotional needs of their children and husbands — made them especially suited to understanding individual personalities and interpersonal relations. They designed their system of type by poring over psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s quasimystical opus Psychological Types

(1921), biographies of famous men and 19th-century novels, and by deriving questions from their readings that they tested on their family members and friends around their kitchen tables.

“In your daily work, do you (a) rather enjoy an emergency that makes you work against time; or (b) usually plan your work so you won’t need to work under pressure?”