The problem with personality tests

Recently, when my brother was staying with me, he recounted an incident from our childhood that I had completely forgotten about. You see, when I was about eleven or twelve, and my brother nine or ten, we were staying on my cousins’ property in the Adelaide Hills. They had a couple of mini motorbikes that my brother quickly became adept at riding, and I, too, was keen to have a go on one. My brother tried to explain how the bike worked to me, but I brushed aside his instructions, confident that I knew what I was doing.

Well, I got on the bike and hit the throttle so hard that I immediately started doing a wheelie; I managed to stop only by crashing into a fence. According to my brother, I screamed like a banshee the entire time¹—although that lasted for approximately 45 seconds, which is about how long it took from when I hopped onto the bike to when I spectacularly crashed it.

I wasn’t hurt as a result of the accident. In fact, it was so unmemorable² that I had completely forgotten about it until he mentioned it, probably because the crash was merely one in a long line of similar such incidents. However, when he recounted the story, it struck me that if there’s any single event that captures my personality best, it’s probably this one. Basically, I’m the equivalent of Ash from the Evil Dead series, brushing off instructions based on a misplaced sense of confidence that I know exactly what I’m doing and don’t need anyone else to tell me.

This has led me to reflect a little on the nature of personality—a topic that I’ve had cause to consider since childhood, primarily via my early exposure to the Myers-Briggs personality test. I was about ten years old when my father discovered the test and he quickly became obsessed with it. Pretty soon everyone in my family had completed the Myers-Briggs, along with most of his acquaintances. This was the first time I had reason to think about the nature of this thing called ‘personality’, given that I came out as an INFP, while everyone else in my family registered as an extroverted personality type.³

I have continued to score as an INFP throughout my adult life. Still, I’ve never thought I fit the type particularly well. Although ‘quiet’ and ‘unassuming’ were words frequently used to describe me as a child, they were restricted primarily to people I had only a passing acquaintance with or didn’t feel comfortable around. (‘Stubborn’ and ‘opinionated’ were probably the descriptors of choice amongst those who knew me best.)

Today, I doubt anyone who knows me would describe me as quiet, unassuming or conflict-avoidant.⁴ Thus, while the internet insists that I am kin to Neil from The Young Ones, I can probably lay equal claim to Rick’s sanctimoniousness (what social scientist can’t?) and, on occasion, Vyvyan’s violence (given my tendency to smack people in the face as a child).

If anything, I probably resemble a Leo (my star sign) as much as an INFP. Indeed, it probably has just as much validity as a predictor of human behaviour, given that many psychologists characterise the Myers-Briggs test as a form of ‘psychological astrology’. To quote the historian Nicholas Campion, it’s ‘a fascinating example of “disguised astrology”, masquerading as science in order to claim respectability’.⁵ Yet, while few companies will admit to making hiring decisions on the basis of star signs, organisations regularly use psychometric tests like Myers-Briggs as part of their hiring processes⁶—as the somewhat overwrought documentary Persona attests.

But while the Myers-Briggs test might be deemed ‘pseudo-scientific’, I’m not convinced that it’s worse than any of the other personality tests out there. Notably, it’s right on some counts, including my disinclination to follow instructions. To quote one overview of the INFP: ‘they often prefer to learn from trial and error, and want to be able to accomplish the task on their own’. But like everything on the Myers-Briggs test, this is true only in certain contexts. Certainly, I do like to figure things out on my own, which is why I treat recipes as inspiration sources rather than instruction manuals, serving to explain why I have never successfully baked a cake in my life. However, when the situation requires it, I can listen to and follow instructions just as well as the next person.⁷

For example, when I was 21, I became a certified skydiver. Rest assured that I listened avidly to all the instructions about ‘look, locate and pull’, reading an odometer, steering the parachute to avoid power lines, and how to avoid breaking my legs on landing (double flare like your life depends on it, even if your arms feel like lead, which they will), because I realised that there are some situations where trial and error is a literally suicidal approach to take. That I am alive today is testament to the fact that I can follow instructions when necessary—even if I choose not to do so when assembling items from Ikea. (To my intense regret, every time.) But this is precisely the problem with the concept of personality as psychologists currently understand it.

We know that all cultures recognise differences in temperament between individuals. To quote the psychological anthropologist Robert LeVine,

It seems highly probable that every culture gives recognition to trans-situational, enduring behavioral consistencies of the individual in its vernacular terminology and that both behavioral consistency within an individual and variability between individuals are universal in human populations.

Still, recognising enduring behavioural consistencies in an individual is not the same thing as speaking of ‘personality’. This is because personality is not seen to represent the behavioural consistencies themselves, but the underlying disposition or characteristics they speak to, which can’t, obviously, be observed directly. To quote LeVine again, disposition is ‘a potential for behavior that is conceived of as existing even at times when it is not being realized in observable behavior’.

It’s in this distinction between disposition and behaviour that all the problems with the concept of personality arise. Personally, I think this is, in part, why anthropologists ultimately moved away from the cross-cultural study of personality, in addition to the growing discomfort in the discipline with talk of cultural traits and national character. When is a behaviour durable enough to be considered an expression of an underlying disposition?

Another issue relates to which behaviours should be prioritised in ‘revealing’ personality. For example, why is irritability often treated as less significant than, say, extraversion as an expression of personality? Consider the ‘Big Five’ personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (a.k.a. ‘OCEAN’). While these are traits are often considered to be universal, doubts have been raised about their applicability beyond western contexts.

Even if we can agree on which behaviours or traits reveal personality, what is the best way to assess them? As anthropologists have long known, what people say about what they do is often different from what they actually do. Combine that with the levels of self-delusion that humans are frequently capable of, and you have a situation where someone’s assessment of their own agreeableness, conscientiousness, etc., potentially differs radically from their actual behaviour. To wit, if someone tells you how empathetic or funny they are, you can usually guarantee that they are a humourless sociopath.

This is because such qualities are intrinsically relational; you aren’t funny or empathetic unless other people think you are. In this respect, these attributes are much like charisma. Introduced in its secular sense by the German sociologist Max Weber, it’s a widely misused concept that relates not to an intrinsic quality of an individual but a quality imputed by others. In other words, you don’t ‘have’ charisma, other people attribute it to you, which is why psychological charisma tests are fundamentally flawed.⁸

In the end, to have enduring differences in temperament from our friends, families and neighbours—and to notice them and theorise on their origins—is a universal human trait. However, to sort ourselves into a limited array of ‘personality types’ is most decidedly not. As the Evil Dead movies have shown us in the most literal of senses, there are a million ways we can be sliced and diced, whether it be your Myers-Briggs type, your Zodiac sign (European or Chinese, take your pick), your Hogwarts house, your Enneagram number or your OCEAN scores.

But just don’t treat them as accurate predictions for how you actually behave. Because as every skydiver knows, it doesn’t matter who you think you are, and what you think you’ll do—something everyone is warned about during training. When you’re at 10,000 feet and they’ve opened the door of the plane and the wind is roaring and your heart is racing and your instructor is looking at you expectantly, as if to say, ‘Are you gonna do this, or what?’, no personality test in the world can tell you whether you’ll actually jump.

1996, after my first skydive

1. Although he, like every member of my family,* is prone to exaggeration and therefore cannot be trusted to give an unvarnished account.

*Including, obviously, myself.

2. Well, at least to me. I suspect that my rampant idiocy combined with the hilarity of my crash are what seared it into his memory.

3. Actually, we could never pin down my brother, as he came out as a different personality type every time he did the test.

4. Especially the people I’ve forced to complete the Myers-Briggs to see if my guess about their personality type is accurate. Yes, I can confirm it. We do eventually become our parents.

5. Although my dad holds astrology in contempt,* he once got into an argument with a committed astrologist and was somewhat shaken by her response that he was a ‘typical Scorpio’ given that he is, in fact, a Scorpio.

*Weirdly, he did once give my sister and I bangles with star signs on them, but I think that’s only because he didn’t realise what the markings on the bangles signified. Honestly, he gave us some seriously bewildering gifts. For instance, he once bought my sister a mandolin for her birthday, despite the fact that she had never expressed any interest whatsoever in the instrument. I think he had visions of us forming a family bluegrass band.

6. For example, during my PhD, I sat the Australian Public Service Exam for graduate entrants and failed the personality test. Interestingly, a number of fellow PhD students took the test at the same time, including my sister, and we all failed the personality test. Whether higher qualifications were seen as a proxy for intelligence or stupidity is anyone’s guess.

7. In fact, better, if that person is an ENTP. (That’s a Myers-Briggs in-joke; my dad will get it.)

8. And I say that not just because I did the test and scored a measly 69. ‘You’re not especially high in charisma but can shine in certain circumstances’, I was informed. Apparently, I need to be more present in conversations, make more eye contact and refrain from criticism to improve my charisma. Oh, and I should ‘contact one of our therapists to determine if you would benefit from therapy’. WTF Psychology Today?