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Can Buzzfeed quizzes, Myers-Briggs Types, and Enneagrams tell us anything valid about who we are? In episode 163 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss personality. They talk through the Big Five personality test and its legitimacy, the history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test (MBTI), and how the concept of personality emerged out of abnormal psychology. Why did the concept of personality replace using literature to understand the self? How does the concept of personality presuppose a fixed concept of the self? And what is the connection between MBTI and World War II? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts think about how personality tests might be susceptible to the Barnum effect and their reduction of the self to egos.

Works Discussed:

Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality

Merve Emre, What’s Your Type? The Story of the Myers-Briggs, and How Personality Testing Took Over the World

Colin Koopman, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person

Highlight: The Big Five

* Ellie & David took a popular personality test in preparation for this episode, known as the Big Five

* The term “Big Five” was coined by Lewis Goldberg in 1981

* Openness measures open-mindedness to new ideas and experiences

* Conscientiousness measures thoughtfulness, impulse control, and goal-direct behaviors

* Extroversion measures sociability, assertiveness, and talkability

* Agreeableness measures levels of kindness, cooperation, and altruism

* Neuroticism measures emotional instability

* This way of “measuring” personality does not type people, as those like MBTI do