What's the Matter with Personality Tests?

Personality tests are not an appropriate tool for resolving workplace conflict.

I was recently asked to take an enneagram at work. I refused, because I have never liked or trusted personality tests, but my manager asserts that my refusal is a red flag for them. They have scheduled group time to talk about the enneagram results, and are unwilling to discuss a contingency in which any group member does not take it. I think this is completely unnacceptable. While a test may provide a framework for better understanding interaction, personality tests run the risks of telling incorrect, limiting, or even derogatory stories. A worker forced to take the test must either internalize the test results, finding accomodation with its assertions about them, or challenge the test itself.

If they chose to reject the test, they also challenge the social capital of both the test administrator and whoever ordered the test (likely their manager), and accept the loss of the money and time they paid to take the test. If they choose to accept the test, they must do the emotional labor of integrating what the test says about them with their personal narrative, and deal with coworkers and higher ups reinforcing that narrative as the rejecter wrestles with it themselves.

If a worker choses not to take the test, they are putting themselves in opposition to people who likely have power over their economic survival. As a white-presenting and masculine-presenting software engineer, I have outsized economic power– I am hard to replace, and it’s easy for me to find other work. Because of this priveledge, and my Jewish tradition which enjoinders that I consider myself the oppressed, I actually have an obligation to fight this managerial overreach into worker’s psychological health.

Personality Is Personal

Some people like these tests. They say they encoding real knowledge in an interactive format that feels like a journey of self discovery. If you find it useful, that’s great. However part of the reason you can do so is because you buy in, at least partially, to their model of personality as a series of traits which can help you predict human behavior.

There are other scientific models, some of which are “behaviorally based approaches [that] define personality through learning and habits,”. There are cultural and religious models of personality as well. Jewish tradition says that the person is created in the image of a single deity that is everywhere, all powerful, of which all the universe is an expression. Further, the person is an embodiment of that infinite divinity. A staunch believer might regard the assertion that there are nine types of humans as blasphemous. God after all, is one and infinite, so so must personality. It feels obvious to say it, but a worker’s interpretation of personality is highly personal, and tied into cultural and religious factors that they should not be required to bring to the workplace.

The enneagram asserts that it can help us understand aspects of ourselves which we did not already know, or could not already explain to a coworker, given adequate time and intention. This is hogwash because of the very nature of the test– a worker answer a series of questions. The enneagram uses some deterministic series of steps to interpret those questions into a “personality.” It can’t possible have additional information, so at best tells a worker exactly what they put into it. If it’s proponents purport it does more, either they are lying, or it must make leaps to judgements that cannot be justified and which we have no reason to believe.

A Physical Parallel

There are recent, debunked historical parallels to personality testing. A popular podcast, 99% Invisible, recently covered the application of the mathematical mean to populations of people in an episode titled On Average. It traced the evolution of the average summary statistic from it’s origins in astronomical measurement, to social sciences, and eventually the military. At one point military equipment was all made to the average sized person. Uncomfortable enough when you’re talking about boots, shirts, and pants, but actually dangerous when the same principle is applied to aircraft cockpits, where shorter-than-average workers might be literally unable to reach the average-person-positioned controls. On Average concludes with the account of the invention of the adjustable cockpit, and sums up nicely:

Today, we take for granted that equipment should fit a wide range of body sizes rather than being standardized around the “average person.” From this understanding has come the science of ergonomics: the study of how to match people’s physical capacity to the needs of the job.

Whether it’s the equipment, or the whole work environment, design must accommodate more people who are outside the average … because in reality no one is actually average.

Yes, most trait-based models of personality have more than one axis, but I hope the parallel is clear. The built environment is an edifice of our understanding of people, and the way they use that environment. The failure of early cockpit designers was to mistake the power of the statistic. They trusted the mean over their own perceptions (obviously there are small and large people, whose differing geometries will affect their ability to operate a specific machine). Instead of their own human understanding, they relied on faith in a technical mechanic whose inner workings they did not fully understand.

Expectations Matter

Like the built environment, personality is an edifice. It is constructed of foundational stories, skills we have developed for navigating complex social situations, and genetic make up. Likewise, our understanding of others is an edifice, constructed of our experience with them, and of others. We have deep intuitions about individuals which encode enormous complexity. Humans have developed tools for dealing with this sort of complexity. We tell stories.

We tell stories about what characterizes a bad person, and what happens when they come into power. We tell stories about ourselves. We tell stories about where we came from. Mine involve generations of cultural persecution, which was attended by stories, others tolds about my culture: Jews are good with money (nevermind that banking was one of few paths to prosperity available to Jews), intelligent, avaricious, argumentative, vulgar, and loud. My grandparents are holocaust survivors, traumatized by adherants to a genocidal philosophy of personhood that replaced the individual with the race and then ascribed to the race characteristics which must be evaluated before permitting the survival of my grandparents.

The Nazis had a trait based model of personality. Allow me to draw some parallels to the enneagram:

I am emphatically not saying that the enneagram is Nazi, but it certainly is not safe.

Primum non nocere

The enneagram is an enormously more complicated method than race or gender for replacing people with their stereotypes. When I have brought this up to proponents, they have attempted to ameliorate my concerns by talking about the complexity of the system– you can draw attributes from other types, you can move from type to type, but that does not address the systemic criticisms I raise:

There is no oath of management, but managers could do worse than starting with Hipocrates’s: “First, Do No Harm.” Forcing your employees to take a personality test, even one with scientific backing, fails Hipocrates oath.