Selects: How Personality Tests Work

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 2 Support for the show today comes from public.com.

Speaker 4 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 5 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 8 The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and public gets that.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 9 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's it's all there.

Speaker 10 Plus an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 13 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously.

Speaker 15 Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 3 That's public.com/slash SYSK.

Speaker 18 Paid for by Public Investing.

Speaker 20 All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 21 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds, and a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 23 CryptoTrading provided by ZeroHash.

Speaker 20 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 29 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 25 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 30 Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, and partnership with Argenix explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Speaker 29 Listen to Untold Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 9 The universe is full of mysteries, black holes, quantum physics, galaxies. On TikTok, millions of people are learning more about the universe around them every day.

Speaker 9 Scientists break down complex theories, demonstrate experiments, and connect dots between the cosmos and our daily lives.

Speaker 9 One scroll might reveal the concepts on the fabric of space-time, the next an optical illusion. It's discovery on a massive scale, where millions learn something new every day.

Speaker 9 Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's Select I've chosen our August 2017 episode on personality tests.

Speaker 9 It turns out that the vast majority of them, maybe all of them, are scientifically faulty to at least some degree, and some of them are just outright made up.

Speaker 9 This can be a real problem if they're being used to diagnose you with a mental illness or hire or fire you or put you in jail, and that actually happens.

Speaker 9 So, dig into this deceptively interesting episode and enjoy it. And I'm an ENFP, by the way.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 9 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
There's Jerry over there.

Speaker 9 And this is stuff you should know.

Speaker 16 Yeah, just a couple of

Speaker 16 ITJSs.

Speaker 9 I don't remember what I am. We've taken it before.
How Stuff Works hosted it years back. Do you remember?

Speaker 16 Yeah, we had, like many companies do, as you'll see, we had when we were under Discovery's Tender Wing,

Speaker 16 they paid for someone to come to our office and administer the Myers-Briggs personality test at gunpoint.

Speaker 9 Yeah,

Speaker 16 I don't remember, but I'm pretty sure I was an ENFP.

Speaker 9 I don't remember what I was.

Speaker 9 I'll probably say like three different things as we go through this one.

Speaker 16 Like, just looking at it again, I'm pretty sure I was an ENFP.

Speaker 16 Okay, P stands for Pisces, right?

Speaker 9 Or pooper. Yeah,

Speaker 9 let's see. Extroverted, intuitive.
Okay.

Speaker 9 What does the F stand for?

Speaker 9 Feeling.

Speaker 16 Pooper. This is a spoiler.

Speaker 9 Yeah, feeling pooper. So we're what we're talking about, which it sounds like we're saying strings of letters.

Speaker 9 They actually do make sense if you're familiar with what Chuck just said, the Myers-Briggs type inventory, which if you are in corporate America and have been a part of corporate America for more than probably three years,

Speaker 9 there's probably a pretty good likelihood that you've taken the Myers-Briggs type inventory.

Speaker 16 For sure.

Speaker 9 Like, it's really widespread. Yeah, people love it.
I saw something like 13% of companies in America use it. It's a lot.
Yeah.

Speaker 16 And was it 89 of the Fortune 100 use it? Right.

Speaker 9 And then I saw another stat. It was from 2001, though, so I'm not sure how current it is.

Speaker 16 Well, 16 years old.

Speaker 9 Right. But they said that

Speaker 9 the,

Speaker 9 I think British companies, somewhere between 10 and 40% of British companies use them. Right.
So, I mean, it's who knows? That's a pretty wild guess, it sounds like. I wonder if they have their own.

Speaker 9 It's

Speaker 9 no.

Speaker 9 The Myers-Briggs test, they don't call it a test, as we'll see. Sure.
But the test

Speaker 9 is it's worldwide. It's translated into tons of different languages.

Speaker 9 And no, it's the Myers-Briggs test. And there's tons of knockoffs.
Oh, sure.

Speaker 9 There's tons of personality tests in general, which really is the larger umbrella that the Myers-Briggs test falls under, but it's probably the most famous of all time, at least as far as pop culture goes.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and we're going to hit on everything from Rorschach to the Myers-Briggs. Sure.

Speaker 9 We're going to hit on them.

Speaker 16 But the MBTI definitely is more of the focus of this one because of its ubiquity.

Speaker 9 Right. And because most people know it.
and because it's a a one of the overlooked pastimes in the united states to take pot shots at the myers-briggs type inventory sure it's fun

Speaker 16 uh

Speaker 16 so categorizing one's personality is nothing new uh and that's what these tests aim to do um for various reasons which we'll go over later but um

Speaker 16 going back and this was a grabster article correct that's right so you know know, it's good. Yep.
And Grabster was just at our show in Toronto.

Speaker 9 Yeah, he was. For the second time, he stood up and like did that victory shake.
Oh, did he do that? No, he did. Oh,

Speaker 16 I'm a big fan of that. That's old school.

Speaker 9 Oh, it is. It's a good way to go.

Speaker 9 It looks like you should be wearing those dolphin shorts and just having crossed the finish line and you're doing that.

Speaker 16 So, yeah, it's nothing new trying to categorize personalities.

Speaker 16 Way back in the day, I know on our

Speaker 16 grave robbing, live grave robbing episode, we talked about the four humors. Right.
And we've talked about them before,

Speaker 16 before medical science was kind of a real thing.

Speaker 9 It was an early attempt. Yeah.

Speaker 16 They talked about the four fluids or the four humors, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood.

Speaker 16 And an imbalance in those will cause disease. But they were also, and this is something I didn't know, these are also linked to corresponding personality types.
Right.

Speaker 9 Yeah. So like the word melancholy in English, it's an adaptation of the Greek words, I believe, for black bile.

Speaker 9 There it is. And melancholy personalities were associated with an overabundance of black bile.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 basically, you're melancholy. You're a depressed person or you're very reserved or quiet.
And for thousands of years, people thought, guy's got a lot of black bile. Yeah.

Speaker 9 That explains his personality. The other ones are pretty, pretty interesting, too, like phlegmatic.

Speaker 16 Phlematic?

Speaker 9 I've seen phlegmatic. I've heard phlegmatic.
Oh, really? I've seen it too.

Speaker 16 So, like, when you cough something up, do you call it phlegm?

Speaker 9 Sometimes phlegm? Depends. If it had like a lot of extra chunks in it, it's phlegmum.
Oh, gosh. But phlegmatic, I say phlegmatic.

Speaker 9 That's very laid-back. Did you know that?

Speaker 16 Well, yeah, because I looked all these up. Oh, okay.

Speaker 16 Because sanguine is one of my favorite words. Yeah.
And that's, this is Hippocrates, by the way. He, he kind of further refined these concepts of the temperament.

Speaker 16 So melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine, and what is it? Choleric.

Speaker 9 Yeah. Choleric.
Yeah. Choleric.

Speaker 9 Choleric. Choleric is like irritable and short and terse and curt.

Speaker 9 Yeah. But the thing is, there's something weird here, right?

Speaker 9 If you are a thinking human being

Speaker 9 who is not in a vegetative state right now,

Speaker 9 and for all we know at this point in medical science, maybe even if you are in a vegetative state, you're probably thinking,

Speaker 9 it doesn't seem like anyone I've ever met is just phlegmatic or just choleric or just sanguine or just melancholy. Sometimes I'm all four of those things.

Speaker 9 Sometimes I go through those things all four in a day, depending on how weird the day is.

Speaker 16 Sometimes I go through all four of those within the course of one happy hour.

Speaker 9 Sure, okay, right. And

Speaker 9 that's kind of the point here.

Speaker 9 And it's also the basis of any criticism from this moment in the podcast here on out is that this whole thing that started back with the four humors and continues on to this day in the guise of personality tests is an attempt to take a human personality and say, you're this.

Speaker 9 Yeah. You're this one type.
You're this type. This is your type.
This is what you're like, right? Yeah.

Speaker 9 And the human personality is just too complex, too squishy, too jelly-like to be boxed into one thing like that.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 16 And we'll get into all the criticisms, but that definitely is the leading criticism that is,

Speaker 9 well, we'll save that. Okay.

Speaker 9 That was a tease. It was a good tease.
There's a phlegmatic one.

Speaker 16 All these classifications, though,

Speaker 16 that we talk about now are,

Speaker 16 or most of them at least, are derived, uh, lay at the feet of one man, one Carl Jung. Yeah.
Who wrote a book called Psychological Types.

Speaker 9 How do you say it, though, in German? I don't know. It's, um, oh, where is it? Let me see.
Oh, there it is. I can't even begin to do it.

Speaker 16 Uh, psycho, psycho, sorry, psychologisch

Speaker 16 gisch psychologikisch typing.

Speaker 9 That's not bad.

Speaker 16 It's so tiny. that was a problem.

Speaker 9 Oh, yeah, I do 10-point. I don't like to waste paper.

Speaker 16 Well, you know me.

Speaker 9 You do like 16-point times New Roman?

Speaker 16 I love paper and I don't want to waste it, but I also have to do my job.

Speaker 9 Sure.

Speaker 16 Maybe I should go double-sided, but then my highlighter gets in the way.

Speaker 9 Oh, yeah. It'd be a problem.
Oh, man. Everything would be highlighted.
You might as well just dip the whole page in yellow ink or something. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 16 So anyway, Jung wrote this book, that book, in 1921 in German and had it translated to English a couple of years later.

Speaker 16 And he created these four categories,

Speaker 16 sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling. Right.

Speaker 16 So those were his four that

Speaker 16 kind of most of these modern tests are based on in some way or another.

Speaker 9 Yeah, and

Speaker 9 it's really almost impossible that I guess we could just save all the criticisms for the end and just pile them on, but it's really tough to talk about this stuff and not like, as you present one fact, talk about the problem with that fact as it relates to modern incarnation.

Speaker 9 What do you think we should do? Should we just save them, like you say?

Speaker 9 Because I can bite my time.

Speaker 16 Yeah, let's save them. Okay.
And then you can just like.

Speaker 9 I'm not even trying, like, I'm not, I'm not going crop circle here. I'm just saying, like, there's just, there's just a lot wrong with this.
But

Speaker 9 even before Jung, who created these, the concept of the modern concept, I should say, of personality types and he created the idea of introvert and extrovert which say what you will about jung and a lot of psychologists have a lot to say about him yeah not necessarily the nicest things to say but introversion and extroversion is so widely accepted yeah inside and out of the field of psychology that i mean if that were his only contribution to the field that's that's enough to to engrave it on your tombstone for sure yeah and each of those um four uh psychological types he was talking about are modified by whether or not you're introverted or extroverted.

Speaker 16 Right. So they all kind of work together to box you in.

Speaker 9 That was like the right. That was the main thing is how you approach life as introvert or extrovert, and everything else is like a sub

Speaker 9 kind of a subsection of that or something.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and one of the issues with this, and I don't think this is part of the criticism, but I was going to say, I thought we were saving him. He was,

Speaker 16 this was based on his ideas. It wasn't like he had all this research and all this data.

Speaker 16 He was a deep thinker and he sat around and

Speaker 16 thought of these things.

Speaker 9 Right, exactly. And then he wrote entire books based on them.
Yeah. But he was a very well-respected psychoanalyst, and he was part of the early movement for psychoanalysis with Freud.

Speaker 9 They were colleagues. Eli Jung was much Junger.

Speaker 9 But they eventually said, I don't like you anymore. We're parting ways.

Speaker 9 But

Speaker 9 as psychoanalysis was really kind of establishing itself, and if you want to know more about that background and the origin of psychoanalysis, go listen to our How PR Works, the live show.

Speaker 9 We talked a lot about that.

Speaker 9 But as this was going on and it was starting to kind of dominate the field of psychology, there was a whole other movement, a parallel movement, that said, you know what?

Speaker 9 We think all that's a little mushy. We like the idea of being able to quantify psychology.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 And so, even before Jung, there were guys like Alfred Binet, who was one of the indirect fathers of the intelligence test, the IQ test,

Speaker 9 a pair of researchers named Gray and Wheelwright,

Speaker 9 and plenty of others who wanted to say, No, no, no, no, you can study psychology, you can study things like the human personality, and you can typify them, you can add numbers, you can quantify this stuff.

Speaker 9 And in doing so, we will prove psychology as a science as well. So, this whole movement to typeify people and put them into convenient,

Speaker 9 almost numerical categories came out of this urgent need to

Speaker 9 establish a scientific basis for psychology.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and Jung, he kind of laid the table for this. And many years later, although not that many,

Speaker 16 there was a woman named Catherine Cook Briggs.

Speaker 16 And she was working on this with her daughter,

Speaker 16 one Isabel Briggs Myers.

Speaker 16 I think you see where this is going.

Speaker 16 And this is post-World War II when women were kind of for the first time really going into the workforce in full and en masse.

Speaker 16 And so they thought, well, maybe we can put together some personality types to find out what kind of jobs these women might be suited for, what types of jobs they might enjoy.

Speaker 16 So they started working together on this. And

Speaker 16 as legend has it, the mom, Catherine Briggs, Cook Briggs, she was doing her thing and then saw Jung's works and said, I got to start over.

Speaker 9 This is the stuff. She had already been working on a personality test.
Yeah. But apparently, according to the legend, threw her work into the fire.
Yeah. Said, I'm starting from scratch.

Speaker 9 She was a voracious reader,

Speaker 9 especially of the psychology, the new psychology books that were coming out of Europe, right?

Speaker 16 She didn't read Jung?

Speaker 9 She did. Well, eventually, but

Speaker 16 it seems like it kind of came along later.

Speaker 9 Well, so, yeah,

Speaker 9 there's kind of a weird discrepancy in the history. And I don't know if it's just it hasn't been covered right or if there is a weird discrepancy, but supposedly she initiated it.

Speaker 9 And so it would have been contemporary or shortly after Jung's psychology or personality types was translated into English in 1923.

Speaker 9 So, but it was her daughter Isabel who really took it and ran with it because of World War II and the need for women in the workplace. Correct.

Speaker 9 So they

Speaker 16 kind of kept some of Jung's stuff, built on that. They kind of stripped some of it away, most notably a lot of the unconscious stuff.

Speaker 16 They might have thought that was a little too weird for the modern American workforce.

Speaker 16 So what they ended up coming up with was the MBTI, Myers-Briggs type indicator. Right.
Very famously.

Speaker 9 Yeah, and they had a publishing arrangement with one group. I can't remember what they were called, but they thought it didn't do very well.

Speaker 9 And then in 1975, they went with another publisher, CPP, and they're the current publishers of the Myers-Briggs type indicator. And since then,

Speaker 9 that's when its ubiquity just really spread, was starting in the 70s.

Speaker 9 And now

Speaker 9 it's basically married to corporate America. Should we take a break? Sure.

Speaker 16 And go get married to corporate America. Yeah.

Speaker 9 As if we aren't already.

Speaker 16 All right, we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit about personality tests in general and then focus in a little more on the MBTI.

Speaker 2 Support for for the show today comes from public.com.

Speaker 4 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 5 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 8 The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and Public gets that.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 9 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there.

Speaker 10 Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 4 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously.

Speaker 15 Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 3 That's public.com/slash SYSK.

Speaker 18 Paid for by Public Investing.

Speaker 20 All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 21 Brokerage services for U.S.-listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.

Speaker 23 Crypto Trading provided by Zero Hash.

Speaker 20 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 29 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 25 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 17 That's right.

Speaker 40 And in the latest season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby studio production in partnership with Argenix, host Martine Hackett explores what it means to reclaim your identity, discover resilience, and cultivate self-advocacy.

Speaker 26 From the frustration of misdiagnosis to the small victories that fuel hope, every story told is meant to unite, uplift, and empower.

Speaker 25 And that inspires us all to take one step closer to being a better advocate and seeing life from a different point of view.

Speaker 41 So if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Speaker 6 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 44 Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about. Your couch.

Speaker 45 Yeah, that thing you nap on, eat on, cry on.

Speaker 44 Turns out that most silfas are basically bacteria playgrounds.

Speaker 15 It's true.

Speaker 45 We looked it up. It's not good.

Speaker 44 But Anibay changes that. It's washable, like fully washable.
Take the covers off, throw them in the machine, boom, clean.

Speaker 45 Also, it's actually affordable, which is surprisingly rare.

Speaker 44 So yeah, if you're going to sit on something every day, maybe don't make it a biohazard. And here's the kicker.
It's not just practical, it's affordable.

Speaker 44 Starting at just $699, you can make your sofa as clean as it is comfy.

Speaker 45 Plus, with their Black Friday sale, you can even get up to 60% off your Anibay sofa right now.

Speaker 44 Because let's be real, you deserve better than a germ factory for a place to rest your head. Check out washable sofas.com now and give your couch the upgrade it's begging for.

Speaker 16 All right, so

Speaker 16 personality tests is just, there are many, many ways you can get evaluated psychologically by a professional. This is just one way.

Speaker 9 You can get your head measured with calipers?

Speaker 16 Back in the day, they did that.

Speaker 9 Give you a bunch of drugs and see what you do. There's a lot of ways.

Speaker 16 But these tests generally, as Grabster points out, falls into a couple of types: projective and objective.

Speaker 16 Projective tests are things like the Rorschach test, where you're shown something, some kind of stimulus, and it's open to interpretation, and you tell them what you think about it, and someone sits back very quietly and taps on a pad of paper and makes an evaluation.

Speaker 9 Very interesting.

Speaker 16 And then objective are more like these personality tests. They're standardized assessments that people use.

Speaker 16 And while it's subjective what you put down, they are then evaluated again by a professional.

Speaker 9 Right. But ultimately, that objective name is a bit of a misnomer because on the end of it, it's still interpreted by a person,

Speaker 9 which therefore makes it subjective. Right.
And which,

Speaker 9 depending on who you ask, is the fatal flaw of all personality tests.

Speaker 16 It should be the like a good song from the 70s had a little parenthetical at the end of the title. Right.
It should just say subjective also.

Speaker 9 Right.

Speaker 16 In parentheses.

Speaker 9 Baby.

Speaker 16 So the big five are, and this is the big five, I get the feeling, are the psychological tests that

Speaker 16 legit psychologists are more in favor of over something like the MBTI. Is that right?

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's not just there's tests to suss out the big five. The big five are the personality types that the field of psychology has come up with.

Speaker 16 Well, yeah, but the tests that you utilize that, they kind of think are more legit than the MBTI.

Speaker 9 Yeah, there's not a psychologist alive who uses the MBTI in their regular practice. Oh, I bet there are.

Speaker 9 Not that are speaking up.

Speaker 16 I guarantee you there's someone out there. Yeah.
Sure.

Speaker 9 It's a freewheeling freewheeling type

Speaker 16 or she

Speaker 16 uh so the big five are extroversion agreeableness openness to experience uh conscientiousness and neuroticism right sounds like it could be like a dating site thing that you fill out it's funny every time i see or hear the word neuroticism a bell goes off in my head like ding

Speaker 16 Just a silent bell? Yeah.

Speaker 9 I don't know what that means. I don't either, but it draws my attention to it.

Speaker 16 So some of these tests,

Speaker 16 I mean, it depends on what it is. They might not all call them by those exact words, but they're generally using, they call them, you know, like I said, the big five.

Speaker 9 Yeah, and I was, I was looking into that big five and

Speaker 9 this site, I can't remember what it was called, but they were basically, they were going over it. Like extroversion is, again, just part of the scientific literature at this point.

Speaker 9 Agreeableness is like whether you're how sympathetic or kind or affectionate you are.

Speaker 9 Conscientiousness is are you organized? Are you thorough? Are you the type who shows up on time? That kind of thing.

Speaker 9 Neuroticism, which is sometimes called emotional stability.

Speaker 9 How tense are you? How moody? How anxious?

Speaker 9 Ding.

Speaker 9 And then like openness to experience, right? Yeah. They sometimes call that intellect slash imagination.
Do you have wide interests? Are you an imaginative person? Are you insightful?

Speaker 9 And this site really went to a lot of pains pains to point out that what you would call these things, the big five personality traits, are, as far as a psychologist is concerned, just one dimension of you, the human being.

Speaker 9 And that to get a clearer picture of you, they would also need to study your motivations, your emotions, your attitudes, your abilities, your self-concepts, your social roles, autobiographical memories, your life stories.

Speaker 9 And if you start to put all these things together, then you can start to kind of approximate the person's personality yeah but it would just it takes a lot of study of an individual and these different components that make up their personality to get a clear picture so i don't think there are any psychologists walking around saying oh the big five personality types are like the beginning and end of a personality right it's just if you put them together you have a just a sketch of somebody's personality and you you should go much deeper if you're analyzing someone.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I think I used to think this stuff was a lot neater when when I was younger.

Speaker 16 And now it kind of gives me a little anxiety.

Speaker 9 Oh, yeah?

Speaker 16 Yeah, like I just, I don't know, as far as doing this to myself, and I still enjoy therapy, like that's different. But

Speaker 16 I don't know, because every single one of these, like my answer would be, well, it depends.

Speaker 9 Well, I think also, though,

Speaker 9 and I don't mean to speak for you, but one of the issues that

Speaker 9 comes up for me is.

Speaker 9 If somebody goes to you and says, you know,

Speaker 9 you rate pretty high on the spectrum of neuroticism,

Speaker 9 Like, that's obviously, you're going to obsess about that kind of stuff, especially if they're right.

Speaker 16 It can make you neurotic.

Speaker 9 But yeah, it's a boundary that somebody has just established for you that you may need feel the need to stay in because that's the boundary that you're bound by, whether you are or not.

Speaker 16 Like, this is my box. Right.

Speaker 9 And I'll live in it. That would be the reason it raises anxiety for me.

Speaker 16 Yeah. Well, my whole thing, like I said, though, is just depends.

Speaker 16 Every single question that I would get asked, well, well not everyone sometimes i'm pretty like set on something but usually i'd say i don't know depends on the scenario right am i uh more prone in a crowd to do x or y maybe right maybe not depends on my mood so one one with these other personality tests and in the whole field in psychology of um studying

Speaker 9 traits, personality traits in a quantitative way is called psychometrics. Yeah.

Speaker 9 So with these tests, the more sophisticated ones, if they had a test taker like you, they're designed to get around that.

Speaker 9 So, they're going to ask a bunch of different questions about the same thing, but in different ways, coming from different directions, so that eventually, if you put all of them together and run them through a statistical analysis, they're actually going to come up with your genuine answer, which is kind of one way or another.

Speaker 9 The other way that they get around this

Speaker 9 kind of hemming and hawing, I guess,

Speaker 9 is

Speaker 9 by placing it on a spectrum, you're not being lumped into one category or another.

Speaker 9 It's here's one end of the spectrum, here's the other end of the spectrum, and based on your answers, you fall somewhere around the middle, like almost everybody does.

Speaker 9 If you look at psychometric tests, a legitimate psychometric test is going to basically look like a bell curve, where most people are going to be distributed toward the middle.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that's I think what that's why it gives me anxiety. It's like, what's the point?

Speaker 16 Don't box me in.

Speaker 9 It's a great question.

Speaker 16 Well, I think the second half of this is a lot of what's the point. Yeah.
You know?

Speaker 16 So looking, speaking on these tests to see if it's actually, if there is a point, if it's a valid thing to do,

Speaker 16 there are a couple of measures that one must look at and that psychologists do look at.

Speaker 16 Is it valid and is it reliable? Valid in the sense that it really is a pretty good reflection of Josh or Chuck or whoever. And is it reliable?

Speaker 16 So if we take this test tomorrow or a different test that's

Speaker 16 just, you know, maybe different questions, will it

Speaker 16 reproduce the same result? Right.

Speaker 16 And that's a big deal. Like if you're talking science and you're trying to have a foundation that says, no, this is science.
It's not just a bunch of

Speaker 16 questions and hippy-dippy questions that we're asking.

Speaker 16 If you really want real data and science behind it, you have to be able to reproduce it. Right.

Speaker 9 One of the other things, too, that these tests are designed to do is to weed out fakers. Right.
We'll talk a lot more about the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,

Speaker 9 which is one of the big ones. Yes.
Probably the most taken personality test in the world.

Speaker 9 And it has a lot of built-in mechanisms and apparently is really good at detecting people who are faking.

Speaker 9 They're faking a mental illness or who are trying to pretend that they aren't suffering from a mental illness.

Speaker 9 It's really good at detecting that because it's so exhaustive.

Speaker 9 And using statistical analysis, if somebody is skewed really far one way or skewed really far the other, they're just immediately exposed as

Speaker 9 gaming the test as best they can.

Speaker 16 Yeah. And one way they do that, which is in its own way, its own little psychology experiment, at least, is by telling you, we have ways.
Right. Like you will be rooted out and we will know.
Exactly.

Speaker 16 So they tell people that beforehand, so you're more inclined to just be like, all right, well, screw it. I'll tell the truth.
Right.

Speaker 9 Especially when they're sitting there like clearing the air out of a syringe.

Speaker 16 That's creepy.

Speaker 9 It is. All right.

Speaker 16 So let's get back to CPP and the MBTI.

Speaker 16 The Consulting

Speaker 9 Psychologists Press. Right.

Speaker 16 And the Myers-Briggs. We'll just keep calling it a test, even though they they say it's not a test.

Speaker 9 It's a type inventory. Yeah.

Speaker 16 So we'll just go ahead and break down the deal here. There are

Speaker 16 the object is to sort you into one of 16 different types, personality types,

Speaker 16 based on which side of four pairs or dichotomies that you're going to fall on. And those are

Speaker 16 at the very base, you're either introverted or extroverted, like we said, E or I,

Speaker 16 sensing or intuition, S and N.

Speaker 16 And these words, they sound a little confusing. Like, what the heck does a sensing person mean? Yeah.
It means you like

Speaker 16 the big data and empirical data and a lot of information.

Speaker 9 Right. Whereas intuition is like you just go with your gut.
That's how you prefer to be. Correct.
Right.

Speaker 16 The next we have thinking and feeling.

Speaker 16 Thinking being more focused on logic.

Speaker 16 Did I say logic?

Speaker 9 With a T? Sure.

Speaker 16 And objectivity. And then if you're feeling, you're going to be

Speaker 16 more interested in relationships and harmony among your group.

Speaker 9 Those two are pretty straightforward. Yeah, I think so.
And then lastly, there's judging and perceiving.

Speaker 9 That's a dichotomy. Judging is where

Speaker 9 you prefer schedules. You prefer

Speaker 9 decisiveness. That's how you kind of approach life.

Speaker 9 And perceiving is where you're just kind of like, whatever. Yeah, I'm not too worried about it.

Speaker 9 That's almost kind of like the difference between the type A and type B personalities, which, by the way, was made up by a pair of cardiologists

Speaker 9 whose work was later secretly funded by the tobacco industry, who were looking for anything to explain heart attacks besides smoking.

Speaker 9 So they funded type A and type B personality research for years. Interesting.
Yeah, it really is. There's a, just as an aside, there's a really interesting price,

Speaker 9 I think, yeah, priceonomics

Speaker 9 article.

Speaker 16 On type A and type B?

Speaker 9 Yeah, just look it up. I don't remember the name.

Speaker 37 All right.

Speaker 16 So when you sit down to take one of these not tests with a series of questions that you answer.

Speaker 9 I think they call them instruments, by the way.

Speaker 9 Psychometric instruments.

Speaker 16 Which are basically a series of questions on a piece of paper.

Speaker 9 Man, sounds like a test.

Speaker 16 They will say things like,

Speaker 16 Ed has some good examples here. When you go on a trip, do you want everything planned out in advance or or would you rather just take each day as it comes and do whatever you feel like?

Speaker 16 Pretty straightforward kind of stuff.

Speaker 16 And then they also have things like word pairs, just to see literally what word you like better.

Speaker 16 Like

Speaker 16 compassion, foresight. Like which word do you like better?

Speaker 9 Carrots or fruit?

Speaker 9 Fruit. Fruit.
Yeah. It's just prettier.
It is.

Speaker 9 So I'm looking back here. I just want to say, so

Speaker 9 I think.

Speaker 9 you're trying to figure out what you were yeah i think e n fp maybe

Speaker 9 i think that's what i was we weren't the same thing i don't remember yumi and i got the same thing she found an old email but she forgot to tell me what we were oh really i i really

Speaker 9 i don't know problem is would we still be the same today

Speaker 16 Yeah, and I think, if I'm not mistaken, didn't we have this up on a big board in the office for a while?

Speaker 9 So, yeah.

Speaker 16 That seems like a, Jerry's nodding. That seems like a breach of protocol.
Sure. Like privacy.

Speaker 9 Yeah. Well, again, being forced at gunpoint to do it was just from the start.

Speaker 16 I remember it was kind of fun. I had a fun day.

Speaker 9 We'll talk about that as well.

Speaker 16 So it's going to cost you if you just do this as a single individual,

Speaker 16 not meaning not married, but just a person, about 50 bucks.

Speaker 16 Although they should charge more if you're married. It's a more complex test.

Speaker 16 About 50 bucks. If you want an hour of feedback, that'll cost you an extra hundred.

Speaker 16 And if you want a a career report all typed up, that'll be $16.95. Yeah.

Speaker 16 And if you, this is $1,500 for an on-site training class.

Speaker 9 Is that like what we had? So

Speaker 9 this is not very well explained. If you want to administer the Myers-Briggs personality or type inventory,

Speaker 9 you can get certified. It's a four-day training course.
Oh, okay. You pay $1,500 to $1,600.

Speaker 16 Oh, that's what that is.

Speaker 9 You cannot legally administer this test, or you're infringing on their copyrights unless you are certified by CPP to do this.

Speaker 16 We should do it with one another on the air and risk a lawsuit.

Speaker 9 Yeah. Well, you probably got a suit already with that one question you asked out loud.
Which one?

Speaker 16 Oh, just the one?

Speaker 9 Yeah, when you go on a trip, do you want everything planned out in advance?

Speaker 16 I just made that up.

Speaker 9 Oh, good job. Good job.

Speaker 16 I got that from Travelocity.

Speaker 9 Nice. Okay.
Yeah, that little gnome whispered it in your ear. That's right.
But so you would go and get certified, and then now you can go around to businesses and say, Hey,

Speaker 9 do you want to know more about your employees? You want to know who's good at what?

Speaker 9 Let me come give the Myers-Briggs type inventory to your

Speaker 9 employees, and

Speaker 9 it'll be wonderful, right? So, that's how the whole process goes. You pay to become certified, and then you go become something of an evangelist for the Myers-Briggs test, and you sell the test.

Speaker 9 You basically become a salesman as well.

Speaker 9 It's a, it's a very interesting

Speaker 9 dynamic that they have going. That is.

Speaker 16 It's a good word. Dynamic.

Speaker 16 They want to point out that

Speaker 16 the person taking the test is the expert.

Speaker 16 And they also use this metaphor of handedness, which I didn't fully understand.

Speaker 16 They say things like, it feels more comfortable to sign your name with your dominant hand, but technically you can sign with your non-dominant hand if you need to. Right.

Speaker 16 I'm not sure what they're trying to prove there.

Speaker 9 They're trying to say that despite the MBTI

Speaker 9 pigeonholing you fully in one category or another rather than on a spectrum, they're saying that category that it's pigeonholing you into is actually just your preference. It's not you specifically.

Speaker 9 It's just your inclined predisposition. Yeah.
You tend to be an extrovert, but of course, everybody likes their own personal alone time.

Speaker 9 So yeah, you're going to be an introvert once in a while, but you're an extrovert more than other times.

Speaker 16 Yeah, because I can't sign my name with my left hand.

Speaker 16 I didn't like that analogy because it literally can barely hold a pen with my left hand. I'm seeing you're doing it right now.

Speaker 9 Wow, that was pretty bad.

Speaker 16 If I tried to do it, it would look like a

Speaker 16 three-year-old with arthritis has tried to scribble it out.

Speaker 9 Mine looks like Unum.

Speaker 9 Unum?

Speaker 9 UDM. Udom? Yeah, Udum.
It's my signature with my left hand.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 16 they do try and point out, like you said, that

Speaker 16 it's interesting because they box you in, but at the same time, they're saying, but, you know,

Speaker 16 like you said, it's just predisposition. Don't really think of it about you being this type of person, even though you are an ENFB.
Right.

Speaker 16 Like you said, it was earlier, it was almost numbered. I mean, it is.
It's lettered.

Speaker 9 Mart.

Speaker 9 It's just a different way of quantifying it. Yeah.

Speaker 9 But without numbers. All right, you want to take a break? And then come back and maybe do a little criticism? Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Support for the show today comes from public.com.

Speaker 4 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 5 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 8 The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and Public gets that.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 9 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there.

Speaker 10 Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 4 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously.

Speaker 15 Go to public.com/slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 3 That's public.com/slash SYSK.

Speaker 18 Paid for by Public Investing.

Speaker 20 All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 21 Brokerage services for U.S.

Speaker 23 listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA, and SIPC. Crypto Trading provided by Zero Hash.

Speaker 20 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 29 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 25 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 17 That's right.

Speaker 40 And in the latest season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby studio production in partnership with Arginix, host Martine Hackett explores what it means to reclaim your identity, discover resilience, and cultivate self-advocacy.

Speaker 26 From the frustration of misdiagnosis to the small victories that fuel hope, every story told is meant to unite, uplift, and empower.

Speaker 25 And that inspires us all to take one step closer to being a better advocate and seeing life from a different point of view.

Speaker 42 So if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Speaker 6 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 44 Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about. Your couch.

Speaker 45 Yeah, that thing you nap on, eat on, cry on.

Speaker 44 Turns out that most silfas are basically bacteria playgrounds.

Speaker 45 It's true. We looked it up.

Speaker 46 It's not good.

Speaker 44 But Anibay changes that. It's washable, like fully washable.
Take the covers off, throw them in the machine, boom, clean.

Speaker 45 Also, it's actually affordable, which is surprisingly rare.

Speaker 44 So yeah, if you're gonna sit on something every day, maybe don't make it a biohazard. And here's the kicker, it's not just practical, it's affordable.

Speaker 44 Starting at just $699, you can make your sofa as clean as it is comfy.

Speaker 45 Plus, with their Black Friday sale, you can even get up to 60% off your Anibay sofa right now.

Speaker 44 Because let's be real. You deserve better than a germ factory for a place to rest your head.
Check out washable sofas.com now and give your couch the upgrade it's begging for.

Speaker 9 All right, Chuck, like I said, it's kind of a pastime in the United States to

Speaker 9 tee off on the Myers-Briggs type inventory.

Speaker 16 Yeah, this is not us here. This is.

Speaker 9 No, this is us talking about other people teeing off on it.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's widely been criticized over the years from psychologists and,

Speaker 16 well,

Speaker 16 amateur

Speaker 16 know-nothings like us.

Speaker 9 Sure.

Speaker 16 One of the big criticisms is that companies use this stuff

Speaker 16 in hiring and firing and promoting.

Speaker 9 But even the Myers-Briggs people, CPP, say, like, don't do that.

Speaker 16 Well, I know, but they say that, but

Speaker 16 then don't go to an office and get hired by a corporation to administer it. Right.

Speaker 9 Or go sell your services, you know. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 Agreed. And that's part of the problem.

Speaker 9 To me,

Speaker 9 that is more

Speaker 9 the corporation's fault.

Speaker 9 Well, sure. Like if you have an HR person who's like a die-hard believer in the MBTI and will hire or fire somebody based on their MBTI type,

Speaker 9 fire that person. Yeah.
Because you have a real dum-dum on your hands. They're a DD.
And they should not be responsible for people's livelihoods. Yeah.

Speaker 9 Even, I don't think they would put it quite in those terms, but even the Myers-Briggs people say, like, you shouldn't use this for hiring or firing. And yet, yes, some people do.

Speaker 9 Some people swear by this. The impression that I have is that the Myers-Briggs people tend to think of this as more like a team building exercise.
Right.

Speaker 9 Or where, like, a certified MBTI administrator can come to your place, get all your employees together, and they find out like all their personality types.

Speaker 9 And by the way, there's not a single negative personality type, and all personality types are equal. Sure.
So everybody gets a participant ribbon in the form of their personality type.

Speaker 9 But at the same time, and this seems to be the crux, at the same time, everybody's finding out like, oh, you're a little different than me, and I'm a little different than you.

Speaker 9 And we all have differences and different perspectives. So let's celebrate that and let's respect one another's differences.

Speaker 9 And there is the actual point from what I understand of the Myers-Briggs type inventory and taking it in a corporate setting.

Speaker 16 That's what stands out to me as what happened with us was

Speaker 16 I remember it kind of being a fun day.

Speaker 9 And we were like Tootsie Rolls.

Speaker 16 Yeah, we all goofed off and had a good time.

Speaker 16 And the person leading it, if they're good at what they do, which this person was, is always, you know, it's always kind of a fun person and cracking jokes. And they don't take it too seriously.

Speaker 16 None of us took it too seriously.

Speaker 16 And we all had a good time. And

Speaker 16 it was very much like a team-building thing.

Speaker 9 Right. So as long as there's like a wink, wink, nudge, nudge kind of thing.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 And the people who take it actually take it seriously or taken off to the side by their HR rep to say, like, no, this is a little less serious than you're taking it, then it's fine.

Speaker 9 But yes, once you start deciding people's fate based on this, then you have real problems.

Speaker 9 Because as just about anybody will tell you, the Myers-Briggs type inventory is based at best on some shaky science, if at all.

Speaker 9 If you go back to the very beginning, it's based on the theories of Carl Jung, which have never been based on science. They were basically personal observations by Jung.

Speaker 9 And the psychology community has disavowed Jung in large part. So therefore, anything based on his teachings and theories is by proxy disavowed as well.

Speaker 9 But if that weren't enough, psychology as a field loves going after the Myers-Briggs type inventory. It just loves it as totally baseless scientifically.

Speaker 16 All right. So, we've got

Speaker 16 shouldn't use it to hire and fire in corporations or give promotions. Right.
We have not based on real science and

Speaker 16 scientific data. Right.

Speaker 16 These four dichotomies are problematic in and of themselves because

Speaker 16 everyone is on a spectrum. You can't say like,

Speaker 16 you know, you answered these 10 questions, so you're either this or you're that.

Speaker 16 And when one of the rebuttals, because I think Ed interviewed someone from CPP, right?

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 16 One of the rebuttals about being a non-repeatable

Speaker 16 experiment of sorts is like, hey, yesterday I was an ENFP and today I'm this. They'll say, well, you know what?

Speaker 16 If you had different answers, that means you were sort of on the cusp, right there in that center line on some of these questions.

Speaker 16 And you might have just leapt over to that other side, which means you're basically kind of down the center. Yet they don't have a categorization for down the center.

Speaker 9 Yeah, because depending on, as Ed puts it, you could answer all 24 questions on the feeling side. Yeah.

Speaker 9 And you're going to get the same result as somebody who answered 11 questions for thinking and 13 questions for feeling. Right.
Same thing. You're still both an F

Speaker 9 in that respect. And I saw elsewhere it put like if the Myers-Briggs test measured height, you would either be tall or short.
Yeah. You could say, well, actually, I'm right there in the middle.

Speaker 9 And they'd be like, well, that's short. Right.
Or for you, it's short. For the guy who is the same exact height, they're tall.

Speaker 16 Right. And trust me, nobody that's 5'10 likes to be considered short.
Right. I can say that from experience.
Because you're not.

Speaker 9 You're average. I'm average.
Right. So being average.

Speaker 9 The fact that there isn't a spectrum is one thing that really makes it in stark contrast of

Speaker 9 other

Speaker 9 much more widely accepted psychometric instruments. For sure.

Speaker 16 It also points out, too, the Grabster, that the construction of the

Speaker 16 instrument itself is problematic

Speaker 16 because, one, like we talked about, it's self-reporting. Anytime you're self-reporting, there's going to be some weird bias in there.
Sure. It's just almost impossible to avoid 100%.
That's right.

Speaker 16 And the other one is that

Speaker 16 he says a couple of these dichotomies are entangled, which I never really thought about that, but that's a pretty good point. Yeah.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 16 judging perceiving scale are correlated with answers on the sensing intuition scale. And if you like, those should be separated out for sure.
For sure. I don't know why why they don't.

Speaker 9 I don't either. You know? Because they've really put a lot of work into this.
Yeah.

Speaker 16 I mean, it's not baked in stone from the 1940s and 50s and 60s, is it?

Speaker 9 No, it's not. And even while they were creating, it was an ongoing, exhaustive process that

Speaker 9 Mrs. Briggs and Mrs.
Myers engaged in.

Speaker 16 Yeah, we don't want to give, they spent decades on this. Yes.
It wasn't like something they threw together.

Speaker 9 No, the problem is, is they

Speaker 9 did it backwards.

Speaker 9 They came came up with the personality types and then set about creating the test that would detect these personality types rather than going out and testing people, seeing what personality types emerged, and then figuring out a test to find that in other people.

Speaker 9 They did it backwards. That's a good point.
It was based on Jung, but it was not for lack of trying.

Speaker 9 Like, as a matter of fact, one of the first things they did after they started to really establish the test was they managed to administer it to like 5,000 George Washington University medical students.

Speaker 9 And they took those results and tracked the students to see what fields of medicine they went in. They like really worked on this.
I read an article in the Washington Post where

Speaker 9 this, I think Isabel

Speaker 9 Myers' son

Speaker 9 remembers their vacations were basically like fact-finding missions all around the country. Like they would go administer tests.
Like everything was about this test. And I worked on it for decades.

Speaker 9 So yeah, the problem is it was just, it's just not based on science. They didn't follow the scientific method.
Yeah. So,

Speaker 9 science kind of poo-poos the MBTI. But wait, wait, wait.
Get back here.

Speaker 9 Because a lot of these criticisms fall just as easily on every other psychometric test around.

Speaker 16 Well, yeah, and that's one of the things that I can't remember who was interviewed in here, but in one of those other articles you sent, one of the

Speaker 16 Myers, or I don't know if it was,

Speaker 16 or maybe it was a Rorschach

Speaker 16 defender

Speaker 16 said, you know, like everyone, yeah, it was Rorschach, like everyone's always picking on Rorschach when all of these psychological tests are,

Speaker 16 you know, subject to criticism.

Speaker 9 They are, you know, I think it's really easy for to tee off on Rorschach as well, because, I mean, we're talking ink plots, man. It is the epitome of subjective self-reporting.

Speaker 9 You're saying, I, let's see, in this one, I see mom's boobs.

Speaker 9 Yeah, mom's boobs in that one, too.

Speaker 9 Dad's boobs. Right, exactly.
So, and then from that, it was strictly up to

Speaker 9 initially Rorschach, who I think came up with this test in 1915, 1917.

Speaker 16 What's the name Herman?

Speaker 9 I think so. He's a Swiss psychiatrist.

Speaker 16 Herman Rorschach.

Speaker 9 It was initially up to him and then later on his followers to interpret this, which is basically like interpreting dreams. Yeah.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 so subjective. Totally subjective from beginning to end.
And then in, I think, 1975, a guy at Bowling Green State University, which is right outside of Toledo,

Speaker 9 came up with this,

Speaker 9 a really exhaustive interpretive test that sought to quantify Rorschach answers.

Speaker 16 Yeah, John Exner. Yeah.
And it was a test called the Comprehensive System, 140 components. And

Speaker 16 in this article you sent, they said that Rorschach was probably going away had it not been for Exner's accompaniment with this other process.

Speaker 9 Right. And even today, he's got an institute in Asheville that's dedicated to

Speaker 9 the Rorschach test, right? So one thing I've noticed from researching this is each of these personality inventories has like its adherents and its detractors.

Speaker 9 And just judging from the outside, it looks a lot like cults gathered around their various idols, right?

Speaker 9 There's like the original figurehead who came up with it, and everybody worships them, and he's attacked by these other followers who have a very similar figurehead.

Speaker 9 They came up with something very similar, but it's just different enough that there's a huge chasm between the two, and there's a lot of dogma surrounding it.

Speaker 9 But the Rorschach test in particular is apparently well known to give wildly inaccurate results. I took one today.

Speaker 16 Did you? Online. How'd you do? I got two out of ten, which means I was only two

Speaker 16 away, whatever that means, from being labeled like a psychotic. So yeah, there's a four out of ten, I think.

Speaker 9 There's a oh, really? I think that's what it said. Yeah.
Wow, that's close.

Speaker 16 I mean, this is an online test. I don't know if it's like how true it was to the original.
I gotcha. Or maybe the original.

Speaker 9 Who knows? Could be. And then they have an algorithm that runs the analysis.

Speaker 16 I kept seeing all kinds of things when I looked at it and I've never done an inkblot test I would say oh that looks like a bat and then I was like no it's like two bunnies and then no it looks like a cool Mardi Gras mask did it did they move to you did you see colors well some of them were colored oh okay most of them were black and they had a the one I took had a had a one and a two like what do you see and what's like a secondary thing that you see right So, you know, supposedly people who are supporters of the Rorschach test say, no, man, there's, we don't know how it's working, but if you see movement in the Rorschach ink blots, it's suggestive of depression or something like that.

Speaker 9 And they say statistically it's correlated. But like I was saying, it's also notorious for giving incorrect results.

Speaker 16 Yeah, like saying you have a mental illness. Right.

Speaker 9 Okay. So there was a study in 2000 that was given to like 100.

Speaker 9 mentally sound elementary school kids. Yeah.
And some like high percentage of them came back as borderline psychotic because of the Rorschach test, right? And it's hilarious to hear stories like that.

Speaker 9 Like, I'm laughing inside right now, but um,

Speaker 9 the problem is, is you're at the very least being labeled as psychotic, sure, not a label you want in society, no, and it was because of this inkblot test that's a hundred years old, yeah.

Speaker 9 And then, secondly, these tests are also being submitted and accepted as evidence in criminal trials, that's the biggest part, child custody cases. Yes.
Civil cases.

Speaker 16 They're still given real weight and lives are changed and ruined based on looking at 100-year-old inkblots. Yes.
And a person's subjective analysis of that.

Speaker 9 That's not okay.

Speaker 16 No, this Howard Garb in this one article you sent, he's a co-author of What's Wrong with the Rorschach, and he is head of psychology, or at least at the time of this article, he may still be, head of psychological testing for the Air Force.

Speaker 16 He said that even with Exner's comprehensive system, he said only 10% of his system even meets the most basic scientific standards. And

Speaker 16 they did examine data of over 30 different Rorschach studies, and he said they all have a tendency to label healthy people mentally ill.

Speaker 16 And if you're trying to get custody of your kid or if you are on trial as a criminal, like it's just...

Speaker 16 That's the last thing you need

Speaker 16 is somebody's subjective opinion of, is it a bunny or is it a bat?

Speaker 9 Oh, he said a bat. Take that kid, you know, quick.

Speaker 16 The kid's like, I like bunnies.

Speaker 9 Another one that we have to talk about is the MMPI, now the MMPI-2. I think as of 2012, they revised it dramatically.

Speaker 16 Yeah, does this one, is that right? It has over 500 questions.

Speaker 9 Yeah. Wow.
Some of them originally were about like your bowel movements. Okay.

Speaker 9 Really nutso

Speaker 9 questions that supposedly really got to the heart of whether you were mentally disturbed or not, right? Yes.

Speaker 9 And it was created at the University of Minnesota in the 40s by a psychiatrist and a neurologist, I believe. And they hit upon a pretty clever idea.

Speaker 9 They said, we're not going to interpret the results, right? And say, you know, oh, this person said that they do feel like smashing something sometimes. Yeah.
And that means this.

Speaker 9 Instead, we're going to come up with this test of like 504 questions and we're going to give it to the patient or the family and staff of a mental hospital who we're sure are sane and we're gonna take their answers and they're gonna become our control group our baseline Yeah, so then anybody who takes this test we're gonna compare the test takers answers to the sane control groups answers and you know, depending on how it relates to the same control group, they're either mentally ill or not.

Speaker 16 You better have gotten that control group right.

Speaker 9 Well, that's the thing.

Speaker 16 To begin with.

Speaker 9 So a group of like family and friends in Minnesota is the picture of sanity throughout the world is the basis of this test. That's a huge problem with it to begin with.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 But apparently a lot of people say like, no, it really has, it does a pretty good job of

Speaker 9 sussing out mental illness. Yeah.

Speaker 9 It's also really good at detecting

Speaker 9 faking one way or the other. Yeah.

Speaker 9 But it's too invasive. And when companies use it for hiring and firing, it's way too invasive.
And apparently lawsuits have been filed against companies for using it.

Speaker 16 Well, I think that

Speaker 16 most people are far more

Speaker 16 troubled than they ever let on in life. Sure.
And

Speaker 16 part of

Speaker 16 success in life

Speaker 16 comes down to how good you are at at covering that up or hiding it or dealing with it and processing it.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that's it. Coming to terms with it.

Speaker 16 It's just to find a core group that are quote unquote sane, normal people.

Speaker 9 Right.

Speaker 16 It's just, you're starting off with a problem, if you ask me.

Speaker 9 A faulty premise, right?

Speaker 16 Yeah. It just, there's no way.
Like everyone has their issues. They're deep, dark

Speaker 16 things at their brain that they don't want anyone to know. Sometimes even the people closest to them don't even know.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 And actually,

Speaker 9 you're in agreement with this a sociologist named William White, who criticized the MMPI

Speaker 9 as a tool that helped to create and perpetuate the oppressive groupthink of mid-century organization man. Yeah.
Where it's basically like, here is what we think is normal.

Speaker 9 Anything outside of that is abnormal. And we're not going to hire you because you don't fit into this picture of normalcy, which is basically white crew-cut Minnesota

Speaker 9 from the 40s. Right.
That's the picture of normalcy. That's highly debatable.

Speaker 16 The other thing I thought was interesting is a lot of skeptics and critics point to things like the MBTI

Speaker 16 and saying

Speaker 16 this is just like astrology.

Speaker 16 It isn't really no different than reading your horoscope because it's all positive psychology.

Speaker 16 At the end of a Myers-Briggs

Speaker 16 non-test,

Speaker 16 no one walks away feeling bad, usually. It's all sort of positive wording and like, like, this is what you are.
You're just this.

Speaker 9 So kind of don't worry about it.

Speaker 16 The same way you read your horoscope in a given day. I mean, how many horoscopes say, like,

Speaker 16 today you will be prone to depression and wonder what it's all about. Right.

Speaker 9 Maybe you should work on your core character because people don't like being around you that much. You don't hear that kind of stuff.
No. But that taps into what's called the Forer Effect, F-O-R-E-R.

Speaker 9 There was a psychiatrist named Bertram Forer.

Speaker 16 Oh, this is so interesting.

Speaker 9 He, he, well, take it. It's pretty interesting stuff.

Speaker 16 Well, I mean, basically, didn't he give the same, he had people take these tests and then gave all of the people the exact same assessment,

Speaker 16 but telling everyone it was tailored for them, their own personality assessment. And I think the people who just thought it was favorable were like, this is great.

Speaker 9 Well, it was favorable. He actually called it from daily horoscopes.

Speaker 16 Well, yeah, but what were they responding positively to? Well, it was whether or not they wanted to to feel that way about the class.

Speaker 9 No, it was a positive assessment. There was nothing negative in there.
So it was all positive stuff, like you have a lot of unused potential, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 9 Stuff people wanted to identify with, right? So the more flattering it was, the more likely the people were to say, this is an accurate assessment of me. Oh, okay.

Speaker 9 So despite the fact that it was the same one given to the entire class, he took their answers and threw them out and said, here's your assessment. It's the same one for everybody.
That's about right.

Speaker 9 It got like an 85% accuracy from the class as a whole.

Speaker 16 Well, that's what I wondered. It was about the 15%.
Were those people just super honest? Maybe. And like, no, this really.

Speaker 9 No, people actually don't like being around me. I'm using all of my potential and they still don't like me.

Speaker 16 Yeah, that's what I couldn't figure out. But I guess that makes sense.
There are people out there that are, I think I would be one of those that would be like, this isn't right.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 16 I'm not like that. Sure.

Speaker 9 You got anything else? I think not.

Speaker 16 This is a good one. We've been wanting to do this for a while.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 This is a special request by me.

Speaker 16 And others.

Speaker 9 If you want to know more about personality tests, well, you can go take them online. They're kind of huge right now.

Speaker 9 Find out what kind of

Speaker 9 hobbit you are.

Speaker 9 I don't know.

Speaker 16 What box do you live in?

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 9 And in the meantime, you can type personality tests in the search bar at house to work.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 16 The only thing that should live in a box is

Speaker 16 temporary housing for a pet frog.

Speaker 9 That's not bad. Or the stuff you find in a tree hole that Boo Radley left for you.
Yeah, that can live in a box.

Speaker 16 Hey guys, feel compelled to write you today to tell you how grateful I am for your show and praise your good work.

Speaker 16 Recently became a listener and I'm working my way through the entire archive. I think a lot of folks might be able to relate to this.

Speaker 16 Until recently, I found out I found it really hard to relax and suffer with anxiety.

Speaker 16 Two months ago, I read an article basically pointing out how our obsession with being productive and associated guilt is a modern phenomenon um i think that for sure you know yep although i had heard this before something really clicked in my head so i decided to abandon guilt and embrace relaxation taking control of my own stress levels you guys have been a big part of this i have taken the time to slowly potter around my flat, go for walks while listening and learning to your fascinating podcast.

Speaker 16 And they've lifted my mood. I feel mentally healthier than I ever have before.
Nice.

Speaker 16 Although the content of what you discuss might not always be positive, the way in which you explain them and your own views personally revive my hope in humanity.

Speaker 9 That is ridiculously flattering.

Speaker 16 Isn't that nice? Yeah. I guess I should also mention that a big part of my tackling anxiety levels has been to abandon watching television.

Speaker 9 And fistfuls of psychotropic drugs.

Speaker 16 I would be really interested to know if there's been any research conducted into the effect TV has upon our lives. Oh, I'm sure there has been.
Sure.

Speaker 16 I haven't owned a TV for many years, but my partner has since subscribed subscribed to an online provider. And I realize how watching TV has not helped my anxiety.

Speaker 16 I also remember reading that after TVs became mainstream in Bhutan, their crime rate went up something like 700%.

Speaker 16 Might prove an interesting topic for a future show. Yeah.
Anyway, sincerely grateful. Keep it up.
I am now recommending your shows to as many people as I can. Big love from the UK, Mac.

Speaker 9 Thanks a lot, Mac. That was great.
We hear from a lot of people, actually, who say that we help them with their anxiety. No idea how, but it doesn't matter.
So thank you. Yep.
Yep.

Speaker 9 If you want to get in touch with us like Mac did, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 2 Support for the show today comes from Public.com.

Speaker 4 You're thoughtful about where your money goes.

Speaker 5 You've got core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side.

Speaker 8 The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and public gets that.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

Speaker 9 Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there.

Speaker 10 Plus, an industry-leading 3.6% APY high-yield cash account.

Speaker 13 Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously.

Speaker 15 Go to public.com slash SYSK and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.

Speaker 3 That's public.com/slash SYSK.

Speaker 18 Paid for by Public Investing.

Speaker 20 All investing involves risk of loss, including loss of principal.

Speaker 21 Brokerage services for U.S.

Speaker 23 listed registered securities, options, and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Crypto trading provided by ZeroHash.

Speaker 20 Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures.

Speaker 29 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 25 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 25 Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, in partnership with Argenix, explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Speaker 29 Listen to untold stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 11 Here with one last reminder to keep you off the naughty list this holiday season, stuff your stockings, your pantry, your gift closet, anywhere you can with Duracell batteries.

Speaker 30 Because there's nothing worse than opening a gift on Christmas morning and realizing you don't have batteries for it.

Speaker 10 Duracell batteries are the only battery brand with power boost ingredients, which are a unique blend of nickel and lithium designed for long-lasting power.

Speaker 11 So, stock up on your double A's and your triple A's so you'll be A-O-K for the holidays.

Speaker 25 Choose the only battery brand with power boost ingredients.

Speaker 11 Choose Duracell.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.