163. Personality
Listen to Ellie and David talk about personality types, the self, and abnormal psychology in episode 163!
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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
Thank you for listening to another episode of Overthink! Leave your thoughts in the comments!