Episode 163 - Personality Transcript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Hello and welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:20] David: The podcast where your two favorite personalities talk about philosophy and its connection to everyday life.

[00:00:26] Ellie: I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:28] David: And I'm David Pena Guzman.

[00:00:30] Ellie: Personality tests are everywhere. With simple Google search you can find a Buzzfeed quiz that will tell you which character from friends you are. Your workplace might even require that you take a Myers-Briggs type indicator test in order to determine like what kind of vibe you're gonna bring into the workplace.

And I have to say, David, right here at the top of this episode, I was completely obsessed with personality tests. When I was like a late teenager to young adult, this was the college era for me. I read so many books about the Myers-Briggs personality typology, or the type indicator. We'll get into that later.

And why it may not be a personality typology, but that is neither here nor there for the moment. Enneagram was absolutely one of my favorites and I would like read these books. There was one book about the Enneagram called, are You My Type, am I yours? And it was about how different Enneagram types, you know, relate to each other and what potential sources of conflict may emerge.

And this was like my bible for dealing with my dad when I was a teenager, struggling with like parental relations.

[00:01:41] David: Wait, I'm curious about when this era ended for you. Was it still there when we met at the b eginning of grad school.

[00:01:48] Ellie: No, I think it ended because of my encounter with Frankfurt school philosophy, which we may get into a bit in the episode, but this idea that maybe personality typologies are, you know.

[00:02:02] David: Reification from capitalism.

[00:02:04] Ellie: Yeah, yeah. I was very much identifying in adolescence, which is a time when people are inclined to identify with certain frameworks anyway, right? Whether or not they're technically personality typologies. I think when people are trying to find their identity as adolescents, they want anything to hold onto and so I was like, oh my gosh, I'm an enthusiast. I thought I was type seven, but then I was like, well maybe I'm type four, which is like the misunderstood artist, you know?

I was kind of trying to find myself and we didn't really have like a bunch of free access to tests on the internet then, or actually maybe we did, but I didn't really necessarily have like internet access even in my room. So I'm reading the books and you know, writing down the answers long hand to try and figure out what type I was.

[00:02:50] David: I've always been weirdly resistant to these personality tests, especially the ones that are more official and that present themselves as scientific.

[00:02:58] Ellie: David, no listener right now is surprised. In fact, like is your personality to resistant to personality types.

[00:03:05] David: Yeah, I'm like a personality nine, classic. But there is no quicker way for, for example, a date to go sour with me than for the person to mention chakras, crystals and energy, or for them to inquire in earnest into my personality type.

That really bugs me, and especially when my people feel entitled to read you, your personality or interpret your personality for you. I really experienced that as very violent, but that does not apply to the Buzzfeed personality test trend because before this episode, Ellie, I took two Buzzfeed personality tests.

One was, what kind of cheese are you? And it turns out that I'm Parmesan. I'm actually, I'm really offended by that. I was gonna, I was thinking I would be asiago, what would you think? I

[00:03:56] Ellie: I mean Asiago and Parmesan are very similar, so I don't think you're either of them. What kind of cheese are you? Maybe a blue fog. Is that a cheese? I'm thinking about like the blue cheese. You definitely have that kind of like acid flavor tea,

[00:04:14] David: Actually, I take that as a compliment.

[00:04:16] Ellie: But then you're, you know, you have a rich personality too. Yeah.

[00:04:20] David: Okay. So yes. I also want it to be like a stretchy cheese, like a Oaxaca cheese, like very flexible, can go the distance.

[00:04:27] Ellie: I'm Sorry David, that's not you.

[00:04:29] David: No. And so there was just a picture of graded Parmesan on my test results. The second test that I took, which I actually do think is way more scientifically valid than the cheese one is which of hairy styles four nipples are you?

And I'm the bottom right nipple.

[00:04:47] Ellie: What characterizes the bottom right nipple?

[00:04:50] David: Oh, all the questions were absurd. It was just choosing songs from one direction and then that's your personality

[00:04:57] Ellie: my God. No, but like we, what is the personality of the bottom right nipple?

[00:05:01] David: Nothing you, that your personality is to be that nipple. There is no description

[00:05:06] Ellie: Oh, it didn't have any description of like, you're, you know, small. You're small. Yeah. That wouldn't be a very helpful personality type.

[00:05:15] David: Yeah. Small. And I guess like right wing,

[00:05:17] Ellie: yeah.

[00:05:18] David: like bottom feeder, bottom right nipple.

[00:05:21] Ellie: Yeah. No, who knows? I don't know his nipples well enough to really be able to say anything about that.

[00:05:27] David: Well, he has four.

[00:05:28] Ellie: Yeah. Yeah. Well I mean I did gather that from what you said. I think although I said it will surprise no one that you are kind of anti these things, I am interested to know that you like these joking ones.

I do feel like that tracks as well. It may not surprise long time listeners to know that I actually like enjoy them, but take them with a grain of salt. I feel like I am a lot more accepting than you are of some of these quasi or sometimes pseudoscientific things if they can help people. Like I do actually think that that Enneagram books I read as a teenager helped me with my relationship with my dad whether or not I agree with them.

But I do think, of course, it's important to take with the grain of salt. And I had this experience a few years ago. Okay, so imagine, remember the Girl Boss era pre COVID. There was this coworking space slash women's community that had, that since went under called The Wing because it was like, it had all of the vices of the Girl Bossera.

[00:06:29] David: Yes, I remember, I remember you telling me that the lobby was all pink

[00:06:34] Ellie: Oh my God. It gorgeous.

[00:06:35] David: It was like peak boss era. Boss girl era moment.

[00:06:40] Ellie: It was like hardcore millennial, pink velvet, cozy. Anyway, the wing decided in 2019 to offer a scholarship program to feminist educators. I think maybe they realized that they were skewing to like bougie. And so I was one of the scholarship recipients at The Wing, and that meant that I got to go to their events and use their space in West Hollywood.

And it was, you know, it was like nice for a minute until it started to seem kind of weird. But I went to one event one time there. I had no idea what I was getting into. And it turned out it was for this personality typology called Human Design, which I still don't entirely understand, but it seems like some sort of mix of astrology and like personality typing and so on and so forth.

And you had to figure out exactly when your birth time was in order to say what type you are. And as I'm sitting in this lecture, I'm just kind of like, wait, what is going on right now? I thought this was gonna be like an interesting talk. And then I'm just getting this weird pseudoscientific, I don't know, sort of like Kool-Aid that I can decide whether or not to drink.

And I ended up temporarily drinking the Kool-Aid because based on your birth time and place, they tell you what personality type you are. There are not very many personality types, but there's one in particular that only one or 2% of the population is, and that was my type.

And so they asked like people to raise their hand in the room, this large room, if like that was their type and it was only me and maybe one other person, and I was like, oh my God, this, this typology is telling me I'm special.

It must be true.

[00:08:14] David: That, that is the kind of Kool-Aid that honestly, Ellie, you love to drink.

[00:08:20] Ellie: And then like the next typology is like, oh, that's 40% of the population and like all these women raise their hand. But yeah, no, a Kool-Aid that tells me that I'm special is a pretty easy one for me to throw back.

[00:08:31] David: Well, so the, the Kool-Aid, right. I was like trying not to drink it for reasons that we'll talk about at one point or another during the episode. But I do think that personality tests tend to simplify very complex human behavior, ? They rely on generalizations and often on scientifically dubious methodologies.

Now my research for this episode has actually changed my view about personality. It has not lessened or dampened my hatred for personality testing, but it has changed my views about the concept of personality itself. And the light bulb went off for me when I read one specific sentence in one of the articles that I was reading where the author said, you know, every time you meet somebody and you interact with them and you're trying to decide whether they are likely to be a friend or an acquaintance, or a good neighbor or a good teammate, you are engaging in personality assessment.

So you are kind of running your own personality test, just not with the methodology of Buzzfeed or, you know, formal like psychology, but. Personality is actually what we experience in our interactions with other people, right? Like when I interact with you, Ellie, I think it's wrong to say that I'm observing your behavior.

That sounds really scientific as if I'm like dissecting your movements.

[00:09:52] Ellie: Observing sure. Not dissecting maybe, but observing. Yeah. That's not problematic.

[00:09:56] David: it's not problematic, but I think it's more accurate to say that I'm seeing your dispositions in action. I'm seeing your friendliness. I'm seeing your openness, your agreeableness and personality is the collection of our dispositions.

And so that claim that the first thing we see in other people is actually their personality in motion unfolding in time, and that we are always assessing personality has now made me believe that personality is something I need to think about much more seriously. Rather than have this like knee jerk reaction of it's like the same as chakras and crystals and astrology.

[00:10:33] Ellie: Today we are talking about personality.

[00:10:36] David: Should you trust the results of your personality test?

[00:10:38] Ellie: When did the concept of personality start influencing how we think about ourselves?

[00:10:43] David: And what view of the self is presupposed by personality science?

[00:10:47] Ellie: As always, for an extended version of this episode, community discussion and more subscribe to Overthink on Substack.

A lot of personality tests, especially the ones that we might find online. Are based on vibes. The Buzzfeed quizzes, David, I'm sorry to say, based on vibes, it is my vibe that you're a blue cheese rather than an asiago Parmesan or oaxacan cheese. And so, I'm sorry to say, there's no verifiable way to say what cheese you are or you know what character you are from friends.

But that doesn't mean that personality is a concept with no basis in science. Personality psychology is a really important area of contemporary psychology and there are many competing theories and schools of thought within it. And so we shouldn't tar all personality typologies with the same brush.

And the main model of personality that we are going to talk about is relatively widely accepted. And that is the five factor model of personality known as the big five. And this model estimates the essence, if we can use that way of your personality based on five core traits. It's not a complete assessment or a description of every aspect of somebody's personality, but studies have shown that these basic categories can be replicable and a consistent way to measure, right?

So when we're looking at is something scientific, one of the key things we're looking at is replicability and the big five sort of passes that test. The term Big Five was coined by Lewis Goldberg in 1981, but five factor models of personality predate his coining of that term. They go all the way back to the work of Donald Fisk in 1949.

And essentially when we talk about the Big Five model today, what we're talking about is a consolidation of many similar theories and models that were developed by psychologists over the years. These models varied a lot in the specific terms or language that they used, so the Big Five then brought these together, offering a standardized set of terms for the same measurable traits.

David, you ready to talk about what the big five are?

[00:13:00] David: Yeah, because you gave me homework for this episode, which was to take the big five test, and I am really excited to talk about it. Let's go.

[00:13:10] Ellie: So they are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. And one thing I just wanna mention off the bat is that one thing that you might note about this is that, first off, we're not typing people into one particular personality or another.

Second, we are not dividing people into a kind of binary in the way that we will get to a discussion of when we talk about Myers-Briggs. So for instance, the Myers-Briggs type indicator says, are you an introvert or are you an extrovert? What the big five is measuring instead is your level of extroversion.

So you end up with a sort of percentage based model of, you know, here's how open you are relative to others, and that can start to form a sort of vision of your personality. It did end up actually giving me like a name for this personality, but it was, it was like your, you know, X percent, this X percent that it didn't say, this is your one single personality

 okay, what did you score highest on

[00:14:12] David: My highest score was o for openness.

[00:14:15] Ellie: Me too.

[00:14:16] David: I am 83% open, I am like a gaped subject, basically just like, I do not exclude anything

[00:14:26] Ellie: Oh my God, I love it. Well, I did score higher on that. I got 94.

[00:14:31] David: Okay. Clearest indication of the limits of personality science. Ellie, I do not think you're more open than me.

[00:14:38] Ellie: You don't?

[00:14:39] David: I don't, I think you're actually like a little less.

[00:14:46] Ellie: Oh my God. Oh my God. Here, let me quickly get a description of what openness they have, like these pithy, sentences about like what each is. Openness is how open you are to new ideas and experiences. David, I mean, I don't wanna litigate this too much, but I will say beginning of the episode we talked about how I like, I'm really open to taking these kind of typologies with a grain of salt and you're against them.

I wanna just mention a couple other things which friends often remark about me. So one is my sister in particular, who's also my friend, she thinks I have like too high a tolerance for people who are kind of charlatans. Like I find a lot of people interesting. And I'm willing to get to know them even if they're sort of sus and she's just like, oh yeah, I would write that person off.

I don't know. But then another thing is I tend to take a lot of information in before making a decision. And sometimes this frustrates loved ones of mine. They're like, I need to make 10 different calls to 10 different termite inspection places and get the right quote and then like mull over it and stuff like that.

So I really like to take a lot of information in and then sort of be open to different perspectives. However, I will say, I think what you're probably hinting at when you say you don't think I'm open is that I think a lot of ideas are terrible. I think there are a lot of people who are not worth my time and I can be kind of like, Nope, absolutely not.

So I don't know. Maybe I'm just like cherry picking here.

[00:16:23] David: Well, this goes to the heart of my broader concern about the scientific status of personality typing, which is, you know, what do we mean by these concepts? What exactly is openness? And in our case, it really depends how we define it, what our score should be.

[00:16:41] Ellie: Yeah. Okay. So I mentioned like the one sentence pithy description of openness a little bit more there in terms of how the Big five is measuring this. And this is actually, I think more of the scientific idea of openness is that it describes the depth and originality of one's mental and experiential life.

So like, do you like learning for the sake of it? It actually doesn't surprise me at all, given that definition that that's what you scored highest on. And wait, did I score highest on that too?

Yeah, I scored highest on that too. And so like for instance, I think it's likely that overthink listeners would tend to score high on openness.

Academics in general would, I think, tend to skew this way. So if you're at the high end of openness, you're probably more likely to have a progressive attitude, for instance. And we're probably like, oh, yay. We love that Being open is better. But I also just wanna remind people that technically the higher you score, it's not the better or worse you are.

These are meant to be neutral. David's like, no.

[00:17:39] David: I don't know. That's, some of them are not really that neutral. I don't think anybody would be like, openness is bad and closeness is good. I think we think of that already as openness is better than closeness.

[00:17:51] Ellie: well if you are, if you score low on openness, it tends to be associated with conservative attitudes. So if somebody is like, you know, happily conservative, then they might be happy about that.

[00:18:01] David: well, and the opposite of the depth of your mental life is like the shallowness of your mental life.

[00:18:07] Ellie: Okay. Yeah, valid. Alright, well let's move on to the second trait here. This is conscientiousness that can also be described as a scale from reliable to unreliable. And so like conscientiousness basically describes a socially prescribed impulse control. If you score high on conscientiousness, you're organized, you are likely productive, you know, more responsible, arriving earlier on time for appointments.

And being at the low end of conscientiousness is associated with smoking or substance abuse, poor lifestyle habits and ADHD. Yeah, again, I feel like it's not totally clear that this is neutral. Maybe I overstated that, David. Anyway, tell us how you scored on conscientiousness.

[00:18:52] David: So conscientiousness was my second lowest score. I was below 50% on conscientiousness and, it's only that and neuroticism were below 50% for me.

[00:19:05] Ellie: Wait, we haven't gotten there yet.

[00:19:06] David: I know, I know. But those are like my two lowest ones. And with conscientiousness, there was a lot of emphasis on being on time. You know, like how much do you value being on time?

How do you react to other people not being on time or respecting your schedule? And I have to say, I don't know how I feel about this because

[00:19:25] Ellie: You think it's racist?

[00:19:27] David: Thank you. know, like, and now I've been thoroughly whitewashed. Now I expect people to be on time when I say I'm gonna be there at 4:00 PM I expect everybody to be there at 4:00 PM But it is true that this is not respectful of brown people time and different cultural assumptions about what is appropriate in terms of expectations for other people.

[00:19:48] Ellie: you may be right on that, David. I don't have a strong opinion on that either way. However, I will say I tend to run late and my answers reflected that, but I actually still scored quite high on conscientiousness, so I don't think, I think there's a way to score high on it without being on time.

I think being on time it.

[00:20:06] David: Without being white.

[00:20:08] Ellie: Yeah.

[00:20:09] David: Well, but I wish it was called something else. 'cause conscientiousness makes it seem as if I don't think about other people. Like, you're so conscientious or like you're so thoughtless about others. Whereas I wish it was just called like detail orientedness and that would capture

[00:20:26] Ellie: organization productivity and responsibility are basically what it's measuring. I don't think that's like empathy. Empathy is, I think, like related to a different one.

[00:20:33] David: well, either way, I don't think it's the best charm.

[00:20:35] Ellie: Okay, so David has notes for the professional psychologist, who over the course of decades came up with this model.

Next is extroversion. I have to say I was shocked by how high I scored on this. I scored 92. This was my second highest one. I think David, you and I have both talked about how we really think that we're extroverts slash introvert combos, but I guess maybe I'm not. What, how did you score on this one?

[00:21:00] David: It was also my second highest, and that doesn't surprise me. And in fact, I scored lower on extroversion than I thought I would. My score was a 67. I was expecting like an 85 or so on extroversion. But my beef with that category is just that, like you said, I actually think the gray area between extroversion and introversion is, is very high.

And here, because they're only using one concept to capture the scale, I do wonder what the opposite of extroversion really is. Is it introversion? Is it something closely related to it?

[00:21:39] Ellie: Okay, well, let me give you the definition. According to this five factor model, extroverts have an energetic approach to the world, are sociable and assertive. So they might approach strangers, for instance, at a party, introduce themselves, or maybe take the lead in organizing a project. And once I read that, I realized, oh wait, actually I am really, really high on that.

I love leadership roles. I love socializing with new people, meeting people. Like I just really, you know, enjoy all of that. I also enjoy many hours alone in a room or on a silent meditation retreat for 10 days. But I don't know that that's actually necessarily the opposite of this. So I actually really like the way that they frame extroversion here, because I think it helps get out of the impasse of the way that we tend to think about it of like, is your social battery charged by being with others? And yeah, it's just, I, I find that to be kind of like leading us down the wrong path.

[00:22:33] David: So I think of myself as somewhat assertive when I need to be. I don't have problem with that, and I do think of myself as sociable, but I don't think of myself as having a quote unquote energetic approach to the world. You know, like that's where I get confused as as to whether the opposite of extroversion is something like lethargy or lassitude or more of like a shyness.

And those two get confused in this category. But I'm happy with the fact that I didn't, because of my belief that the gray area is actually really the most important here.

[00:23:08] Ellie: Okay. Okay, next up we have, I absolutely love this one. The fourth trait is agreeableness. And agreeableness describes a pro-social communal orientation. It's associated with compassion, respect, and trust. And agreeable people emphasize the good in others. They often lend things to people they know. And if you're at the high poll of agreeableness, you have better performance in group work.

It also tends to be associated with religiosity. And if you're at the low poll of agreeableness, you're more likely to engage in criminal behavior or be a juvenile delinquent and perhaps have interpersonal problems. And the reason that I love this may be surprising, but I wanna hold off on that, David, to first have us say what our scores in agreeableness are.

[00:24:00] David: Okay. What was your score on agreeableness?

[00:24:02] Ellie: Well, I wanna know yours first.

[00:24:04] David: Mine was 65.

[00:24:05] Ellie: Okay. Yep. That, that tracks I think.

[00:24:08] David: I think, I think that's right.

[00:24:10] Ellie: Yeah.

Any quick like responses on that?

[00:24:13] David: I actually like this category. My only disagreement was the emphasis on religiosity. I don't actually think all the questions they asked in the test about my belief in supernatural forces in whether there is something higher than me in whether I believe there's an afterlife or whatever.

Like, I don't think those are actually indicators of agreeableness in any shape, way, or form. And so there is some slippage here between the psychological concept of agreeableness and then social, I would say stereotypes that we have a religious person as social.

[00:24:50] Ellie: David, I love how you take one free online test. You do a little research on the big five and you have so many notes for these psychologists. This is low on openness, it's giving low on openness.

[00:25:03] David: Do you disagree?

[00:25:05] Ellie: I feel like I don't know quite enough. I mean, I have the definitions that I'm reading and we did some research on it for this episode, but I haven't read like the 50 peer reviewed papers or whatever.

Maybe there's far more, maybe there's a little bit less, but it's still like pretty established. I'm willing to defer to psychologist to

[00:25:19] David: some degree on this.

This is why I scored high on extroversion as assertiveness. It's me asserting myself over the science.

[00:25:26] Ellie: Yeah. I actually don't think you're that assertive, but that is, that is maybe going back, let's, let's stick with this here.

[00:25:32] David: Go forward. Yeah. Also criminality? Jesus.

[00:25:36] Ellie: I know. I am extremely low on agreeableness. I got 23.

[00:25:42] David: I feel vindicated. I feel vindicated. Yes. And I think, I mean, no, I would give you higher than that for sure.

[00:25:47] Ellie: No, I I'm what? Okay. Again, David, why are you disputing the word, like you're like, if I were to arbitrarily come up with a number, I'd give you higher than 23. The reason I say I love this is that when I first heard about the Big Five model a number of years ago, and I don't think I took a test at that point, but I was just kind of looking at these and reading descriptions.

I was like, oh, I bet I score really low on agreeableness. I found that to be cathartic in a way because even though we said it kind of seems like a scoring higher is like better than scoring lower, technically that's not the case. And I actually find like I like my disagreeableness and I find that I'm really drawn to other people who are disagreeable, and it's one of the things that leads me to be really misunderstood.

So, for instance, I have a reputation among my friends who love to go to the movies as being unpleasant to go to the movies with because I'm extremely critical of movies afterward. I also don't think I tend to emphasize the good in others. Like even though I'm very extroverted, I love talking to new people and I said that I'm open, I'm scoring high on openness, right?

I actually tend to not be super pro-social when, like I'm thinking about my relationship with the world. I tend to have like pretty strong boundaries with others. And I just wanna note like this is a different trait from openness or extroversion. So it's like possible. I think what's helpful for me to think about is that it's possible for me to score high on openness and extroversion, but still be pretty disagreeable.

[00:27:19] David: And still be a grouch.

[00:27:20] Ellie: I know well, like, okay, so if you think about my best friends, David, who we know from grad school too, one thing that characterizes our trio as a friend group is that we often actually really disagree about things. And if somebody looks at that from the outside, they may be like, oh, those girls like are not having a good time.

But actually we really enjoy that. And so whether it's like disagreeing on our assessment of a movie or on where we should go to dinner and having a full conversation about the pros and cons, like I really like reasoning things through with friends in that fashion and, but that sometimes comes off as like rudeness or coldness.

[00:27:56] David: No, but I think we have to be careful about the associations that we have with the term that capture the category and then the scientific definition of the category, right? Because the way you've been talking about disagreeableness is in terms of expressive of viewpoints and somewhat argumentative, you know, like I'm opinionated and I'm a little prickly.

And I think that's right and I love that about you. But the category is actually about compassion, respect, and trust, you know? And so like you scoring like in the low twenties in that, it just doesn't seem right to me. And so when I say I would give you a higher one, I do think you value compassion, respect, and trust more than like 25%.

And the term agreeableness, you know, is a little bit ambiguous in that it can be like, oh I agree with everything people say versus I tend to have a pro-social orientation that foregrounds respect for others and trust in people's words. So that's, that's where I think it's not quite right actually.

[00:28:57] Ellie: Yeah. I don't think my ethics is grounded in compassion, actually, which is like, perhaps ironic since I've been practicing Buddhism for such a long time, I think my ethics is grounded more in like principles,

[00:29:08] David: like respect?

[00:29:10] Ellie: Oh yeah. No, that's, that's, right.

[00:29:12] David: And actually you place a huge value on trust. I would say It's like almost at the top of your moral code,

[00:29:19] Ellie: Oh

[00:29:20] David: not me reading you, your moral code to you

[00:29:23] Ellie: And now me now, after being like, David, stop criticizing this. Let's just go with it. I'm like, oh, actually you're right. This test is telling me that I don't have respect for people. It must be bs. Okay, we gotta move on to the fifth trait. This one you briefly mentioned earlier is neuroticism.

And neuroticism describes a negative emotionality. It tends to be associated with depression, anxiety, and volatility. And so a neurotic person might, for instance, get very upset when someone else is angry with them or have a hard time relaxing. At the high pool of neuroticism, you find a tendency towards burnout, self-harm, and even suicide.

And at the low pool of neuroticism, you find relationship satisfaction. So I think this is one, if we are to extremely reductively, say like it seems like one poll is better than the other, which again, we shouldn't do, but I find we have the tendency to do this is actually one where it seems like the low poll is perhaps like more closely linked with what our society values.

Right. And obviously like self-harm. Yeah. That's not a good thing. So you said you scored really low on this.

[00:30:31] David: Yeah. I scored 17 on neuroticism, and I think that's accurate and it matches how I view myself and I think how other people have described me to myself.

[00:30:42] Ellie: Yeah. What do you think? I scored on neuroticism.

[00:30:45] David: I think you scored like a 38.

[00:30:49] Ellie: Oh no. It was my lowest. I scored a 19.

[00:30:52] David: Oh really?

[00:30:53] Ellie: That doesn't surprise me. I think actually that's something that you and I really share. Yeah. And I also think, I mean, I don't know if this is conscientiousness or neuroticism. You and I are very comfortable like putting out stuff we think is good in the world, but not worrying about whether it's perfect.

And I don't think we, like I do tend to ruminate in certain situations, but in general, I think you and I, you know, you've spoken a lot about how you try not to live with regret, not worry about that too much. I think we're just kinda like, I think we're somewhat go with the flow when it comes to planning the future and also like reflecting on the past.

And those were some of the things that came up in the questions about agreeable or sorry about, I'm still on agreeableness about neuroticism on the test.

[00:31:31] David: No, fair enough. And if I think about this category in terms of rumination and anxiety, maybe I would give you a higher score than me. But if I think about it in terms of volatility, I think we're both really not volatile people. And in fact, we have a very high threshold and very high tolerance for tension without us internalizing that tension or letting it bring us to a point of explosion.

In fact, I would say this is one of the most peculiar aspects of our personalities that we can tolerate very, very high levels of social pressure and interpersonal conflict, which is why Overthink still exists.

[00:32:08] Ellie: Yeah, totally. Totally. Okay, so just to wrap this up here, I wanna say, you might be wondering here, I know David, you are definitely wondering here, and our listeners may be two, why five? Why five traits rather than two or 200. And the answer that traits psychologists give is basically just that. That's what the data say.

For instance, the psychologist McCray and John wrote that the number of core traits is simply an empirical fact, like the fact that there are seven continents. And the slightly longer story here is that statistical methods have been crucial for the development of personality psychology since they were adopted in the early 20th century.

And the common technique is what's known as factor analysis. There participants will answer questions with a range of statements, like I have the ability to control my emotions, and some statements will be correlated with other statements. Psychologists then will introduce a factor to explain the variation in the data, right?

Conscientiousness perhaps, or impulse control, and the number of factors and what kinds of statements they're correlated with is just a matter of data. And so the specific naming and interpretation is up for debate. You said you don't like the term conscientiousness, but a standardized model like the Big Five serves to kind of bring those things to together, and it also has a very useful acronym.

It's ocean.

[00:33:33] David: Okay, so I really dislike this view and this justification for the five person typology because the idea that this is just what the data shows is such a problematic understanding of science as if data just gives you answers without the mediating force of analysis and interpretation, data is ambiguous and it needs an interpretive lens before it becomes meaningful.

And so we have to make choices about how we analyze data, and it's usually those choices that introduce bias or influence or whatever the case might be. And so the appeal to this is just what the science is, I think tells us more about the anxieties that psychologists have about being real scientists, like physicists and trying to make their discipline mimic the natural sciences than about the actual phenomenon of personality itself.

And the fact that they use the metaphor of the continents is really revealing, right? If you look at a picture of the earth, it's not as if the picture tells you that there are a certain number of continents. Continents are geopolitical constructions. They are effects of our political imagination. You know, where is the objective data-driven border

[00:34:46] Ellie: between Europe and Asia?

[00:34:48] David: Yeah. And so I think this is actually quite revealing.

Although personality seems like an absolutely foundational concept for thinking about ourselves and one another, this concept has not always been around. In fact, the philosopher Colin Koopman argues that the concept of personality emerged as a stable concept only in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries.

He writes about this in his 2019 book, how we Became Our Data, a genealogy of the Informational Person, which is largely about the rise of our data fight selves in the present. But he argues that we cannot understand the rise of this new informational person that we have in the age of the internet and social media without getting clear about the concept of personality that preceded it.

[00:35:44] Ellie: Yeah, and I think the question of the informational person is different from the question of personality, in part because the informational person has so much to do with our online data, our profiles and so forth. Certain things that didn't exist when personality science was being developed. But it's definitely right that there's a historical line to draw between this, including the way that websites are profiling us as likely to like this brand because of XY interests and the personality concept that emerges before.

[00:36:22] David: And Koopman's position is that that informational person is different than personality, but it sort of grew out of it. And so personality is something that really takes shape in the 19th and 20th centuries, and he gives a really interesting account of the genealogy of this notion. And for the purposes of our discussion, I want to focus on two specific moments that he talks about in his book.

The first of them is the period between 1880 and 1920, so it's a four decade period when according to him, the notion of personality first emerges in scientific discourse. And it's at this time that we really see, leading figures in psychology, start talking about this new thing called personality.

And at this time it's not yet super clear. The boundaries of the concept have not yet been fixed, so it's both loose and decentralized. The second moment that he talks about is the decade of the 1920s, and that's when the concept finally gains unity and becomes conceptually stable. So what exactly happens between 1880 and 1920?

In short, the concept appears first in the subfield of abnormal psychology with psychologists who are really interested in making sense of phenomena like criminality and deviancy. And then once the concept is there, it's first real application is in the analysis of people with multiple personalities.

[00:37:57] Ellie: Yeah. Which nowadays we call dissociative identity disorder. That change was made a few decades ago to avoid giving the impression that there are like multiple people that are actually involved. Right. It's one person with a dissociated psyche.

[00:38:09] David: And at the time, it was not described in that way. It was seen as there really are multiple selves or personalities hiding inside the same body. And the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking has pointed out that personality because of its emergence and application in abnormal psychology. Originally it was plural.

Multiple personalities before it ever was singular like personality. Yeah. And you know, you see this in the work of a number of leading psychologists of the time, like Pierre Jeane in France, or later William James in the US. But originally, and this is the important point, the interest is on abnormality.

And so according to Koopman, this interest is what led psychologists to seek, to quantify the self, to generate data about the self so that they could study it scientifically. And that's why in the late 19th century, the discipline of psychology starts pumping a ton of resources into all these efforts at quantifying the self.

So we see the rise, for example, of intelligence tests. You give all these tests to see how smart people are. You see the widespread use and application of surveys as well as the suddenly almost mandatory use of questionnaires in psychological science. And so all these tools that test the questionnaire, the survey, become the pillars of a new way of doing psychology that is called psychometrics, and that's what enables the scientific study of personality to take off at this period of time.

[00:39:48] Ellie: Yeah. And this turn to quantification is important to keep in mind because, you know, nowadays we speak a lot about the problems with big data and the datafication of the self, which makes sense given recent technological developments that are, you know, often algorithmically based. But the quantification of the self is not as new as that might suggest.

In fact, it's been going on since the 19th century. These tools were the big data of the 19th century.

[00:40:16] David: Yeah. And I take it that that's what Koopman is saying. That's why he's doing a genealogy. And so that's what happens in 1880 to 1920. If we move forward now into the 1920s, that's when this concept that's kind of jumping around between deviancy, criminality, abnormal psychology, starts to stabilize. And what happens is, first and foremost, that the concept is extended from abnormal to normal subjects.

So it's not just disturbed people or traumatized individuals who have a quote unquote personality or personalities in the plural. Now everybody has a personality. You have one? I have one. You know, it's like the Oprah, you get one. I get one. And in a sense it becomes, democratized. Another factor that contributes to the stabilization of this concept in the 1920s is our changing attitudes precisely about these quantifying methodologies, like the test, the surveys, all of that. Coopman points out that when they were used for the first time in the 18 hundreds, people actually had questions in psychology about whether these tests were really helpful and objective.

You know, yeah, you can give people all these tests, but what exactly does this data tell you? What did you learn from it?

[00:41:34] Ellie: They were the Davids of the 1920s.

[00:41:37] David: Yeah, it's like grouches who were not convinced at all by these new metrics, but over time, because these metrics are really useful and they do generate a lot of data that then you can do interesting things with, they become widely accepted in psychology.

And so all the questions and doubts that people had about them start receding into the background. And so suddenly people start seeing these quantification efforts as the obvious way in which we go about studying personality. So both of these developments, the democratization of personality, where everybody has one, and then the widespread acceptance of tests, surveys, and questionnaires, that's what lays the groundwork for the emergence of the quote unquote personality test.

And Koopman points out that the first official personality test emerged around 1917. It was called the personality data sheet. And it was a test given by the US Army to new recruits to see if they were good at performing their duty as soldiers. So before 1917, there were already tests that were given to new recruits, but they were all intelligence tests rather than personality tests.

[00:42:56] Ellie: Interesting.

[00:42:57] David: Yeah. And so suddenly the military realized that like, oh, maybe we need to know more than intelligence. You know, we need to know how they will live up to their expectations.

[00:43:07] Ellie: Maybe emotional regulation is important.

[00:43:10] David: Yeah, who knows? Maybe they really valued emotional volatility in new recruits. But either way, that's when the military starts turning to personality science. And after that, the personality test then expands from the military to other aspects of social life to school, to the hospital, and that's what creates this new interest in the notion of personality.

[00:43:34] Ellie: And it is so revealing that the first use of a personality typing system is in the military. I did some research on what happened after this, David, in part because I've like been obsessed with the Myers-Briggs typing indicator for a very long time, and so that's where I'm gonna pick up on now, you left us in a place of the 1920s where these tests are starting to expand and very quickly they really proliferate.

So by the 1930s, there were hundreds of personality typing systems, and they were used more and more in corporate context, basically for hiring workers. Will these workers be good or not? Those, however, were still based mostly on identifying normal versus abnormal personalities, so it's still really rooted in this abnormal psychology that you mentioned was the origin of the concept of personality.

So like there's, you know, one that goes from your scoring as a normal worker, and then all the others are things like quote, manic depressive, paranoid, schizophrenic and so on. So like pretty yikes.

[00:44:37] David: I was about to say wow.

[00:44:38] Ellie: Yeah. And so in the 1940s, the Myers-Briggs type indicator comes along as something quite new. If this was created, I read the Merve Emre book on this, and I learned a lot about the lives of the mother daughter duo that created it, Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. But the point of the Myers-Briggs typology was to create a system that showed all personalities have their own unique gifts.

It's not like normal versus abnormal, good versus bad, as we were worried about with the Big Five. Even though again, it's not technically about that. So the Myers-Briggs type indicator was to show that, you know, everybody has unique gifts. There aren't some personalities that are better or worse. And the history of this indicator is super interesting because I think nowadays we tend to identify this with corporate workplaces.

It's, you know, a kind of neat questionnaire that often prospective employees or new employees are given, are you introverted, extroverted, and so on and so forth. But it basically started with two very smart women who due to their status as 20th century wives and mothers were largely expected to remain in the domestic sphere, and they were kind of bored there.

And so they ended up making their home life a kind of laboratory of sorts. They were studying their husbands and children in an attempt to figure out what made them tick.

[00:46:02] David: Oh my God, I love this. The pressure of domesticity, just like births a discipline.

[00:46:09] Ellie: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so the mother, Katherine, was obsessed with Karl Jung and she started to devise a system that was based on Young's personality typing so young, you know, the originator of depth psychology, a sort of foil to Freud has this personality typology. And Katherine wants to create a system that offers, you know, sort of more formal way of understanding this.

Jung's types assess three different factors, extroversion versus introversion thinking versus feeling and intuition versus sensation. And funnily enough, Katherine actually misunderstood what young meant by extroversion and introversion. So our common understanding of these two categories is based on a misappropriation.

That is a story for another time, but somewhere along the way, a fourth factor was added, and that's judging versus perceiving. And I could talk for an hour about these four different binaries, but I wanna stick here with the history of how then this typing system entered the workplace. Because I think it's really interesting.

So Isabel, who's the daughter, she started working for a personality consulting firm and in the 1940s, she took over her mother's Jungian inspired system and devised a more formal version of it that was based around a questionnaire. This is how Meyers-Briggs was born through this personality consulting firm, kind of formalization of her mom's like folk system that she'd created in the laboratory of the home.

And the first client who bought the typing system was the OSS Office of Strategic Services, which is the precursor to the CIA. And long story short, yeah. So long story short, in World War II, American intellectuals thought that one way they could contribute to the war effort was by training smart personnel.

And they assessed that smart personnel in part based on typing systems. And there was a whole secret training center for spies that used the Myers-Briggs indicator. More than that, there were also a number of analysis performed of Hitler's personality, including by Katherine Briggs, the mom herself.

People were like, why is this guy the way he is? We got a subjective to some personality typing system.

[00:48:26] David: Yeah. I, I read a a lot about the weird. Obsession with, figuring out Hitler's personality at this time. But it also makes me think about Theodore Adorno's study on the authoritarian personality from the same period which he created. And it was a personality typology known as the F scale that assess your pre fascistic tendencies.

Like how likely are you to become a fascist when fascism comes knocking at the door?

[00:48:55] Ellie: and the Frankfurt school was also working with OSS, actually this precursor to the CIA. And interestingly, Adorno was really critical of personality typologies in the sense that he thought they formed part of the impulse to categorize people, which is a fascist impulse in itself. It's anti humanistic because it overlooks the individual and their freedom.

But at the same time, he saw in these systems a kernel of truth, and that is the following. Our capitalist society actually doesn't care that much about the individual and their freedom. So these systems, in reducing people to categories, are actually just responding to the material conditions in which we find ourselves.

And so he thought that some of these systems could be strategically used in order to subvert the desire to categorize people to begin with. And the F scale was precisely one of these.

[00:49:45] David: So it seems a little bit ironic to link typing systems to fascism and then be like, oh, here's my own, by the way, the F scale.

[00:49:52] Ellie: See, that's something I would do and you wouldn't do. I'd be like, yeah, take this with a grain of salt, we can subvert. And you'd be like, Nope.

[00:49:59] David: We know Adorno never ceases to surprise us all, and even in the present, but the fact that World War II consolidated the importance of personality typing systems and that these systems were directly used in war efforts like, you know, as a kind of psyop against the Germans in the case of analyzing Hitler's particular personality or training, literal spies is absolutely fascinating.

[00:50:29] Ellie: The concept of personality has come to dominate our cultural understanding of the self in the 20th century and today. And I think this tendency can raise questions for us about the rise of the importance of the self in the 20th century, where it's less about the skills you have and more about who you are as a person, as well as the idea that the self is not so much an individual, let alone the free individual and more a packaged entity or commodity.

[00:51:01] David: I think the term packaged entity is right, because when I think about my personality at the workplace, it's something that I have to fashion. It's something that I have to curate and it's something that I have to project. And in my description of Colin Koopman's work on the informational self, we've seen how if you fast forward in time, the concept of personality maybe evolves into something new, like the modern day informational person.

I think it's also important to keep in mind that if we move backwards, we had other ways of making sense of our behavior and of other people's behavior that was not personality. And I think the term that played the role that personality then played in the 20th century is the concept of character where we appealed to trying to figure out people's character rather than their personality, especially in the 18th century and before.

[00:51:56] Ellie: This is fascinating to me, and it's something I was thinking a lot about in the lead up to this episode. How and why is it that character came to be succeeded by personality? And I don't know that I have a good answer to that, but I do have some thoughts on what that shift has meant. So for one, there's a shift in how people are getting their understandings of who they are, and that shift is towards quantification.

In the 19th century by contrast, like prior to the rise of personality in the late 19th century, people got their understandings of who they are largely through literature, through the narrative arcs and the character development that you get through things like novels.

So if you think about a novel like George Elliot, one of my favorite novelists, I love the Russians as well, you might think about Dostoyevsky. There is such a rich articulation of what we would now call personalities. In fact, to the point that some of the early personality tests were actually rooted in analyzing the personalities of literary characters such as Madam Bovary and Raskolnikov, literally two characters that were used in the development of personality typologies.

And there is a really big difference nonetheless, between the characters that we get to know over the course of hundreds of pages, whose decisions we get to see and the narrative arc that their lives take. And a kind of snapshot of here's how you measure on these different traits.

[00:53:27] David: I love this appeal to literature as the foundation for our understanding of character because it also plays on the double meaning of character, right? The character of a person and these characters in literature. Or through whom we see ourselves reflected. So it's no longer which character from friends are you, but which character from Dostoevsky are you?

[00:53:47] Ellie: Or the which character from friends are you needs to be thought about, not just like in terms of really superficial traits, but also in terms of the narrative arc and the decisions that the characters make.

[00:53:56] David: Yeah. And I think that really underscores what is lost in the transition from character to personality, because one thing that's really important to keep in mind here is that character has a moral dimension that personality does not. And that's because personality is a psychological concept that because of psychology's, pretensions to scientifically claims to be purely descriptive, right?

Like that guy said, it's just the data. It's what the data shows. We're not injecting anything through human judgment. We're just telling you what the evidence reveals. And when you think about somebody's character, I think the difference is that character is a much more unified concept. It's like a singular thing.

You have a good or a bad character, and also it has an inescapably ethical dimension. You cannot talk about somebody's character without, you know, saying whether it's kind of good or bad. Whereas with personality, you start breaking it down into all these factors and you can be a little bit more distanced and scientific about it.

[00:54:57] Ellie: Well, and the defender of personality over character will say, yeah, it's actually good that we've moved away from good versus bad character because that's what led to things like the creation of a distinction between the normal and the abnormal, right? That then personality typology it, starting with Myers-Briggs helpfully moved away from.

But I don't think we should think about good and bad character as like fixed essentially who you are, but as the series of choices that you make. I think that's what is so beautiful about George Elliot's novels is that she really gets into the minds of her characters and shows you here's why they were led to the decisions that they made, but also here are the consequences of those.

And those consequences of course can be good or bad. And there are good and bad decisions, right? And so I think the move from character to personality is. In some ways really sad because it tracks the increasing aestheticization of the self that we have. We don't just see in the 20th century an increasing emphasis on the self.

We also see a superficial understanding of what the self is, such that the self is devoid of moral content. And so, you know, the aestheticization of it is like, okay, when we're thinking about which character and friends you are, I'm thinking about like, well, are you nerdy? Are you quirky? Are you Type A?

And those are devoid of moral content. Those are just aesthetic.

[00:56:18] David: So one thing that I'm now thinking about is the fact that one difference between character and personality is that characters are absolutely singular, right? A character is a person with a full life, with a depth and a personality is a type into which you fit a lot of individuals, right? Like there is nobody else like the characters in literature.

They are who they are. And maybe we come to think of who we are through encountering them, and that there is no logic of containment, which is what you get with personality typing. Moreove, the concept of character requires introspection in a way that the concept of personality does not.

With personality, you just answer questions that are given to you just like we did with the Big five personality test. And in fact, historically, this is why when this data fight approach to personality starts emerging in the late 19th century and early 20th century, it presented itself as an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis, which was the other dominant discourse for thinking about who we are and the psychologists who were proposing this new quantified way of thinking about the self, they really worried that psychoanalysis was too individualistic.

It's too much work to really like do an analysis of an individual person where you have to have many sessions over many, many months, maybe years before you get to the kernel of truth of who they are. And so they wanted something that was not just more objective in the technical sense of the term, but also a lot quicker because you know, like I took that personality test in 10 minutes.

I cannot undergo analysis in that timeline. And so it really gives you competing visions of what it means for an expert, whether they are an analyst or a psychologist or something else, to have insight into the mind of another being.

[00:58:15] Ellie: Which is perhaps ironic given that a lot of the personality typologies were created mainly just like on individual creator's vibes, or like, you know, using the characters from novels. But I think also when we're speaking about the voiding out of moral content in the move from character to personality, we're also talking about the way that it's so easy to appeal to a fixed concept of the self, which you, you know, is neatly packaged for you by a personality test in a way that overlooks your freedom.

The fact that you are never reducible to this type. You have to make choices. You have to do so freely. That's a burden of being human. And at most, a personality typology is gonna tell you about like what you know, we would call the ego. It's not gonna inform your life trajectory. That is something that you must take responsibility for.

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our substack for extended ad free episodes, community chats, and additional overthink content.

To connect with us, find episode transcripts and make one-time tax deductible donations. Go to overthink podcast.com. You can also check us out on YouTube as well as TikTok and Instagram at overthink_pod.

We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.