The Corporate Sorting Hat

Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers are known as the inventors of a personality instrument known as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It's not a test, its supporters insist, because you can't fail.

Briggs Myers argued that everyone was good at something. The point of the instrument was not only to recognize and value your own strengths, but to appreciate that other people had different strengths and styles. She thought this knowledge would help people work together more efficiently and effectively. During the Second World War, this also meant enabling people of all types to contribute productively to the war effort.

And not complaining, accepting one's rightful position in life, which is perhaps why so many corporations like it. The MBTI combines a simplistic version of Jungian type theory with an immutable division of labour. You are born with one of these sixteen personality types, and this supposedly determines your path. 

Merve Emre notes how MBTI rhetorically intertwines "the fiction of the complete self with the fiction of the happy, hard-working team". Instead of using the instrument (it's not a test) for self-development, it becomes a way of labelling yourself and others, helping to define and reinforce your identity.

If you have difficulties with a partner or colleague, it is probably useful to remind yourself from time to time that they don't have the same view of the world as you do. A fictional explanation, whether it is based on MBTI or astrology, is probably better than no explanation at all, and may allow you to accept that they mean well ("positive intent") rather than assuming they are being deliberately difficult.

And if you believe that these labels are fixed through life, which is what MBTI theory claims, then you should work with the personality you have been given rather than trying to change it.

So why do so many organizations use this instrument? The first answer is perhaps - because it's there. Briggs Myers worked with Edward Hay, the founder of a management consulting firm specializing in personnel management, and this kind of instrument is popular with consulting firms because it allows them to generate apparently value-adding work for their junior consultants.

Perhaps another reason is that bureaucratic organizations like sorting people at all stages in the employment cycle, selecting people for recruitment, promotion and redundancy. Selection by gender or race is no longer acceptable, but selection by personality type apparently is. If you have the idea that people of a particular type tend to be good at sales, then this becomes an enabling prejudice.

Briggs Myers herself had some old-fashioned views on gender and race. The extreme racism in her second novel was considered unacceptable even in the 1930s, and early versions of her instrument differentiated between men and women. She presented Hay with two scoring keys - a "standard" key and a "female" key. It may astound readers of this blog to learn that this resulted in women being type-cast as nurses, teachers, and secretaries, rather than executives and managers. As Merve Emre remarks sardonically, "destiny wasn't biological; it was typological".

 

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Dean Burnett, Nothing personal: The questionable Myers-Briggs test (Guardian, 19 March 2013)

Merve Emre, Uncovering The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs (Digg, 1 October 2015)

Elle Hunt, What personality are you? How the Myers-Briggs test took over the world (The Guardian, 30 August 2021)

Tim Lewis, Myers-Briggs personality tests: what kind of person are you? (Guardian, 15 September 2018)

Lisa Wong Macabasco, They become dangerous tools: the dark side of personality tests (Guardian, 4 March 2021)

Isabel Briggs Myers, Gifts Differing (1980)

Related posts: Are Best Practices Obsolete (September 2009), From Sedimented Principles to Enabling Prejudices (March 2013), Algorithms and Governmentality (July 2019), Bad Sorting (September 2021)

Explaining bodies

@xwaldie (Katy Waldman) advises us to beware of evolutionary explanations that rest on what men find attractive. In Another Dingbat Sexual Selection Theory (Slate Feb 2013), she comments on a theory that explains the evolution of small breasts in East Asian women.

Women may well be insulted by the suggestion that the reproductive success of East Asian women depends on the mammary preferences of East Asian men. Waldman argues that women's choices are at least as important as men's - indeed, women may have more reason to be choosy in their sexual partners than men - and notes that in most species it is the male that invests in display (e.g. fancy plumage), while healthy females can get laid without needing to develop unwieldy protruberances.

Meanwhile, men may be insulted by two contradictory propositions - either that they will have sex with anything that moves, or that they will only have sex with women whose chest fits some predefined norm.

As I see it, one of the main problems of evolutionary biology is that for any plausible hypothesis, one can invent any number of equally plausible alternatives.

For example, let's start with the idea that a male seeks to produce as many viable offspring as possible. The survival prospects of his genetic line are surely improved if his offspring are as genetically varied as possible, which means that the male should try to maximize the variety of his sexual partners. Thus if the majority of the available women have one characteristic - say small breasts - then the pursuit of genetic variety might attract him to woman with the opposite characteristic - namely large breasts. But this pursuit of variety might equally be satisfied by variation in other physical characteristics, or even non-physical characteristics such as personality and intelligence.

Of course females also benefit from having genetically varied children. There is some evidence of what scientists call "negative frequency-dependent preferences" - in other words, fancying the unusual. A recent experiment suggests that the relative attractiveness of bearded and clean-shaven men goes in cycles: the more beards there are, the less attractive they become.

However, variety needs to be balanced against other factors. There are many reasons why a woman may prefer to have all her children with the same man. And there are also reasons why a man may prefer to have all his children with the same woman rather than casually impregnating many different women.

So even if sexual attractiveness is based on some genetic programme, we cannot infer the logic of the programme either from observing actual and attempted couplings, or from asking subjects to rate photographs of the opposite sex.  Such evidence may lead us to dismiss some hypotheses as unlikely, but do not help us choose between equally likely alternatives.

It may be fun for scientists to speculate why a particular characteristic developed in a particular group of humans at a particular point in prehistory, and it may help the scientists get noticed by journalists, but theories based on sexual attractiveness are highly unreliable. After all, sexual desire is so polymorphous.


Updated 17 April 2014
 

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Katy Waldman, Another Dingbat Sexual Selection Theory (Slate Feb 2013).

James Morgan, Beard trend is 'guided by evolution' (BBC News 16 April 2014)

Zinnia J. Janif, Robert C. Brooks and Barnaby J. Dixson, Negative frequency-dependent preferences and variation in male facial hair. Biol. Lett. April 2014 vol. 10 no. 4 20130958 16 April 2014 doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2013.0958

Educational Ideals

Aidan expresses some good educational aspirations, which are not well achieved by the prevailing educational system. 

This raises the question - is there a system anywhere that achieves anything remotely similar to these aspirations? It is possible that we might find a system whose official purpose was something entirely different. 

In the past, educators (both in schools and in management training) have discovered that some aspects of personality and character can be developed in activities outside the classroom - perhaps the sports field or some outward bound adventure. The education system has then tried to incorporate some of these activities in the curriculum. 

But what happens to these activities when they are given a new context, and an explicit educational purpose? Do they remain as effective at the development of character? 

At the same time, activities that were central to my own experience of university life (such as political debate) have nowadays been pushed aside as non-essential, a waste of time and a distraction to study. However, activities such as these undoubtedly helped many people to develop some critical intellectual and communication skills, skills from which many of today's students would benefit. 

 

Related posts: Richard, Purpose of Education (December 2003), Aidan, Educational Ideals (December 2003)