Ep. 159: The Anti-Worker Pseudo-psychology of Corporate Personality Testing

"Is it a higher compliment to be called a) a person of real feeling, or b) a consistently reasonable person?" "Are you more successful at a) following a carefully worked-out plan, or b) dealing with the unexpected and seeing quickly what should have been done?" "Which word in each pair appeals to you more? a) scheduled, or b) unplanned?"

Questions like these are posed to millions of current and prospective workers and students every year. They come from personality tests, whether the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Clifton StrengthsFinder, or other surveys purporting to assess personality traits and job aptitude. Through a series of tens to hundreds of questions, personality inventories claim to identify qualities like dominance, neuroticism, or introversion, synthesize a user profile, and determine that user’s fitness for a given job.

But beneath this ostensibly neutral goal of matching a person with their ideal form of employment lies a much more sinister aim: Identifying and weeding out would-be dissenters, labor organizers, and union sympathizers. Additionally, studies have shown repeatedly that commercial personality tests like the commonly used Myers-Briggs have little to no scientific value. Why, then, does their use continue–with anywhere from 60 to 80% of prospective workers taking a personality test–and given their anti-labor history, what harms do they pose?

On this episode, we examine the history of personality testing used in military, educational, and corporate settings; the relationship between personality assessments, labor law, and the corporate consultancy class; how personality testing threatens the livelihoods of people based on race, disability, and other factors; and media’s role in laundering tests as benign instruments of self-realization.

Our guest is writer Liza Featherstone.

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Guest

Liza Featherstone is a columnist for Jacobin and The New Republic and a contributing writer to The Nation. She is co-author of the book Students Against Sweatshops: The Making of a Movement and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Worker’s Rights at Wal-Mart and Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation.

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Show Notes

How Workers Really Get Canceled on the Job

Nathan Newman | April 6, 2021 | The American Prospect

'They become dangerous tools': the dark side of personality tests

Lisa Wong Macabasco | March 4, 2021 | The Guardian

Algorithms in Hiring Tests Make it Easier to Discriminate Against People with Disabilities [PDF]

Plain Language Report | December 2020 | Center for Democracy and Technology

Myers-Briggs: Does it pay to know your type?

Lillian Cunningham | December 14, 2012 | The Washington Post

The comforting pseudoscience of the MBTI

Anne-Laure Le Cunff | October 23, 2019 | Ness Labs

The First Personality Test Was Developed During World War I

Lila Thulin | September 23, 2019 | Smithsonian Magazine

How Accurate Are Personality Tests?

Angus Chen | October 10, 2018 | Scientific American

‘The Personality Brokers’ Conjures the Mother and Daughter Who Helped Us Think of Ourselves as Types

Jennifer Szalai | August 29, 2018 | The New York Times

Ace the Assessment

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | July-August 2015 | Harvard Business Review

Are Workplace Personality Tests Fair?

Lauren Weber and Elizabeth Dwoskin | September 29, 2014 | The Wall Street Journal

The Mysterious Popularity Of The Meaningless Myers-Briggs (MBTI)

Todd Essig | September 29, 2014 | Forbes

It's OK to not be passionate about your job

Ruth Tam and Sylvie Douglis | February 1, 2022 | NPR

A history of the early days of personality testing in American industry: An obsession with adjustment

Robert E. Gibby and Michael J. Zickar | September 2008 | History of Psychology

The Union Avoidance Industry in the United States [PDF]

John Logan | December 2006 | British Journal of Industrial Relations

Using Personality Inventories to Identify Thugs and Agitators: Applied Psychology's Contribution to the War against Labor

Michael J. Zickar | August 2001 | Journal of Vocational Behavior

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Transcript

For a full transcript of this episode, go here.

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