Personality tests are old-fashioned and bizarre, but employers still love them
Even in today’s world of disruption, the tradition is going strong
Among tech professionals and entrepreneurs, a responsible person is one who optimizes. Break up your day into 15-minute increments. Use a standing desk. Order nootropics. Start your day with an ice bath — all to be smarter, healthier, more productive, and creative.
Our inclination to correlate success with a certain kind of personality owes itself in significant part to the 1940s and 1950s. While it may seem odd to have gotten to the individualistic, creative, productivity-hacking ethos of Silicon Valley from an era defined by conformity and cooperation, the period gave us an assertion we have not been able to shake: that in hiring a good worker, an employer should look for a particular personality.
Formal personality tests emerged in the 1910s, and were first applied to the selection of personnel in the aftermath of World War I. The Woodworth Personal Data Sheet was the first of its kind, developed in 1917 and introduced in 1919 to screen for prospective servicemen’s susceptibility to shell shock. A decade later, psychologist (and creator of Wonder Woman) William Moulton Marston introduced the DISC personality theory. This was adapted for corporate assessment by Walter V. Clarke, who sold it to businesses starting in 1948. Clarke’s Activity Vector Analysis required testers to select adjectives from a list to describe themselves with the intention of revealing to employers whether the applicant had aggressive, sociable, stable, or avoidant personality traits.
At the same time, a handful of personality tests emerged not merely to identify agreeable employees, but dangerous ones. The Humm-Wadsworth Temperament scale was developed in 1934 following a workplace-violence incident in which an employee killed his supervisor. The test, which asked questions like “Do you like to go on blind dates?” and “Do you think traffic policemen have the right attitude toward motorists?” claimed that “a knowledge of temperament will predict behavior, and often will forestall undesirable behavior through an understanding of unfortunate tendencies.” In 1942, a manager at Lockheed Martin remarked “nearly every time we’ve made an exception [that is, hired somebody the test rejected], we’ve regretted it.” A survey that same year showed that the Humm-Wadsworth had been administered to over 2,000,000 employees and candidates.
The period after World War II saw the explosion of the corporate personality test. According to The Fifties by Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, by 1952, personality tests were in use by one third of U.S. corporations to screen new hires and promotions. In 1953 alone, perhaps the most well-known test of the period, called the Bernreuter Personality Inventory, sold 1,000,000 copies to businesses and corporations.
The large demand for personality tests was supported by corporations’ taste for that quintessentially 1950s temperament: cooperative, diligent, well-mannered, hardworking, loyal, conforming, preferably wearing a gray flannel suit. Corporate and industrial manuals made open the professional desire for employees with personalities that accommodated the greater operations and interests of the institution. In the early 1950s, the Navy put out a handbook titled “Conference Sense,” which advised a proper way to deal with a dissenting colleague:
“Fail to hear his objections, or if you do, misunderstand him. If possible, recognize a legitimate objection and side with him. Object is to get him to feel like he ‘belongs.’ If he still persists in running wild, let the group do what they are probably by now quite hot to do, i.e., cut the lug down. They generally do it by asking Little Brother Terrible to clarify his position, then to clarify his clarification, etc., until our lad is so hot and bothered that he has worked himself into the role of conference comedian. Then soothe his bruised ego and restore him to human society by asking him questions that he can answer out of special experience.”
The attitude that saw individual creativity and opinion as an encumbrance prevailed. “There is little room for virtuoso performances,” warned a company booklet from Socony-Vacuum Oil. “Business is so complex … that no one can master all of it; to do his job, therefore, he must be able to work with other people.”
By the middle of the 1950s, skeptics began attacking the accuracy and validity of the corporate personality test. In 1954, the chairman of the New York Board of Examiners’ personality-testing committee (evidently a position at the time) raised doubts about the premise of measuring the fluid components of personality, as when a person is promoted, “the properties of cooperativeness disappear and those of authoritarianism begin to manifest themselves.”
The most famous critic of 1950s corporate testing was William Whyte, who chronicled the decade’s obsession with conformity in his 1956 book, The Organizational Man. His central example was Sears Roebuck, which held enough confidence in its testing methods to chart in diagram the answers of its ideal candidate. Applicants were asked questions like, “Who did you love most: your father or your mother?” and “Which would you rather do: read a book or go bowling?” Though there were supposedly no right or wrong answers, Sears regarded the answers of “father” and “bowling” preferable, suggesting qualities of ambition and sociability. A candidate would do poorly to score in the top 10th percentile of aesthetic sensibility, for instance, since according to the company, “This is not a factor which makes for executive success … Generally, cultural considerations are not important to Sears executives, and there is evidence that such interests are detrimental to success.”
Though Whyte and other skeptics persuasively refuted, among other premises, that it is hard to accurately measure people’s personalities, let alone use that information to “a large degree predict what they will do in the future,” the corporate personality test has endured. Several if not dozens of tests over half a century old, like the DISC profile, the Birkman Method, and the controversial Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, are still used today. Overall, around 50 percent of companies ask questions from personality assessments when interviewing candidates.
Though a newer philosophy of management has flourished — tailored toward creativity, productivity, and unorthodox disruption — corporations have not relaxed their attachment to personality assessments poised to identify agreeable, loyal, and predictable employees. The people who own the Myers-Briggs test have even calculated which personality types earn the highest salaries.
The persistence of the corporate personality test comes at a time when people seem more enthusiastic than ever to take them. From quizzes on Pottermore to Myers-Briggs types announced in Tinder bios, these tests have an endlessly willing audience consisting of people eager to understand themselves. Digital publishers have taken note, corralling millions of clicks in their name. BuzzFeed has found immense success by producing endless poppy personality quizzes, and you can now read reams of internet pages telling you what your Myers-Briggs type means for everything from your career to your weekend.
As the personality test enters its new, even grander era, it will no doubt do so by appealing to the two things it always has: the corporation’s bottom line and our personal, dearly held prejudices.
