Terry Prone: Categorising personality types in room is akin to circus sideshow

The hotel had put little dishes of diamond-hard mints down the middle of the boardroom table. The upside, at this two-day corporate workshop, was that nobody reeked of last night’s garlic.

The downside was that everybody present would have mouth ulcers for a week.

Because I had already made my contribution and survived, I was on that happy high that comes post-performance when you are thrilled to sit through the next speaker and eager to ingest their brilliant ideas.

The presenter was a grey-bearded bloke who had developed a way to categorise the mental habits of the participants.

They had all filled in questionnaires in advance, and he was now going to reveal all.

As always, when presenting this kind of material, the man with the grey beard set out to reassure everybody present. His research didn’t find anybody wrong or right, he stressed. Nobody should be anxious. It just identified the manner of each participant’s thinking. Everybody present ignored this, knowing that, no matter what he claimed, he was going to hand material about them to some enemy to use, sometime in thefuture.

They gazed, fascinated, at his judgments of them. Some of them were more into statistics than oil painting. Some of them thought in sporting or military terms. Some of them were more comfortable with ambiguity than others. They nodded and laughed among themselves, the one beside me murmuring that he had “got her to the life”.

He had said she thought in statistics. Since she had already told me she was an actuary, I’d have thought it was pretty obvious that she thought in statistics, but finding herself diagnosed on a PowerPoint slide convinced her that Greybeard had seen into her soul and that they now were viscerally connected for life. This was the Barnum effect in vivid action.

The Barnum effect, named after the circus showman, is where people such as the actuary give high ratings to depictions of their personality that are actually vague as hell, but seem to them to be incredibly accurate personal diagnoses of them. The Barnum effect plays out in every adolescence as (mostly) girls go to fortune tellers to be sold guesses dressed up as occult insight. But it figures in business, too. A lot.

In this particular corporate session, one of the guys had been outed earlier as “given to analytical and critical thinking”, which again had been unmissable throughout the previous day-and-a-half. He now raised his hand.

“This is kind of an update on Myers-Briggs, right?”

Greybeard nearly had a heartattack right there. Couldn’t be further from Myers-Briggs, he said. Myers-Briggs, he added virtuously, clustered people into groups, while he didn’t. The critical thinker nodded thoughtfully: “No scientific support, though, for either?”

I began to review my knowledge of CPR, because it looked like Greybeard was going to need it. He did that lower-face smile that means that the smiler hates you, and explained in a casual, unthreatened way that his approach was informed by the best psychological research.

The critical thinker gave him the full-face beatific smile that means “gotcha”, and left everybody with the understanding that Greybeard was presenting the obvious as scientific discovery, the subjective as data-driven.

Someone called a coffee break and several of the participants went up to talk to the presenter, who recovered his equanimity once the critical thinker had gone outside to wrap himself around a cinnamon roll. It was clear that Greybeard had serious worshippers who would recommend him to other people or deploy him when they hopped to another corporation. Just like Myers-Briggs and just as fruitlessly.

Myers-Briggs is the greatest load of nonsense ever inflicted on executives as a ‘development tool’ — which it isn’t. It is the most successful lump of drivel ever invented. Two million people take the test every year.

That’s a lot of money. Not, to be fair, that the mother and daughter who invented it — Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers — were in it for the money or profited much from it in their lifetimes.

They genuinely believed that the human race could be divided into 16 stereotypes. Not that they’d have called them stereotypes. Perish the pejorative thought. Their test (not that they’d have called it a test) allowed people in the workplace to establish what kind of people they were — introverts, for example, or extroverts — and this would make the workplace happier and more productive.

The end result is that executives who are sensible in every other way will describe themselves as ‘yellow’ or ‘blue’ people, depending on how ‘expert’ analysis of their completed questionnaire works out. Now, it is worth pointing out that the people are filling out these questionnaire about themselves, and that, as Robert Trivers has spent more than 20 years and several evidenced books pointing out, we humans are masters of self-deceit.

We lie like rugs, not just to impress others, but to impress ourselves. Accordingly, a so-called ‘scientific’ test such as Myers-Briggs provides analysis of questionable data provided by the only species to master and perfect the untruth: Us humans.

It’s not alone in this. The famous ink-blot or Rorschach test is another. It’s the one where you look at an inkblot and are forced to interpret it in order to get a job or stay in the job you have or be diagnosed as having something up with your mind.

Some years ago, Prof Trivers wanted to be readmitted to Harvard after medical leave, and found himself facing a sheet of paper with an inkblot on it.

“I had learned that results were graded based on whether you saw a picture or told a story, whether it was in colour, whether the story was coherent, and so on, but I had forgotten what the ‘appropriate’ answers were supposed to look like to signify ‘normal,’ so I simply randomised my responses, figuring absence of a pattern was my best hope,” he said.

Prof Trivers was readmitted, thereby proving he was being judged by an unscientific tool which human intelligence could outwit.

However, much these tests claim to be non-judgmental; to simply recognise hard-wired traits, this is untrue, as proven by the critical thinker in the corporate workshop I attended.

Those who were not identified as critical thinkers by the interesting but subjective test immediately hated the one who was. It was like the infamous school test where children were supposed to be clever or stupid based on their eye colour: It created a new reason to hate others.

It must be said that workers identified as yellow people don’t necessarily hate those identified as blue people. It’s just that they become convinced they know something which can help their careers.

The fact is that if they just dealt with the people in front of them, if they listened to them, looked at them and learned about them, they’d do a hell of a lot better, in career terms, than colour-coding.