enneagram + personality
Personality Tests. From online quizzes to dating profiles to job applications, these things show up EVERYWHERE!
Sure, they can be entertaining, and thank god now I know that Alanis, Groot, and I share the same meyers’-briggs’ type… (ironically, accurate).
But did you ever wonder where this collective fixation on personality typing started – or how the business of personality tests grew from measuring random lumps on your skull to an industry that pulls in more than 2 billion dollars every year?
the basics
Now, I’m no psychologist, so today we’re just going to cover the basics:
where these things came from,
how they became so popular,
and how you can use them as a not-so-secret superpower both at work and at home.
personality theory emerged all the way back in 300BC, when Hippocrates – the father of medicine, the guy with the ‘oath’ - debuted his theory of personality – believing that human moods, behaviors and emotions could be caused by the levels of certain bodily fluids in each of us. This was refined further by a physician named Galen, who theorized that there were between 4 and 9 major personality types.
Now, of course, we’ve moved on from the belief that the amount of blood in your body determines your level of introversion, but this early system was adapted by many of the contributors to the development of what we now call psychology, including Kant, Jung, and even Katherine cook briggs, who co-published that Meyers briggs type indicator in 1944. Hold on tho – we’re not quite there yet.
The next major development comes along in the roaring 1820’s – the decade that produced beethoven’s 9th symphony, the internal combustion engine, the first photograph… and… phrenology. The science of determining personality and other mental traits by measuring the size and location of bumps on your skull. (Now, while this was also fairly quickly disproven, phrenology does make an interesting contribution to our story – it moved the study of personality from a philosophical concept to a scientific discipline.
And because of this shift, within a few decades the new science of psychology would become a widely accepted reality.
And then, we hit world war 1, and the first widely used personality test: the woodworth personal data sheet.
You see, the us army had a theory: that when people with a “weak constitution” faced the challenges of war, their bodies shut down, and they shut down.’ They called this ‘shell shock’ – we call it PTSD. And Robert Sessions Woodworth – a professor at Columbia – saw it as a serious problem, writing That “liability to ‘shell shock’ was a handicap almost as serious as low intelligence…”
So, in an attempt to identify soldiers with this ‘handicap’, Woodworth developed 116 questions to determine a soldier’s level of emotional instabililty. Score poorly enough, and you might not get sent to war! By the end of 1918, almost 2 million of our soldiers – over 1/3 of the us army - completed the first personality test.
modern growth
Ok. Lets face it – these days, nobody’s taking the WPDS. So where do the tests that we use today come from?
Well, not that much later…. the Meyers-Briggs (a test that 20% of the US population took last year) was first produced in 1944 so that women entering the workplace during WW2 could identify the sort of jobs that would be most comfortable and effective for them.[1]
Less than a decade later, the DISC assessment was popularized – and shortly after that came the most widely scientifically accepted personality assesment: the 5 factor model (aka the big 5).
Hopefully you can see that each of these typing systems can trace its roots straight back through history – there’s a surprisingly clear line from Woodworth and world war 1 all the way back to Hippocrates and his four temperaments!
And then, there’s the big trendy one – currently grabbing 4X more interest than any other typing system on google, and popping up all over your Instagram – the enneagram.
While the official test is one of our more recent, The enneagram’s story is shockingly similar, with a deep history reaching back thousands of years, mid-century interest from psychologists, and a widely used test that continues to evolve with science and research.
tips + tactics
First, these tools work best when we leverage them as superpowers for self awareness and discovery.
If you’re curious and want to understand your own conscious or unconscious patterns and motivations, taking a personality test like the enneagram can be incredibly valuable.
And once you’re a jedi master, or at least a padawan, of your own personality, you can use your power for good in other ways – by building empathy and connection with the people in your life.
For me, recognizing and owning my own conflict avoidant tendancies has been super illuminating, but I actually find it most valuable in relationships. sharing my results with coworkers – and being genuinely curious about theirs – well, its allowed us to form deeper connections, increase our empathy, and see each other a little clearer.
So… what’s you’re type? Are you a 3 wing 2? An INTJ? Do you know your top five strengths?
thanks for being here.
