The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test is used by many organizations and consultants, but it’s been criticized by many as pseudo-science that’s unhelpful, and even harmful. I talk to Randy Stein, who has researched the Myers Briggs and personality tests in general. Transcript is below.
Topics discussed include: the reasons people object to the Myers Briggs test; the downsides of personality tests that group people into boxes (as opposed to using a spectrum-like approach); the Forer effect, where people often believe that vague descriptions apply to them; the downsides of labeling ourselves and others; how the complexity of a question can wrongly seem like deepness; how Myers-Briggs relates to the more scientifically respected “Big Five” personality traits. We also talk about Randy’s research on political polarization, showing how we can be drawn to being the opposite of a disliked group.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
Resources related to or mentioned in this episode:
- Randy’s paper on Myers-Briggs
- Randy’s paper on conflating difficulty with deepness
- Randy’s paper on pressures to be not like an outgroup
TRANSCRIPT
(Transcript may contain errors.)
Zach Elwood: Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding people. You can learn more about it, and see my most popular episodes, at behavior-podcast.com. If you like this show, please hit subscribe on the platform you’re listening on. That’s one way you can show your support for what I do.
Have you ever taken the Myers Briggs personality test? This is also sometimes referred to as the 16 Personalities Test; because it categorizes people into one of 16 personality types.
I first became acquainted with the Myers Briggs in my mid twenties, when I had a job as a video producer at Comcast Cable in Savannah Georgia. They did a team-building activity where we all took the Myers Briggs test and then talked about that and other psychological stuff. I remember thinking that the questions were quite vague and ambiguous, and I could easily imagine answering them differently depending on how I interpreted them or how I was feeling that day. I also remember thinking the 16 personality categories it lumped people into seemed quite vague, also. All in all, it felt like a non productive exercise to me.
Over the years I would occasionally hear people talk about the Myers Briggs in work-related situations. Recently I started thinking again about personality tests, and so I wanted to talk to someone who’d researched and written about the downsides and weaknesses of Myers Briggs.
This led me to the social psychologist Randy Stein, who’d worked on a couple papers about Myers Briggs. One paper of his went into several granular reasons for why the Myers Briggs fails from a scientific basis and also just from a practical benefit angle. It also talked about why, despite its rather obvious failings and downsides, people and companies think it’s useful and promote it.
If you’ve ever wondered, “Why do some people dislike the Myers Briggs so much?”, or maybe “Even if the Myers Briggs isn’t scientifically respected, can’t it still be helpful in some way?”, I think you’ll enjoy this talk. Just a note that this talk is on youtube and includes video; I’ll also put some chapter markers to different topics we discuss in the youtube video description.
Also, if you have had experiences, positive or negative, with Myers Briggs or other personality tests like the Enneagram, or other ones, please leave some comments on YouTube.
Randy has also worked on some interesting research related to political polarization; towards the end we talk a bit about his research on that, which was related to how, when we dislike an out-group, we can be drawn to resisting the ideas of people in that group; basically conflict can serve to create an anti-conformity dynamic with an outgroup.
Randy Stein teaches at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, California.
Okay here’s the talk with Randy Stein.
Hey, Randy, thanks for coming on the show.
Randy Stein: Sure, great to be here.
Zach: Maybe we can start with your overall impressions of the overall thoughts on the Myers-Briggs test. And maybe a good way to enter that would be if you were a business—if you were in charge of a business—would you use Myers-Briggs at the business, and why or why not?
Randy: Yeah. To take your question literally, if I were in charge, it would be a hard no, although I’m not always the one in charge. I think probably if I can encapsulate everything wrong with Myers-Briggs—and there’s still a lot of different ways you could approach talking about what’s wrong with it—in a nutshell, I would say there’s no such thing as customer service science. And by that, I mean Myers-Briggs is at the very least science-presenting, right? They have this thing that appears to be like a scientific personality test. They have a manual that is written somewhat in the style of an academic paper, there’s result sections that have factor analyses and all sorts of statistics that you would write up if you’re an academic studying personality, they have something resembling a theory behind it. So, they are at the very least science presenting.
But when I say there’s no such thing as customer service science, they’re science presenting but in the end, they are a profit-driven company that depends on keeping customers happy. And if it is at all ever the case that they face a conflict between ‘Should we do what’s scientifically accurate, or should we do what will sell us more stuff?’ it is, of course, the case that they will go with whatever sells us more stuff. And their customers, as with most people in the world, are not necessarily experts in scientific academic psychology so, of course, those things are going to come up all the time. And again, they’re going to make the concessions every time. I think that’s where all of the issues derive from that. Right? Plenty of people who have had all sorts of issues, it’s not ‘How are we going to fix this?’ It’s ‘How can we sweep this under the rug or reframe it in some way?’ And there’s all sorts of issues and we can go into them.
But back to your question. If it were me, I would say, “What is it we’re trying to get out of here? Do we even want to avoid personality tests?” But it’s not me. And to the question of if it’s someone else’s business, the reason why a Myers-Briggs consultant would be hired is because you’re trying to tell some story about making your employees come together. Right? We could talk about management consulting, but it’s often implicit like they’re there for symbolism.
Zach: Right, it’s a way to build team unity or give a nod to team unity. That kind of thing.
Randy: Right. Yeah. So, it’s entirely possible that even if there is zero value to the Myers-Briggs test itself—which I think if I were going to round it to a number, it would probably be zero. If you have a consultant who is skilled at getting people to talk, on that level, sure, there could be value. I would say there’s probably still some… It’s not great to have employees or anyone else believing things about themselves that aren’t true.
Zach: Or other people. Yeah.
Randy: Right. Or even if you don’t have a consultant, can you just give your employees the Myers-Briggs test? Or, like the company I used to work at, make up your own Myers-Briggs test because the official one costs money? Will that get them talking? Sure. And that could be beneficial in some way.
Zach: Right, just talking about it.
Randy: Right. So if you’re purely at the level of, ‘We need to tell a story. We need to show our bosses that we did something to help our employees come together,’ yeah, it could do that. But that’s really more like we’re trying to save it and justify it rather than starting with, “What is this thing? Does it actually do what they say it is?”
Zach: Yeah. It kind of reminds me I was talking to somebody about astrology and they were saying similarly, you could imagine benefits from just talking about astrology in the sense of it can help somebody become more aware of how people are different like there could be some benefits and you could theoretically see that even as you think astrology is complete bullshit, but it’s like a separate thing from whether the thing itself is valid or… Yeah.
Randy: Yeah. At the very least, totally irrespective of any scientific validity, it takes you on a ride.
Zach: Right, you think about things.
Randy: Right. It gets you thinking about things. Yeah.
Zach: Right, which doesn’t take much. You can think about a very low bar. Many things get you to think about things and can make you think about helpful things. But yeah, so maybe that’s a good way into… I mean, one of the things that surprised me—I can’t actually remember offhand if it was in your paper, which I really liked, or if it was in another paper, I’m pretty sure it was in your paper— about the fact that I didn’t know that you could just choose what personality type you want to have. Is that true about the Myers-Briggs?
Randy: Yeah, essentially. About five years ago, I wrote a paper with a colleague of mine, Alex Swan, where we basically tried to take all the publicly available information that we could at the time on Myers-Briggs and evaluate it as if it is a scientific theory, which, again, they present themselves as such. And one of the things we did was if you’re evaluating a theory, which is something that’s not traditionally taught in undergraduate education, but we basically took that kind of approach and said one of the things that should be true of a good scientific theory is there shouldn’t be internal contradictions. It shouldn’t say that both X and not X are true. And we found that if you look at the Myers-Briggs manual, which as far as I know, was written in the late ’90s and is still the manual that they go by today, as far as I know, what they say is you take the assessment and at the end it gives you your type, right? And what they say is if it feels wrong or if you feel like there’s some other type that you associate with, you can just take that. And that’s it. So number one, that’s a great example of customer service science-
Zach: Give the people what they want. Yeah.
Randy: Yeah, that’s literally on the nose. They have this giant manual—hundreds of pages about all the statistics behind, supposedly, that it’s a reliable test—even though other people think it’s not. But they’ve spilled a lot of ink, at least, saying that it is. But if you don’t like what it says, you can just change it. The other part of that, which I think is maybe even more telling, to get back to the idea that a theory shouldn’t have contradictions, what they say in their official copy and on their website or at least at the time I looked at their website earlier today—it looks like they kind of backed off this—but what they say is everybody has a true type. There’s this thing inside of you, I guess presumably inside your brain, that represents the true essence of who you are. And then presumably, the assessment reveals it for you. Right? So the contradiction is if they are allowing you to essentially choose your own type, which is basically like if you’re allowed to say, “No, I don’t like the result. I’m going to go with this one instead of that one,” is true type hidden or not?
Zach: Yeah, how much do we know our own true type?
Randy: Yeah! Because if I have the freedom just to say, “Okay, this thing said I’m an INFP but I want to be an INFJ,” and then they say, “Okay, well, that is the real you,” is it hidden or is it just what I think it is? So, those are the kinds of things that we look for. When you start thinking in terms of that evaluating as if it is a legitimate theory, a lot of things start falling apart.
Zach: Yeah, I think that also relates to the limits of self-knowledge and also how much you’re expressing your preferences on those things versus what you really like. Because when I’ve taken those kinds of tests, it’s like I can imagine people choosing what they want to be like versus how they really express in the world. You know?
Randy: Yeah, and that’s an interesting way that they sort of box themselves into a corner. Which, again, from a customer service perspective, doesn’t really matter. But if we’re talking about is this an actual personality assessment, it matters quite a bit. Which is the type, technically—according to their definition—is about your preferences. Not your actual behavior. The questions on the assessment, I would say, if you look at it, kind of mixes it both but they kind of feel like they’re more about the behavior. And, again, that adds some ambiguity because you could have the actions of an introvert but the preferences of an extrovert. Right? You might say okay, if you ask me,
“Do I tend to talk at parties?”
“No.”
But I feel like deep within me it’s an extrovert way to come out, right? And this is not a scientific theory issue because, with a scientific theory, you’re supposed to have clear predictions. But if the questions are about preferences and the preferences may or may not match behavior, it’s like you’re saying there is a real me. Which is it? Is it my preference or is it my behavior? They just say there’s preferences. But why? You could easily make the case that, well, anybody could think anything about themselves. Your behavior is what really matters and is more reflective of the real you. And they just kind of slide to that entirely, right? Again, from a customer service perspective, that dichotomy, if anything, draws people a little bit deeper into it because you get to think about the differences between my preferences and my actions. But it means the assessment itself doesn’t really say much because there’s that lack of clarity there.
Zach: I’ve also read criticisms of these kinds of things that use firm boxes or boundaries versus a more spectrum approach where it’s like you could have somebody that’s theoretically right around that line and they’re very similar, but for one reason or another, now they’re in completely different boxes, which I thought was a pretty good criticism.
Randy: Yeah. This is a very classic one. And again, this might be my favorite issue of how they just kind of ignored it- not ignored it, but sidestepped it and sort of pulled the rug over it. So, if you take a site class—a social site class or a personality site class—a day one kind of thing is for the most part, everything exists on a spectrum rather than being in boxes. Meaning most personality attributes are traits rather than discrete states, right? Like with introversion versus extroversion, for example, most people are not hard one or the other. Most people fall in the middle. Which is most things in life. Most things in life are normally distributed like that. So this is by definition a problem for sorting people into boxes. And even with the Myers-Briggs assessment, a classic criticism was even with the assessment that they put out, you get a range. You don’t get scores that are concentrated on polls, you get a range of people concentrated towards the middle. So the way they get around that—and again, this is in their manual if you’re reading it as a social scientist, it’s like, “Why are they saying this out loud?” But if you’re reading it as, “Oh, they’re just trying to make people happy,” then it makes perfect sense. What they say in the manual is they just changed the way that it’s scored so that you can’t really score in the middle.
So basically the way this is supposed to work is you have a theory and you test it. If the test makes it seem like the theory isn’t correct, you give up on it or you change the theory. What they did is, “Well, we have this theory that people are sorted into types. We collect the data on it. It doesn’t seem like that’s true. Let’s keep the theory and just change how we score it.” Which is totally backwards. Like, it’s good evidence that people don’t actually sort themselves into types, but we’re still going to keep on doing that anyway and just change the scoring so that that helps do that.
Zach: Got you. Yep. So, am I correct in thinking the Forer effect has a lot to do with this? When it comes to people who say they find a lot of value in these and other personality tests like the Enneagram, when it comes to people who say, “Oh, I really correspond with that,” is the Forer effect related to that in your opinion? And can you talk a little bit about what that is?
Randy: Yeah, I think so. I mean, there’s 16 types and they sound different. Right? Extrovert sounds different than introvert, which the intuition feels different from… What’s it? Analysis?
Zach: Analytic or something.
Randy: Yeah. They sound different, but they have definite descriptions of each of the types. If you read them, they do tend to be worded fairly vaguely. And they tend to have sentences along the lines of it’s describing intuition. It’s like, you tend to be someone who… Like, what is currently going on in the present, do you think about how it applies to the future? And, of course, everyone’s going to say yes to that because you’re just describing how the human mind works.
Zach: Like, “Yes, I’m human.” [chuckles]
Randy: Yes. [laughs] Right. So yeah, they might sound different but when you actually read the descriptions, I think you can reasonably make the case that whatever type it assigns you to at the end, you’re going to be able to see it in yourself. Which is what the Forer effect is, right? If you give people vague statements like, “Hey, sometimes I feel like being outgoing, sometimes I don’t,” people will tend to read that as accurate—which is true because it is true to most people—but they’ll also tend to see it as like, “Oh, something deep has been revealed about me.” Which really it hasn’t because it’s not a very specific statement.
Zach: Right. Which is the same way that they say psychic stuff or astrology stuff works on the Forer effect because we’re… Or con artistry in general kind of works on the same principle where it’s like we think somebody knows something about us based on some vague statements. Right?
Randy: Right.
Zach: Well, and the thing that strikes me there is I can imagine just taking a few hours and creating my own personality test off the top of my head. And as long as I hit upon some of the major points which most people think of like introversion and extroversion, being more analytical versus being more intuitive, or these kinds of broad tendencies, I just feel like if I just created my own off the top of my head and I gave it to people, people will be like, “Oh, that’s really smart. I can really see myself in that.” Which I think gets to how easy these things are to strike chords with people. You know?
Randy: Yeah. One of the things that Myers-Briggs uses to give off the appearance of validity is the most commonly used personality assessment in academic psychology, this thing called The Big Five. And a couple of the dimensions of Myers-Briggs do correlate with a couple of dimensions of The Big Five. The most obvious one is… One of the dimensions of Big Five is extroversion, which does correlate with the MBTI extroversion versus introversion dimension. It’s nice that they do that. But kind of to your point, I feel like most people given a basic definition of extroversion versus introversion, which I think most of us have, could come up with something that would correlate with one of the official measures of The Big Five. I mean, that’s good for them that it correlates somewhat with The Big Five-
Zach: But it doesn’t mean much. [crosstalk] That’s a pretty low bar because most people wouldn’t think of those basic aspects too.
Randy: Yeah. It’s almost a bit of a cell phone because you’re saying we’re legitimizing ourselves by saying, “We correlate with The Big Five a bit, so just use that.” Especially given like that so you can just take that for free. I guess there’s all sorts of bootleg versions, but the official one costs like 60 bucks for an individual to take. Why bother going through that when there’s better options for free?
Zach: Yeah. Another thing that you’ve worked on is the idea that when you tell people something kind of complex and difficult to understand, that they’re more likely to think it was meaningful. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Randy: Yeah, this was like an offshoot of our work on the Myers-Briggs. So, about… Oh, this must have been seven or eight years ago. The BuzzFeed YouTube channel posted a video where some of their employees took the Myers-Briggs test and what I thought was really interesting about that is one of the guys in the video, for the BuzzFeed fans, it was the guy who went on to be Eugene in The Try Guys, if you know The Try Guys. I mean, his name is Eugene so he was Eugene throughout the whole thing, but he was later one of the Try Guys. So they’re taking the Myers-Briggs assessment and Eugene says at one point, “I’m surprising myself with my answers to these questions,” as if to say, “And this makes me really interested to see my result.” Right? Like, “I’m feeling myself going through thinking about myself as I’m answering these questions, so I’m interested in the result.” I thought it was kind of interesting because he was picking up… If you look at the Myers-Briggs assessment questions, if you know a bit about designing these kinds of scales, they’re actually not all that great. Some of them are actually pretty confusing. They ask you to choose between words that aren’t really opposites and you can choose one or the other. Difficult questions in these kinds of assessments is actually bad. You don’t want people wondering what you’re trying to say.
Zach: Yeah, because that’s more room for ambiguity and misinterpretations.
Randy: It’s more room for ambiguity. Right. You want people interpreting things about the same way, right? The Big Five items tend to be much more straightforward. It’s just like, “Hey, do you… I seldom feel blue. I insult people. I don’t talk a lot…” They’re much more straightforward. So I thought what was interesting was he’s picking up on that difficulty, which should be a bad thing, and include that like maybe there’s something wrong with this assessment. But he was flipping around as like, “No, no, no. This is a sign that’s really getting at something.”
Zach: That’s deep!
Randy: Yeah. Yeah. So we did a bunch of studies based on that premise and we used—we didn’t use the official Myers-Briggs, we used a competitor to it that’s called the KTS, Keirsey Temperament Sorter—and we made up our own assessments that were like BuzzFeed quizzes where it’s like, “Which color describes you the most?” And what we found was the more difficult we made the questions… We did that basically by adding ambiguity. So, a low ambiguity question is, “What color of car do you prefer? Green or blue?” A high ambiguity question, which actually we took from a BuzzFeed quiz, was, “Which color between green and blue best describes Tuesday?”
Zach: It’s almost like a Zen Koan approach to it. Like, the more Koan it is, the more deep they might seem.
Randy: Yeah. I think the intuition is the more unrelated to personality the question seems, the better it must be. But, of course, it’s the opposite. That’s what we found. The harder we made the questions, even if we made them nonsense, people would pick up on the difficulty and they would associate that difficulty with depth. Meaning the harder it is, the more I think this is getting at the real me. Right? Which, again, if you know how to design these things, is the total opposite. The more ambiguous it is, the more noise that you’re getting. You’re not really reading much of anything. So yeah, at least some of the experience of taking the Myers-Briggs assessment is picking up on that ambiguity and thinking that, “Oh, because I’m not really sure what the answer is here, it must really be getting at something really deep down inside.”
Zach: It makes you think I’m exploring some unknown parts of myself or something. It has that appearance or can feel like that.
Randy: Yeah. Which, to go back to your first question, that kind of thing as a conversation starter, sure. Right? Like, if I asked you, “Hey, which do you think is more you? Breakfast or lunch?” Even when I raised that question to myself, I feel myself starting to think about it.
Zach: It’s like a good party game or a date kickoff or something.
Randy: It’s a good way to start talking about like, “Hey, what kind of food do you like? Or what’s your daily routine like?” You might eventually get to something meaningful. But that initial question is not a good personality assessment question on its own.
Zach: That’s what strikes me about these things, too, when I’ve taken them. And then just in surveys in general, I see so many badly designed questions where I see so much room for ambiguity and different interpretations and I’m like… That’s always what strikes me as somebody who’s a writer and interested in that. I just always see so much room for ambiguity and I’m like, “I could totally imagine interpreting this question in a totally different way,” which gets to your point about ambiguity and such things.
Randy: Yeah. I design these kinds of things all the time and do experiments all the time. It’s hard to write a question that has no ambiguity.
Zach: Yeah, even impossible. But you can get less or more. Yeah.
Randy: Yeah. But to lean into it is not what you want to be doing.
Zach: Right. Maybe let’s talk about the downsides of this. Because I think a lot of people are like, “Well, if it helps you have better conversations, if it helps you have those conversations and think about things more, it can be valuable.” But I think, to me, the major downside I see is thinking in terms of labels, whether it’s labels of ourselves or labels of other people, I just see so much harm in labeling ourselves or labeling other people as opposed to trying to analyze what the context is and giving people and yourself room for getting outside these boundaries that we assign. And that to me is what bugs me about these kinds of tests because I don’t think of myself in terms of labels, I don’t think of other people in terms of labels. People can change in major ways and such. Do you have things to add to that and what bugs you the most?
Randy: Yeah. So, the labeling is a problem for a couple of reasons, and one is as we discussed. If you’re artificially putting people into boxes when really everything is on a spectrum, the label might just be wrong. Period. But also there’s this illusion of explanation. And by that, I mean in personality psychology, there’s this longstanding debate over ‘Is personality causal?’ If I call you an introvert, have I said something about what causes your behavior or have I just described it right? Are you quiet at parties because you’re an introvert, or when I call you an introvert, am I just describing that you tend to be quiet at parties?
Zach: And that introversion could be caused by many different factors underneath, but present in similar ways.
Randy: Yeah. There’s a great example that [inaudible 00:30:21] is like, when we say a car is reliable, when we talk about the reliability of a car—so that means a few things. It means it tends to turn on, the brakes work, the gas pedal works… But there is no one thing in the car where we say, “There is the reliability.” Reliability is an end description, it’s not a causal force. And a personality, it could be the same thing. We might have this illusion of, oh, when I’m calling someone extroverted or open-minded or whatever else, I’ve explained who they are. But now I’ve just condensed it into a single word, which is useful maybe, but I haven’t necessarily explained anything.
Zach: Yeah. And then there’s the aspect of, you know, say you label yourself as an introvert and then you’re more likely to… You know, some people will use that as an excuse to not push the boundaries of what they’re capable of and they’ll be like, “Well, that’s just who I am.” It can be a crutch for certain types of those labels that we give to ourselves. That’s what strikes me about some of these things where it’s like, “Well, I just won’t try to do those things because I know that I’m like this,” where it’s like maybe you’re not like that and you’re bounding yourself in. Also, the way I’ve seen people talk about it used in the workplace and such where it’s like, “I’m going to approach them for these reasons,” where it’s like maybe you’re not giving them enough credit, maybe you should just think about how you would feel in their shoes. It can be a little limiting in terms of thinking about full complexity with people, I feel like.
Randy: Yeah. And, again, if you take what the Myers-Briggs manual says super literally, it’s hard to escape that conclusion. Right? It’s revealed the real you, so how much can you really fight it?
Zach: And they say—correct me if I’m wrong—but do they say you basically don’t change, or do they say you can change the Myers-Briggs?
Randy: Yeah, they say… I definitely see something like if you’ve taken the assessment earlier in life, you don’t need to take it later.
Zach: Oh, really?
Randy: Yeah.
Zach: Because I’ve also seen people say that you can take it over time, and based on just how you’re feeling, you’ll get different results too. [crosstalk]
Randy: Yeah. Right. One of the classic problems with it is… So, a personality is supposed to be reliable. Meaning if I take it on Monday and I take it on Friday, I should get the same results. Folks who have looked into this say that with Myers-Briggs, that that doesn’t work that way. They say it does. It’s kind of hard to know what’s real and what’s not on that. But either way, they do at least imply that it’s supposed to be stable over time. If it’s a true type that you’re born with, it would be weird to be like, “Okay, but by the way, it changes when you’re 50 or whatever.”
Zach: Yeah. I wonder if they get into it as a way to defend it where they’re like, “Well, if you had actually tried a little bit harder when you took it, you would have got your true type. But you’re not taking it seriously enough so it keeps changing when you take it.” You know? Something like this where it’s like they’ll put the blame on somebody for not really trying hard enough to take it. I don’t know. But I would imagine that’s maybe a strategy. And I did happen to notice after I looked at your work on personality tests, I happened to notice that you’d also worked on some political polarization-related things that interested me because I’ve worked on that myself. I’ve actually been working on that kind of thing full-time over the last year. But yeah, you had a paper that talked about the tendency for people to resist the opinions of groups that they morally oppose or dislike. Can you talk a little bit about that research? The thing that interested me there as somebody who thinks a lot about polarization and how we come to these divergent opposed narratives is—and I talk about this in my polarization books about how we can be drawn to being unlike people that we dislike, the groups that we dislike, which kind of has this polarizing force for all of these issues and beliefs that get aligned on either side. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your research there and how you view that kind of pressure to not be like them or something.
Randy: Yeah. The finding there was basically we have this instinctive, automatic, I guess you could say almost repulsion to the views of people that we morally dislike. Even for things that don’t matter, like if we hear what their favorite ice cream flavor is.
Zach: Minor things. Yeah.
Randy: Yeah. To go into it a little bit more, the prevailing opinion in social psychology at the time was people are intuitively cooperative. For evolutionary reasons, we tend to go along with one another and that’s kind of helped us with teamwork and helped us help the species survive. When you put people under time pressure and when people are playing games where they can either cooperate or compete with one another, if you put them under time pressure, they tend to be more cooperative rather than more competitive. So I thought okay, maybe. But what if it’s people who you morally despise? Will that intuitive cooperation still be there? So basically I did a couple of studies where I trained people to understand their automatic reactions. In psychology, there’s this thing called the Stroop test where you see a word on the screen and you have to say the color that the ink is printed in. So if it’s the word red printed in red, it’s really easy. If it’s the word red printed in green, and you have to say green, that takes you like a second because you have to suppress the urge to say red. So basically I put people on the Stroop test and said, “Do you feel that? That’s this thing called action and it’s you fighting your instincts.” Then this other thing where I gave people a bunch of preferences, like, “Hey, what’s your favorite ice cream, chocolate or vanilla?” That kind of a thing. And I said, “Oh, by the way, this was before the 2016 election. Oh, by the way, Trump supporters prefer chocolate.” Right? And then I asked people, “Tell me what your favorite is again.”
And it turned out that when you morally disagreed with the group—so if I tell you Trump supporters prefer chocolate and this is 2016, you’re a Hillary supporter, basically, people feel the automatic urge to now say the opposite, even though I’m just asking them to say their own thing again. That was kind of the point there. People, maybe in general, are intuitively cooperative. But if it’s a group that we don’t like, it’s intuitively the opposite. We feel that automatic pressure to distance ourselves, like you said, even for things that don’t really matter.
Zach: That’s a great one. I mean, it’s actually really interesting because I had been looking for research like this. I’d seen some other ones, but not as direct as yours. And I was actually trying to… I put some things like that in my book, but it’s funny that I just happened to contact you from the Myers-Briggs thing and you’ve worked on something that I was actually looking for in that research and I couldn’t find it before. Thanks for coming on, Randy. This was an interesting conversation, and thanks for your work and your time.
Randy: Yeah, my pleasure.
Zach: That was a talk with the social psychologist, Randy Stein, who teaches at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona
If after hearing this, you wonder, “If I shouldn’t do the Myers Briggs and want to learn about personality, what should I do”, Randy recommended that, instead of getting into personality tests, maybe take a class about psychology, or find a short intro to psychology type of syllabus online. In other words, consider if you really need a personality test of any sort and instead maybe just learn about some basic psychological teachings.
This has been the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to it, and please let me know what you thought of it in the YouTube comments, if you would. If you have ideas for future show topics, please let me know that, too.
Thanks for your interest.