Podcast Summary: "Selects: How Personality Tests Work"

Podcast: Stuff You Should Know (iHeartPodcasts)
Hosts: Josh Clark & Charles W. "Chuck" Bryant
Air Date: November 15, 2025
Episode Theme:
An accessible yet critical deep dive into the world of personality tests—past, present, and (problematic) future. Josh and Chuck dissect the popularity, origins, and scientific merits (or lack thereof) of personality testing, with emphasis on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the "Big Five," and other notable instruments.

Main Theme & Purpose

The episode demystifies the world of personality tests, exposing the surprisingly unscientific roots and misuse of widely accepted instruments like the MBTI. The hosts explore:

• The historical and psychological evolution of categorizing human personalities
• The functions (and failures) of popular personality tests in workplaces and clinical settings
• Critical perspectives from psychologists and their skepticism toward these instruments
• Why we continue to love these quizzes even if they don’t hold up scientifically

Breakdown of Key Discussion Points

1. Personality Testing: Ancient Roots to Modern Mania

• [06:25] Attempts to categorize personality date back to ancient Greece's "four humors" (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood), each linked to temperament (melancholy, phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric).
• [08:54] Critique: Real people are complex—everyone displays traits from all categories, sometimes in a single day.
  • Josh: "The human personality is just too complex, too squishy, too jelly-like to be boxed into one thing like that." (09:37)

2. Carl Jung: The Godfather of Types

• [10:08] Carl Jung’s 1921 "Psychological Types" posited basic structures: sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling—each modified by introversion or extraversion.
• [12:27] Jung’s influence set the stage for personality tests, albeit from armchair theorizing, not empirical study.
  • Chuck: "It wasn't like he had all this research and all this data … he was a deep thinker and he sat around and thought of these things." (12:58)

3. Birth of Myers-Briggs (MBTI)

• [15:46] Katherine Cook Briggs and daughter Isabel Briggs Myers drew directly from Jung, adapting and modifying his ideas to create the MBTI—initially to help guide post-WWII women entering the workforce.
• [17:09] MBTI’s corporate spread began in the 1970s after rights shifted to CPP (Consulting Psychologists Press).

4. Types of Personality Tests: Projective vs. Objective

• [21:23] "Projective" tests (e.g., Rorschach) ask for subjective interpretations; "Objective" tests (e.g., MBTI, Big Five) are standardized but still rely on subjective input.
  • Josh: "Ultimately that objective name is a bit of a misnomer because on the end of it, it's still interpreted by a person, which therefore makes it subjective." (22:10)

5. The Big Five: Psychology’s Preferred Model

• [22:28] Most psychologists prefer the "Big Five" traits: extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism.
• [24:41] Big Five aren't the full picture; they're a sketch of a person, not a total assessment.

6. The MBTI: Mechanics and Ubiquity

• [30:54] MBTI sorts you into 1 of 16 types via four dichotomies:
  • Introversion/Extraversion
  • Sensing/Intuition
  • Thinking/Feeling
  • Judging/Perceiving
• [33:13] Test consists of either/or questions and word pair choices.
• [35:17] Administering MBTI requires paid certification; ties test to a business model.

7. Critique Roundtable: MBTI and Its Peers

• Major MBTI Criticisms

  • [41:58] Widely used in hiring, firing, and promotion—even though its creators say it shouldn't be.
    • Josh: "If you have an HR person who's like, die hard believer in the MBTI and will hire or fire somebody based on their MBTI type, fire that person because you have a real dumb, dumb on your hands." (43:11)
  • [45:49] Based on Jung's armchair ideas, not empirical data; modern psychology largely disavows his theories.
  • [46:18] MBTI dichotomies are too rigid—real people live on spectra, not in boxes.
    • Josh: "If the Myers-Briggs test measured height, you would either be tall or short … You could say, 'Well, actually I'm right there in the middle.' And they'd be like, 'Well, that's short.'" (47:07)
  • [49:00] The MBTI was developed backwards: types first, then test to slot people into them; not grounded in observed data.

• Self-Reporting & Bias

  • [48:06] All personality tests are affected by inherent bias when people describe themselves.

• Comparisons with Other Tests

  • [50:44] Rorschach and MMPI are also problematic; notorious for subjective interpretation and labeling healthy people as mentally ill.
    • Chuck: "That's the last thing you need, is somebody's subjective opinion of, is it a bunny or is it a bat?" (55:05)
  • MMPI relies on a control group of “sane” people—whose definition of sanity was very much 1940s Minnesota.

• Forer Effect & Astrology Parallel

  • [60:21] Positive, flattering test feedback feels accurate—same trick used in astrology.
    • Josh: "Despite the fact that it was the same one given to the entire class, he took their answers and threw them out and said, here's your assessment. Same one for everybody." (61:22)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "(Talking about MBTI at work) Like privacy... Well, again, being forced at gunpoint to do it was just from the start." — Josh (34:24)
• "The human personality is just too complex, too squishy, too jelly-like to be boxed into one thing like that." — Josh (09:37)
• “If you have an HR person who's like, die hard believer in the MBTI and will hire or fire somebody based on their MBTI type, fire that person because you have a real dumb, dumb on your hands." — Josh (43:11)
• "If the Myers-Briggs test measured height, you would either be tall or short … You could say, 'Well, actually I’m right there in the middle.' And they'd be like, 'Well, that's short.'" — Josh (47:07)
• "It's a good word—dynamic. They want to point out that the person taking the test is the expert." — Chuck (36:23)
• "Despite the fact that it was the same one given to the entire class, he took their answers and threw them out and said, here's your assessment. Same one for everybody." — Josh (61:22)

Memorable Segments & Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment/Event | Summary | |-----------|-----------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 06:25 | Four Humors | How Greeks categorized personality, early foundations of "types" | | 10:08 | Carl Jung introduction | How Jung’s theories provide basis for MBTI and other systems | | 15:46 | Briggs & Myers Introduction | How they devised MBTI for women entering workforce post-WWII | | 22:28 | Psychologists’ preference: The Big Five | "Legit" psychometrics vs. pop-psychology favorites | | 30:54 | MBTI Structure | MBTI’s dichotomies, mechanics, and the “not a test” controversy | | 41:58 | Criticism starts | Major critiques: use in hiring/firing, shaky science, all-positive feedback | | 47:07 | Spectra not boxes | MBTI’s problem with gray areas—everyone is “tall or short” | | 55:05 | Legal and life consequences | How Rorschach and MMPI results can seriously (and wrongly) affect lives | | 60:21 | Forer effect | Why tests feel “accurate” (because everybody likes flattery, even if generic) |

Overall Tone & Style

Josh and Chuck keep it conversational and humorous ("P stands for Pisces, right? Or Pooper." — 03:30), blending pop-culture references and asides with approachable skepticism toward the topic. The episode is packed with historical trivia, personal anecdotes (including their own Myers-Briggs experience at work), but always circles back to the scientific reality (or lack thereof) behind popular psychology fads.

Conclusion/Takeaway

Personality tests—especially the MBTI—are fun, occasionally helpful for opening conversations or personal reflection, but are not scientifically rigorous and should not be used for serious life decisions like hiring, firing, or diagnostics. The psychology field generally prefers the spectrum-based “Big Five” to rigid typologies, but all personality inventories have pitfalls rooted in human complexity and self-reporting bias.

“Don't box me in.” — Chuck (28:18)

For Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In

If you’ve ever taken an MBTI test at work, wondered about your “type,” or been labeled “too neurotic” by a Big Five quiz, this episode will arm you with historical context, a skeptical eye, and a chuckle at how much of personality science is more personality than science.

End of Summary