Personality
Overthink
Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.
4.7 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 3 March 2026
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can Buzzfeed quizzes, Myers-Briggs Types, and Enneagrams tell us anything valid about who we are? In episode 163 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss personality. They talk through the Big Five personality test and its legitimacy, the history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test (MBTI), and how the concept of personality emerged out of abnormal psychology. Why did the concept of personality replace using literature to understand the self? How does the concept of personality presuppose a fixed concept of the self? And what is the connection between MBTI and World War II? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts think about how personality tests might be susceptible to the Barnum effect and their reduction of the self to egos.
Works Discussed:
Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality
Merve Emre, What's Your Type? The Story of the Myers-Briggs, and How Personality Testing Took Over the World
Colin Koopman, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Overthink. |
| 0:19.6 | The podcast where your two favorite personalities talk about philosophy and its connection to everyday life. |
| 0:26.6 | I'm Ellie Anderson. |
| 0:28.1 | And I'm David Pena Guzman. |
| 0:30.6 | Personality tests are everywhere. |
| 0:33.4 | With simple Google search, you can find a BuzzFeed quiz that will tell you which character |
| 0:37.8 | from friends you are. |
| 0:39.5 | Your workplace might even require that you take a Myers-Briggs type indicator test in |
| 0:44.6 | order to determine, like, what kind of vibe you're going to bring into the workplace. |
| 0:49.4 | And I have to say, David, right here at the top of this episode, I was completely obsessed with personality |
| 0:56.4 | tests. When I was like a late teenager to young adult, this was the college era for me. |
| 1:04.0 | I read so many books about the Myers-Briggs personality typology, the or the type indicator, we'll get into that later, |
| 1:12.8 | and why it may not be a personality typology, but that is neither here or there for the moment. |
| 1:17.5 | Enneagram was absolutely one of my favorites. And I would like read these books. There was one book |
| 1:22.9 | about the anyogram called, Are you my type? Am I yours? And it was about how different enneagram types, |
| 1:28.9 | you know, relate to each other and what potential sources of conflict may emerge. And this was like |
| 1:34.6 | my Bible for dealing with my dad when I was a teenager struggling with like parental relations. |
| 1:41.6 | Wait, I'm curious about when this era ended for you. |
| 1:44.6 | Was it still there when we met at the beginning of grad school? |
| 1:48.4 | No. |
| 1:49.0 | I think it ended because of my encounter with Frankfurt School philosophy, which we, yeah, |
| 1:55.9 | may get into a bit in the episode with this idea that maybe personality typologies are, you know, |
... |
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