Selects: How Personality Tests Work
Stuff You Should Know
iHeartPodcasts
4.5 • 82.7K Ratings
🗓️ 15 November 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For millennia, we have tried to put human personalities into neat types, an effort psychology took up early in its history in an effort to legitimize itself. But is the idea of types – which all personality inventories are based on - flawed to begin with? Find out in this classic episode.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:04.7 | Hey, everybody. |
| 0:05.8 | It's me, Josh, and for this week's select, I've chosen our August 2017 episode on |
| 0:11.0 | personality tests. |
| 0:12.6 | It turns out that the vast majority of them, maybe all of them, are scientifically faulty |
| 0:17.2 | to at least some degree, and some of them are just outright made up. |
| 0:21.4 | This can be a real problem if they're being used to diagnose you with a mental illness or hire |
| 0:26.4 | or fire you or put you in jail, and that actually happens. So dig into this deceptively |
| 0:32.0 | interesting episode and enjoy it. And I'm an ENFP, by the way. |
| 0:42.0 | Music and enjoy it. And I'm an ENFP, by the way. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeartRadio. |
| 0:51.8 | Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know. Yeah. Just a couple of ITJs's. I don't remember what I am. We've taken it before. How Stuff Works hosted it years back. Do you remember? |
| 1:13.5 | Yeah, we had like many companies do, as you'll see, we had when we were under Discovery's Tender Wing. |
| 1:20.7 | They paid for someone to come to our office and administer the Myers-Briggs personality test. |
| 1:27.1 | At gunpoint. |
| 1:28.2 | Yeah. |
| 1:28.8 | I don't remember, but I'm pretty sure I was an ENFP. |
| 1:33.4 | I don't remember what I was. |
| 1:36.1 | I'll probably say like three different things as we go through this one. |
| 1:39.4 | Like just looking at it again, I'm pretty sure I was an ENFP. |
| 1:43.3 | Okay. |
| 1:44.1 | P stands for Pisces. |
... |
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