You are not a personality type

You are complex. You cannot be reduced to a single number or to a four-letter personality type, as the Enneagram and Myer-Briggs tests try to do. There’s far more to you than that. But we like reductionist systems that make sense of the world. And yet the world is far too messy to be boiled down to a few letters or a number on a scale of 1-9.

I know I’ll make some people angry when they read this, but neither the Enneagram or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) are scientific. In fact, attempts to scientifically verify them have failed. As this USA Today article reports, there have been numerous studies on the MBTI and none of them have validated it. Despite the fact that it has been shown to not be reliable, valid, independent, or comprehensive — the four requirements of psychological science — millions of people take the test every year. Half of people who take the MBTI five weeks apart have drastically different scores. In other words, it’s useless!

The last time I was asked to take the MBTI was two years ago. As I took it, I was shocked by how primitive and obviously false the test is. It kept asking me to choose between two words or feelings, forcing an all-or-nothing decision. There was no continuum between the two dispositions. For instance, either you are a wall flower or you are the life of the party. But what if you’re neither? What if you are sometimes the life of the party and sometimes a wall flower? What if you’re too complex to reduce to an either-or decision?

Because of that flawed methodology, I came out of that test as a 95% extrovert. But anyone who knows me knows that that’s simply not true. I love people and get energized from being with people … a lot of the time. But I also love being by myself and get energized by time alone, away from people. There are no true introverts, no true extroverts.

I’ve taken more than one Enneagram test and they’ve been more nuanced than the MBTI. But that’s because they’re not controlled by a company that owns the entire system and makes money from testing people. The Myers-Briggs Company is a lucrative enterprise. But because it’s not owned and standardized like the MBTI, the Enneagram tests and methods of evaluation are all over the board. This test offers either-or questions like the MBTI, but only 36 of them, suggesting you can figure yourself out in just five minutes. More than 3.5 million people have taken it.

The first real dissertation on the Enneagram was written in 1980 and points to its origins in Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism. It was a secret method by which a person’s spiritual master would help that person come to a kind of self-realization. But this would only be achieved over the course of many conversations. And the results were never to be shared with anyone else. Never, ever would someone try to pigeon-hole anyone else or even talk about someone else’s “type.”

So, not only is the Enneagram’s origin intentionally non-scientific, its creators would be horrified by how their wisdom has been formulated and packaged and abused today.

Our attraction to these two and other typing systems is actually more revealing than they are themselves. Here’s three things they reveal.

1. We love quick and easy answers to complex and difficult questions.

We hate complexity. We want everything dished up to us in nice bite-sized portions for easy consumption. Unfortunately, people aren’t built that way. But actually, it’s a good thing we’re not built that way.

If the MBTI were true, there would only be 16 kinds of people out there. So much for being one in a million! (Actually, if you’re one in a million, there would be more than 7,500 just like you out there.) But we’re much too complex for that.

I used to edit a business magazine. And each December, we would host an economic forecast breakfast, and we’d fill a hotel ballroom with people who paid way too much money for the event. We’d have a national economist and a state economist tell us what they expected to happen with each economy over the next year. And the attendees would write down notes, basing business decisions on them.

But after a few years of this, I noticed a few things. The first of which was that the economists were always wrong. Things never played out as they expected. And that led to the second observation: The economy is too complex to be reduced down to a handful of factors. There were always other factors that came to bear on what actually took place economically. A new invention like the iPhone would change things. A war would change things. Always something unforeseen changed things.

As complex as the economy is, we’re even more complex. There are things going on inside of each of us that we have no answers for. As Blaise Pascal wrote, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”

When we deal with people, we need to be content to deal with mystery. No one can be solved.

2. We love to pigeon-hole other people.

I first became aware of the Enneagram in a graduate school class I took in 1994. In the Regent College class on Christian Character taught by Dr. James Houston, we were warned to avoid using the nine types to figure out our family members and friends. It could be a helpful tool but a dangerous one. But I made the mistake of telling my mother about it. And even with that warning, you can guess what she did. Soon, my sisters were mad at me for ever mentioning it to her because she had them all pigeon-holed. And so I gladly closed the book on the Enneagram.

But lo and behold! It showed up again a decade later and has only grown in popularity since. And as I’ve listened in as people talk about it, I hear the same thing over and over again. Almost always, people talk about others more than they talk about themselves when referencing it. Yes, there is some self-reflection that goes on. But mostly it’s being used to sift others. And that’s so dangerous (and especially so if the system is in fact bogus).

This is a problem with so much of what passes as psychology. People who know next to nothing about what they’re talking about use big words and systems to reduce other people down to a number or a particular childhood trauma or something else like that.

We do this in order to control people. If I know what type you are then I can wrap you up and put you in my pocket. If I can reduce you to a set of letters or a scene or two from your life, then I can act as if I know you when I really don’t.

In fact, I would say that if we rely on any of these systems for knowing a person, this is proof that we in fact don’t know that person much at all. Real knowledge of a person takes time, years of time. It takes conversations and experiences. It takes attentiveness, observation. Not a test. Not a system.

But we don’t have time for people. So, we use these shortcuts, even if they don’t actually work.

3. We love fads.

“The flavor of the month is busy melting in my mouth” is the opening line to a song by The Posies and it couldn’t be more true than with the Enneagram right now. There are Instragram feeds about it. There are books about it. There are weekend retreats about it. There are songs about it. There are sermons about it. There are way, way too many conversations about it.

We are suckers for the latest fad, whether it’s the latest diet, the latest dance move, the latest thing to be mad about in politics, the latest TV show. We’re lemmings — and that’s an indictment against me too.

The only reason people know about and are using the Enneagram is that it’s a recent fad. Hopefully, those who use it will find something helpful and self-revealing as they do. But most will get excited about it now and forget about it when the next fad comes along. “Oh look! A pet rock!” “And what’s that? A chia pet!”

A suggestion: Pay attention.

Better than any of these tests is this: Watch people. Listen to them. And do the same to yourself. And pray. Pay attention to God and what he’s doing in you and others.

Have conversations with people over time. Let years go by. Build friendships that last decades. That’s how you’ll get to know others, yourself, and God.

There are no quick paths to self-understanding or knowing others.

Eugene Peterson renders Psalm 14:2-4 like this:

GOD sticks his head out of heaven. He looks around. He’s looking for someone not stupid — one man, even, God-expectant, just one God-ready woman. He comes up empty. A string of zeros. Useless, unshepherded Sheep, taking turns pretending to be Shepherd. The ninety and nine follow their fellow. Don’t they know anything, all these impostors? Don’t they know they can’t get away with this — Treating people like a fast-food meal over which they’re too busy to pray?

Ouch! That hits me hard.

Let’s agree to stop reaching for fads like the ninety and nine who follow their fellow. And let’s stop using tests and tricks to figure people out. Let’s stop treating people like a fast-food meal over which we’re too busy to pray.