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[soft female voice] Breathe in...
and relax.
Know yourself.
Become your own attention.
[intriguing electronic music]
[electronic beep]
This test is about your personality.
You must answer, "strongly agree"
"agree," "neutral", "disagree", "strongly disagree"
Agree.
[pulsing music]
Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality
as they are by gender and race.
A lot of people say, it's what makes somebody tick.
To me it's more around how somebody portrays themselves.
Who we are, what we're good at, what we are capable of doing.
These are really big questions and one way of answering them
in our society has become taking a personality test.
I am somewhat of a thrill seeker.
I get angry more often than nervous.
People's feelings are sometimes hurt by what I say.
Personality testing can be the key that unlocks the life
that you want to live
or something that seems against you
in ways that you may not even be aware of.
Okay, so this is my first YouTube video.
The first one with my face in it anyway.
I look like an idiot. I've got these cherry lips.
My lips are chapped, I don't know what's going on.
[sighs] So it's...
it's about 4am on January 1st 2017,
so it's the new year
and I'm already feeling like depressed about it
I'm an introvert.
If you're in the Myers-Briggs I'm an INFJ.
For those of you out there who are introverts
or if you've taken that test
and you're an INFJ,
I'd be interested to hear from you if you feel the same way.
Are there any other INFJ women out there?
Are you new to MBTI or are you just getting started?
Ladies and gentlemen, greetings
from the other side of YouTube.
When I first started making videos on YouTube,
the personality niche was really small.
But over the past few years it's gotten really big
it's really exploded.
Hey guys, it's Lizzie, so today's video,
it's about Myres-Briggs...
...and it's just like a trend going around.
People keep randomly saying, "Oh, I'm HIJK..."
The most definitive personality test of them all
is the Myers-Briggs.
If you don't know what the Myers-Briggs is,
that's alright, just know that it is the most well known
personality type quiz in the world
and it breaks us all down into 16 distinct types.
The theory is that your personality
is constructed in such a way
where you are blind to certain things that you do
and ways that you cause problems for yourself.
You find it difficult to introduce yourself
to other people?
-Yeah, disagree. -Yes.
So typology is a tool for you to be able to see the things
that your mind is hiding from you.
"You often find yourself lost in thought when you
were walking in nature." Strongly agree.
Often find yourself lost in thought
when you're walking in nature?
Does this test think I'm active? What's walking?
When I first took the test and I got my results back
I was like, wow, this thing knows me better
than I know myself.
I am ENTP-T. Wooo-hoo-hoo!
ENFP-T, a campaigner.
Mediator, no one can stop you from dreaming.
As a Beta personality type is ultimately devil's advocate.
That's me! Hello devil.
Cause when you find out your personality type
you realize that you're not alone.
My personality type is INFJ.
So that means the first letter is I
which stands for introverted versus extrovert.
The second one is N,
which stands for intuitive rather than sensing preference.
Then the next letter is F
which stands for feeling and that's opposed to thinking.
And then the last letter is J, and the dichotomy there
is J-O-P which is judging or perceiving.
For an INFJ, the description is usually
something like their mind works in a way
that's very different from everyone else.
They can be disconnected from the real world
and INFJ's are the rarest type.
People want to understand themselves
and the Internet is a great tool to really dive
into what are the differences between everybody.
Love is like beauty and the beast.
Love is what you are looking at right now.
There is no such thing as love.
Everyone wants to know who's going to be
their perfect partner, who they're going to marry.
Want to know when Prince Charming
is going to walk through the door
that you have his personality type.
And you can say there he is, there is the ENFP
that I'm supposed to be with, right?
Nothing becomes trendy,
nothing becomes important in pop culture
if there isn't some aspect of it working in reality, right?
There's a trend about something because people like it
and there's value in it.
[upbeat music]
When I was 21, my first job out of college
was as a management consultant at a large corporation.
And one of the first things
all new employees were asked to do
was to take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
They whisked us away to a very luxurious offsite...
...and they brought in a career counselor
to tell us what our types were
and how we might fit into the corporation based on our types.
And I remember her telling me... "You are an ENTJ."
"You are the CEO type...
...and one day you might even become...
head of this organization."
I was completely taken in by it.
Fast forward six months
I was a terrible management consultant.
I spent most of my time reading novels under my desk.
And I quit to become a writer.
And I thought I might write something on personality.
And I remember the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
and I started doing some digging into it.
And I discovered that the people who invented it
were not two men, Myers and Briggs...
...but two women, a mother and a daughter.
And that really moved and intrigued me.
And I wanted to understand how these two women
who had no formal training in psychology
had come to design the world's most popular
personality test.
I think what's absolutely essential
to the history of type is that it begins it's life
as a domestic experiment.
[baby crying]
Katharine Cook Briggs gives birth to three children.
Only one of whom, Isabel, survives past infancy.
And after seeing the incredible fragility
of human life,
Katharine starts to wonder about what it means
to bring a person into the world
and what it means to be a person in the world.
[baby cries]
She cordons off her living room, into what she calls
the cosmic laboratory of baby training
and she starts with what she begins to think of
as a series of experiments on the personality
of her daughter Isabel.
Years later, Isabel goes away to college
and Katharine has a complete crisis of faith
because she's dedicated her whole life,
not just to her child but to her child's personality
and she doesn't know what to do with herself.
But one day she reads in the New Republic
a review of a new work by Carl Jung
called "Psychological Types"
and she's entranced and she orders it immediately.
We need more understanding of human nature
because the only real danger that exists is man himself.
He is the great danger
and we are pitifully unaware of it.
This psyche should be studied
because we are the origin of all coming evil.
After Katharine read "Psychological Types" in 1923,
she writes to Isabel and says
that she needs to burn all of her notes
and she needs to begin her life anew
as one of Jung's disciples.
And she sees a way of bringing the language of types
that Jung has developed, to the United States...
...and use it to transform American society.
[expectant music]
Can you handle a fast paced working environment?
I had always really wanted to do comedy.
The speed at which you're asking me these questions
makes me question how fast paced it truly is.
The first one I did was the 16 personalities
at a job interview.
Okay. You're hired.
-We're interviewing you. -Oh.
My Channel started to blow up.
Like... what!
I am killing it.
People just like to see this format over and over again
because they can learn more about themselves
and about other people in like a quick humorous format.
Dating can be a struggle for introverts.
What with the talking to people
and leaving the house but fear not.
This is the introverts survival guide to dating.
Good first date spots for introverts include
the coffee shop, the library and the cemetery.
I get comments and emails all the time
and they range from things like
what would a relationship look like
between an ENFP and INTJ?
But then I also get people saying
"You're the only person who really understands me."
People who are like going through like a fresh divorce.
Yeah I'm here with my INFJ girlfriend.
It is Valentine's Day.
For those of you who did not know I'm an INFJ...
Even once I had someone who was feeling suicidal
and posting about it and it's
all these really deep weighty things
and some people viewing this
form a very strong emotional bond,
when they know that they are not a freak,
when they are not alone, when they're not broken.
When someone else can just say what they've been thinking
and feeling and make it seem normal.
[suspenseful electronic music]
Personality testing is a multibillion dollar industry
and is growing at at least 15% a year.
What I'm helping my clients do is to compete and win.
The world is like a large poker game,
where we're trying to crunch the numbers
and we're trying to count the cards
and trying to ascertain
do they have a full hand or are they bluffing?
[electronic music continues]
Approximately 70% of an organization's expenditures
is on human capital.
And when there's all kinds of psychological data available
that can help inform companies
on what kind of human capital they invest in,
it's going to be very appealing to organizations,
to use that data,
to try to maximize their return on investment.
The two most popular personality assessments
on the market today
are the Myers-Briggs and the Big 5.
The Coke and Pepsi
of the personality assessment world.
They have similar categories and several things in common.
Most of the personality assessments on the market today
are based on the Myers-Briggs and or the Big Five.
Sometimes the two of them together.
Algorithms are everywhere.
They sort and separate the winners from the losers.
The winners get the job or good credit card offer.
The losers, don't even get an interview.
I actually think personality tests are fun to take.
You know, in a loose stakes environment
if have you ever taken a personality test
it's like fun because you basically get
to think about yourself,
and talk about yourself.
It's not fun if it's high stakes.
[dog barking]
Good thing I got my my cold sleeves.
I am set.
We have two different types of people right here.
We got Barrett. He's doing the pulling.
And then Danny, he's the one keeping us in check.
So we couldn't just have two Barrets
because that'd be too much.
I was already on
to the whole personality test industry
and I came across Kyle's story
and it just seemed...
...amazing.
But it wasn't just Kyle.
It was anybody who would have answered
questions like Kyle.
So I guess it starts really
with I was in school up in Nashville
and I ended up having to take a leave of absence
during which I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
And then after I graduated
I decided I would get a part time job.
And one of my friends that I had made,
he worked at Kroger, in the pharmacy
and I told him I have to take my own medication myself.
so I'd really like to be on the other side
helping people with their medication.
And he brought my case before two of his managers there
and he came back to me and explained
they are both on board with this,
let's move forward.
All we've got to do now is you've got to submit
your resume to online and take a test.
The next day I go upstairs into my room.
Lock myself in my room because I'm taking a test.
So, no distractions.
[soft keypad punching]
I start taking this test and I'm thinking to myself,
"This is easy, I'm good at this,
I'm good at being honest."
"I'm just going to go right through this exam,
submit." And did it.
And then over the next few weeks
I'm kind of still waiting to hear back.
My friend drops in again and I asked him,
I said, "Hey, how's the job going?"
"Like I submitted the online test."
And he then explained to me that the manager said
that he could not hire me
because I had scored a red on the test
and red on a specific area of the test.
In the specific area which I scored red
indicated that I was very likely to ignore customers
if they were either upset,
or if they were making me upset and frustrated.
And so I heard this news and I was a little taken aback
because, you know, I've worked in customer service before
and one of the things I've learned is
you completely separate your personal feelings
from the job.
It's not fair that by answering honestly
about things that were related to my mental health,
I was excluded from work.
So, in my head I'm thinking, there's no way
that this can be legal.
I've been an advocate for disability rights
and disability justice for over the last decade,
and when I was in high school
I had decided to apply to several other jobs.
Several of these places that I applied
had a personality test as part of the application.
I just remember that because one of the times
that I was filling one out, I was with some classmates.
We all crowded around the screen as a group to be like
"This is a personality test?" "What the hell!"
"How are you supposed to answer these questions?"
"What is the correct answer supposed to be?"
"Does anyone know, What should we put down?"
"Does it matter?"
I don't remember what the verdict was,
but I do remember
that I didn't get a single job that I applied for.
And to this day, I don't know why.
I have a lot of suspicions as to why.
Perhaps one of the reasons that I was not hired was
because I failed the personality test,
or perhaps one of the reasons that I was not hired
was that even if people didn't know affirmatively
that I'm autistic, I still coded,
I was perceived as you're kind of weird
we can tell something's going on,
so we don't really want you,
you're not a good fit.
That phrase that's supposed to mean
maybe like this won't work out in particular.
But really is usually code for you're too Asian,
you're too disabled, you're too gay.
So for me, when people say
what's used personality tests to learn
about who would be a better partner for you,
or who would be a better student for the school,
or who would be the best employee for this position.
My instant reaction is, oh no, fuck that, no.
It's not just a prediction.
If it were just a prediction, it wouldn't be that important.
But it's a prediction that's being used
to make decisions about who is worthy and who's unworthy.
We need to know what's going on.
We need to stop trusting it.
We need to look into it.
See what is it really doing?
I can only indirectly infer because I know a lot about this,
but I imagine that there's just so many
hundreds and thousands of other people that have been harmed
that just don't know it, yet.
I tell you all the time
that it's survival of the fittest, isn't it?
[students] Yes.
Cos there's a million people in New York
fighting, scratching, fighting for these jobs.
And a lot of employers are just looking for one mistake.
-We got to be mistake free. -[students] Yes.
I think a lot of people of our community
are not afforded many mistakes as other people, right?
We have to go to extremes to show them,
"I am the best candidate,"
because in a lot of people's minds,
I hate to say unfortunately,
they have an L on your forehead as soon as you come in.
We're going to show them what's really what?
-[all] W. -W for winner.
And that's why we got...
For over a decade now, my job has been
to help New Yorkers find employment.
I service different students from different populations.
Some are long term out of work.
Some are freshly incarcerated.
But you'll be surprised, some have master's degrees
and still can't find work.
You apply for that doorman job?
-Yeah. -Right, that's a good job.
Many students aren't aware
of how technology plays an important part
in this job process.
A lot of my students are still used to the one ads
in the Sunday paper and thinking,
"Oh, I see a job opening. I'm going to walk
to that physical brick and mortar store
and I'm going to apply in person."
When those days are dead as the dinosaurs.
When I was in prison,
I was working with computers that...
the software was in the 1980s.
So being introduced to the Google world now is like
what's the Google world?
A couple of years ago,
we started to see that job applications
started to become longer and longer.
When we looked at them closer the questions in the application
were not actually about the job.
These are questions about who you are.
Psychological evaluations.
Tends to dislike a person who has sold his payment forcefully?
[sighs]
Daily, I see frustration.
These students, they are filling out tens,
maybe hundreds of applications.
A lot of times, my students will tell me,
"Oh, Mr E. I applied to this job
and I never heard anything back."
It really sinks my heart because I've seen them trained,
I've seen them wake up early,
I've seen them get into a whole new routine
and I've seen them get to the edge of,
"Is this even worth it?"
So me and my colleague David decided
we needed to do something about this
in order to give our guys a chance
I often say "Is this a psych test?"
And they would often say, "That's what it feels like."
And so that's where they go.
And so the personality profile is designed to distract you.
It's designed to bring you into the personal,
because what are they trying to do?
They're trying to filter people out.
Once you hit "apply now", you're in,
you're committed,
now what?
You might be there for two hours.
So when they give you these questionnaires
psychologically how it messes with me,
is sometimes it, it finds a way to try to trick you.
[rumbling machine]
Whereas Katharine was
the more spiritual partner of the two
Isabel was the more commercial, the more entrepreneurial.
I think this had a lot to do with her own personality.
She was a woman who had started her life
as her mother's experiment.
And once she had broken free from her mother.
she seemed to have no real interest
in her mother's obsession.
But then World War II comes along
and that changes everything for her.
[thunderous explosion]
December 7th 1941,
a date which will live in infamy.
The United States of America
was suddenly and deliberately attacked.
She says that, you know, she was sitting at home
and she thought, "Well, what is it that I can do
that would be helpful to humankind?"
[Carl Jung] We need more understanding
of human nature
because the only real danger that exists... is man himself.
"What if I took all of this knowledge,
that my mother has been sitting on
and I somehow operationalized it?"
"What if I made it immediately usable for people?"
[interview with Katharine Myers]
So she gets her daughter
and her daughter's three best friends
to come to the house after school
and to sit around the kitchen table.
And she gets them to answer these forced choice questions
about how they would behave
in all sorts of different and ordinary scenarios.
So, for instance, if you were at a party
would you wait for somebody to talk to you
or would you approach somebody to talk to them first?
Or if you were walking down the street
and the fire truck blazed by you
would you follow it to see where it was going
or would you just keep going about your day?
And using her children and their friends
and her husband's answers to these questions
she started building up these profiles of people
who were different types.
[Katharine Myers]
Many many many people find the language of type
that Myers-Briggs offers extraordinarily seductive.
And I think for me the interesting question is
why are they so seduced by it?
[Myers voice]
What is it about these words
and the way in which they're grouped together
that really commands people's imagination?
[Myers voice]
And why is it that the moment they have access to those words
they actually start using them
not just to describe their personalities
but to kind of re-conceive the idea of personality itself.
[Myers voice]
And the most powerful rule of type is that you were born
with essential personality type
and you would die with that same essential personality type.
The most important part of personality,
the North and South of it all,
is the introvert-extrovert spectrum.
-Hi, how are you? -I'm good.
One really easy way to ask yourself who you are
is to think about how you feel when you go to a party
that you're truly enjoying, with company that you truly like
and think about how you feel after about two or three hours.
Because if you're an extrovert, it's as if you have
an internal battery that's being charged.
Check me out, ladies
your boy is under the fake mistletoe.
And if you're an introvert
no matter how socially skilled you might be
or how much you're enjoying it,
it's as if your battery is being drained.
What? No, I wasn't going off to be by myself again.
I was just checking out your laundry room, yeah
American culture really does prefer it's extroverts.
This is a culture that comes from a kind
of veneration of the man of action.
You should be the doer, not the thinker.
You often hear a preference for hiring of extroverts.
Increasingly now offices are designed
as these big open social spaces.
Do you have any questions for us?
Hey, forget the questions.
I brought brownies. Let's just dig in.
Also I was wondering
do you have a kombucha bar for employees?
We also know that introverts tend to get passed over
and overlooked for leadership positions.
So it's like there's this colossal waste of talent,
because of these preconceptions we have.
My message to fellow introverts in the world is
to love being the way you are,
there's a lot to love.
I'm applying for more jobs and I'm finding more and more
of these personality tests.
I'm very outgoing.
I am generally hopeful and optimistic person.
And this is one that I see a lot,
how would you describe your personal energy level?
If you're someone who's suffering from depression
if you're being honest, you're going to say
I have less energy than most people
that's part of what the illness is.
But that's the type of person who is also forcing themselves
to get out there and do things.
While I'm doing this and finding that out
my dad is doing all this research
because he's sort of the type of dad
that obsesses over things.
We started with just Kyle applying to additional companies
and when he applied for him to take screenshots
of the questions that were asked.
When we were looking back at screenshots
we realized that you were being sent to other websites.
When you go one level deeper
you get to third party test providers.
The second part of that was then to sort of take those names
people I'd never heard before,
Unicru or Kronos or some others,
and just start doing research on them.
This goes deeper than we thought.
There's a whole industry of companies.
They've infected the whole system.
-[dog barks] -[birds chirping]
[Isabel's granddaughter] We all, of course, knew type
of everyone in the family and we all took the indicator
at an early age.
My grandmother was introverted and my great grandmother was
introverted and my mother was introverted.
So at first, I was a little concerned
because I was extroverted
but she was very reassuring.
And when I went over the type description,
I really liked my own type description
which was extroverted, intuitive feeling with perception.
I knew I wanted to be a reporter and she had done massive amounts
of research on type and career and when I looked at the careers
of reporters, there was a great concentration of ENFPs
so, I felt like I had made the right choice.
What I remember about her is that she spent most of her life
in a big overstuffed chair in the corner of a living room
where she worked, pretty much around the clock
on type research.
She had long gray hair which she braided every morning
and put in a very complicated bun
that really used to fascinate me.
She was not remotely materialistic.
I never saw her shop.
I don't know where the clothes came from
or where the furniture came from
but it was a very warm house.
She would come up and sing every night
before we went to sleep.
She made a cinnamon sugar toast in the morning.
She had a special way of making scrambled eggs.
She was always very much driven,
and sometimes even watching her make scrambled eggs
she was kind of like rocking back and forth,
and then she was gonna get back to her desk.
She would say that her dad always said
that if a child asks you a question,
no matter how many questions they ask you
you have to answer their questions right away.
So I think all of us grandchildren knew
that the one way we could get her attention
is if we'd ask her questions and then she would,
she'd stop whatever she was doing
and she would patiently answer our questions.
I think she really felt that if you could help people
understand themselves better
and ways that other people are different
that were not better or worse,
that would be a better way
of creating empathy towards others.
[Myers' voice]
She believes that what type can do is help manage
the now growing labor force of the US.
She says "If men came like shoes,
with the number on the outside of the box
then we could avoid a painful fit."
It's about the idea that working at something
that's not good for you,
pursuing a profession that you're not suited to,
and even marrying a person
who is not suited to your personality type
results in a great deal of pain.
And so she's very interested in trying to mitigate the pain
that these bad fits of people to their social roles
might cause.
And so it really started out small.
Initially, when you look at the register of her accounts
she was selling a couple of booklets here,
a couple of questionnaires there.
But then these accounts really through the 50s
start to grow and grow and grow.
Some of her biggest clients were places like Standard Oil
or GE or the Home Life Insurance Company.
And they were really intent
on having her test their executives
to figure out what made a good executive.
There were companies like the
Washington Gas and Light Company
that had her come in to figure out
whether extroverts or introverts
were better at meter reading versus clerical work.
She was being asked by hospitals
to come in and type their nurses,
to type their stenographers,
to try to figure out what types were best
for particular kinds of jobs.
For Isabel, it was about imagining a better world.
A world in which everybody was doing the thing
that made them happy.
One of the criticisms of the MBTI
is that it's all positive, makes people feel good.
I don't know why it's a problem but she purposely didn't include
some of those negative things.
Her whole point was, look, all types have value
all types are good, we just approach
the world in different ways.
At the end of the day people find it useful,
they find it very valuable.
Even if it's not a perfect model.
There's no personality model that captures every element
of a human condition, they just don't.
They're models, that's what they're for, right?
To help us simplify the complex world we live in.
We know that about 80 of the Fortune 100
make use of the MBTI in some form or fashion
from Ivy League schools down to community colleges
in the US use it.
We know that most of the branches of the military
in the US and in England use it.
To me that's what's so extraordinary about type.
It's not the question of whether it's scientifically valid
or reliable or not but rather how it is that these two women
manage to create a language that would latch on to you
and just never, ever ever let you go.
A language you would never be able to shake loose.
Since I've been in the Myers-Briggs company
the admonition has been to not use it for hiring
because there's no reason to assume
that a person with one particular type preference
can do a job better than someone who has a different type.
We had a couple of organizations that we're using it for hiring.
We knew they were using for hiring.
We called them and say, hey you can't do that
and they said, "Well we're going to,"
and so we stopped selling to them.
In the United States copyright laws are particularly
challenging to enforce.
The four letters were never copyrighted.
Terrible mistake by some lawyers somewhere.
So they are in the public domain
and anybody can use those combinations of letters.
Many of these personality tests have now been copied, reworked,
reformatted, reformulated, so it's hard to even know
where they are or where they come from.
There's been not a big increase in the number of competitors,
as we call them knock-offs of the MBTI.
One of our biggest challenge is that there's people out there
who say they're doing MBTI and they're not.
Or who say they're using our products
and they're not using our products.
The creators of the Myers-Briggs may have had a vision
of simply helping people understand themselves
and one another.
But now that the genie is out of the bottle
they can't necessarily control
how it's being used and by whom.
Just like pharmaceutical companies
sometimes get in trouble for off label use
of pharmaceutical drugs
for an off label use to select people into jobs
when they shouldn't be doing that.
My job, of course, was to find evidence of harm.
Show me the blood, right?
Well, how do you find blood when they're these algorithms
that are secretly harming people?
Most people who get red-lighted
with personality tests never find out they get red-lighted.
But Kyle knew somebody,
who told him, "You got red-lighted."
So that was the first miracle for Kyle.
The second thing is that his father is a lawyer.
Kyle said, "I don't know what to do, dad."
He asked, "How broken am I?"
-[tense music] -[soft emotional breath]
And...
that statement really...
...hurt.
Can we afford to slip in this room?
-[all] No. -No, we can't.
That's the problem.
Because these things will add up quickly.
We're all human beings
but there's a computer behind this
and it adds it up super fast in nanoseconds
and if you have too much wing in the wrong category
you are out of the running.
Between 2012 and 2014,
I was doing a very in-depth two year project
where we looked at online job applications
from every aspect.
We found that a company named Unicru was marketing
most of these tests to each company
as being uniquely suited to identify the workers
that that company wanted.
So, presumably every company wouldn't want
the same type of person
because they're different kinds of companies
and they're different kinds of jobs.
Every single test we looked at evaluated mental state.
And I would say a good third of the questions
actually evaluated mental states of applicants.
And it's unfair and wrong to not hire someone
based on a mental disability.
You can screen them out
if you are unable to make an accommodation to them
after you've already hired them.
But you can't pre-screen and disqualify somebody
based on a perceived disability.
Every one of the tests was administered nationwide.
You went on a national website to take this test.
These were not New York City employers.
We're talking about Macy's, Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's...
and they all had some variant of this inappropriate test.
They don't really understand personality testing.
They don't understand what they're dealing with
and you have vendors who are telling them
this is going to save you oodles of bucks.
It sounds like the magic bullet.
It's a process by which technologists hide ugly truths
inside blackbox algorithms and called them objective.
Call them meritocratic.
When they're secret, important and destructive
I coined a term for these algorithms,
weapons of mass destruction.
[audience applauds and cheers]
That's when you realized, it's not just me,
it's not just Kyle,
it's much broader than that.
And that led us to talk with people
who are more qualified lawyers
and then turn that hopefully into change.
The concern I have is that people seem okay
with kind of innovating and testing out things
where there isn't a lot of scientific support
to really document that it works.
Whereas you wouldn't do that
if you were testing out a new drug, right?
You would actually develop the science to support it.
Somehow people think this is like a low risk area.
So let's just test on all these humans
before we know exactly what the consequences are.
What came to my mind is job applicants
are crash test dummies, right?
Because we don't know if it's going to work, but...
how could it hurt?
But unlike the crash test dummies
the people are there like the dummies don't have feelings.
The crash test dummy does not have
economic survival needs or feelings.
Correct.
Personality tests are by a large constructed to be ableist,
to be racist, to be sexist and to be classist.
That's what happens when you have a test
that decides whether you're friendly or not based on norms
devised from college educated straight white men
who don't have any known disabilities.
Personality tests are useful for individual people
sometimes on journeys of self discovery.
But when they're used to make decisions
by other people, affecting somebody's life,
they become dangerous tools.
My dad was just pushing forward with this
and we started getting some more publicity.
There was a Wall Street Journal article
that was written about us.
Being on the Wall Street Journal cover page, this is important.
Kyle is having an impact.
And so now he's obsessed with this idea.
And he keeps digging, and he keeps talking to people
and he would go with third party like test providers
and ask how they made their tests.
We found that many of them used something called
the five factor model of personality.
They look at five major factors in the context of hiring.
The way the Big Five theory developed was over decades.
Academic researchers took thousands of attributes
adjectives that you might use to describe people.
They found that five attributes explain
most of the variants in human personality.
Conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism,
openness to experience and extroversion.
With a Unicru reading their statements
and marketing materials,
what it read was Unicru allows you to clone
your best performers.
Cloning your best employee
sort of led me down the path of, "Who is that employee?"
There's actually medical papers out there explaining
how you can generally diagnose mental illnesses
using the five factor model.
So under the Americans with Disabilities Act,
it's illegal to ask prospective employees
for medical information or about anything
about their physical or mental health.
You can't ask somebody about a mental condition,
but perhaps the technology can tell whether somebody
has a medical condition.
You might not even know you have a mental illness
and taking these personality tests
you might keep getting denied and just have no idea.
I just cheated on Myers-Briggs with another personality test.
That's right, I took the Big Five test.
What I wanted to do is go through the results live.
We'll see how much of a loser I am.
All right, so first up is agreeableness.
Agreeableness? I scored 77 which probably means
I'm a big doormat.
So now we move on to the next one.
Conscientiousness, which I think
basically translates to how hard you work.
Conscientiousness.
Oh, I'm in the 4th percentile of conscientiousness.
Dang!
Oh, now we're getting to the stuff I'm good at.
Neuroticism.
Neuroticism, I scored in the 97th percentile.
No surprise there.
People with exceptionally high levels of neuroticism like me
tend to think that everything in life has always been going wrong
and always will.
[electronic music]
When you steer someone away from a job
that they're not as likely to do well in,
you've done them a favor
even though it doesn't feel like a favor.
If you help someone land in a job
that they're likely to enjoy and do well
it's a win for everybody.
And, of course, companies have a vested interest
in picking the best people.
The problem of why are some people more interested
and capable in specific types of work?
That's an interesting question.
And I just fell in love with it early on.
We use Big Five.
It's certainly not the only theory of personality
but it's got a strong research basis.
And I built some of the earliest examples
of automated psychological testing that employers use
to pick better employees.
One of my first companies that I worked for
was trying to validate an honesty test.
Did you write number one?
No.
When I was in college, you couldn't get a job
at a convenience store or a gas station
without taking a polygraph.
It was a very common practice.
It wasn't reliable. It wasn't scientifically valid.
And so Congress passed the Polygraph Protection Act
which forbade the use of the polygraph
for employee selection in most of the jobs.
In the late 80s there were a few influential developments
in machine learning and pattern recognition
one of the major branches of artificial intelligence.
I was all about trying to implement that research.
And finally, a group of entrepreneurs
from the West Coast called me and said,
"We'd like to talk to you about your research."
And so I moved out to Portland
and we put together a little company
that grew quite quickly.
Six or seven years passed.
We were estimated to have about half
of the domestic hourly hiring market in the United States.
So we were processing
between 70 and 90 million applications a year.
Hotel, customer service, waiters.
Our little system's here
influencing the lives of millions of people.
Even though I had so many positive things
going on in my life I just couldn't stop revisiting,
Why me, why am I un-hireable? What's wrong with me?
Is my personality wrong?
Is there something wrong with me?
Am I broken?
We could actually be explicitly making sure that hiring systems
are inclusive and creating diverse workforces.
That's not what we're doing, though.
What we're doing is propagating past practices.
We are repeating the past.
[Kyle] Is this platform new?
People constantly have to perform their personalities.
They are always on the clock.
And they not only have to perform their personalities
but they have to be happy to do it.
They have to do it willingly.
I think one of the extraordinary things
about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
is that that's there from its very inception,
almost incidentally.
But of course it's not an accident
because Isabel herself is a product of this ideology.
[Myers voice]
When I started researching the book,
I thought it would be a fairly simple research process.
But the more I got into it, the more I realized
that there were things people didn't want me to find.
So I would go up to archives and the files that I needed
would have been removed.
I would go to archives and there would be people
assigned to watch me as I was doing my work.
That does start making you a little bit paranoid.
What is it that the people
who have a vested interest in the indicator
don't want disclosed about it's origins.
I was completely stunned to realize that Isabel
was a successful mystery novelist
before she designed the type indicator.
And in the late 1920s she had written a mystery novel
in about five weeks.
She had done it while her children
were asleep at night.
And she had entered it into a competition
and it had won and was published.
And then I realized
that she had written a second novel,
but that novel wasn't advertised anywhere on the website.
It was very, very difficult to track down
in any sort of mainstream library.
And when I finally found it and I read it, I understood why.
Because that novel features the same team of detectives.
Only this time they're investigating
a series of suicides that take place among an old aristocratic
Southern family.
And it turns out that the reason the members of this family
are committing suicide is because they believe
that they have a single drop
of African American blood in their veins.
[ominous music]
And so it's a really horrifyingly racist novel.
Reading it I felt betrayed,
because you have this woman who on the one hand
is committed to a certain set of progressive ideals,
particularly for her time.
And on the other hand, everything she's doing
is weighed down by a very, very troubling set of ideologies.
So, for instance when Isabel is first administering
the indicator to people who work at a factory
she wouldn't test anybody she said with an IQ under 100
because she didn't believe
that they have the cognitive capabilities
to differentiate their personalities.
And she argues that the people
who have the clearest personality preferences are
research scientists and CEOs.
When the type indicator was first designed
there were separate answer keys for men and for women,
under the assumption that women
were simply biologically predisposed to feeling
and so you couldn't actually evaluate
men's and women's answers on the same scale.
They had to have different scales.
All of these little moments in the history
of the type indicator contain these traces
of Isabel's classicism and her racism and her sexism
and her ableism.
It's primarily the white managerial class,
around which the idea of personality,
as Isabel understands it and articulates it
through the type indicator, is constructed.
The way the indicator was designed
and the way that any personality test
really is designed is to perpetuate the language
of individuality and of the self
for people who already have access to it.
If people create something they bring into that something
all of their preexisting values.
There is no way to preemptively excise
those values from the creation.
Problem is what does it mean when those biases are tied
to systems of power that harm whole communities of people.
It was really telling to me how Isabel's prejudices
which it would be very easy to dismiss as being of her time,
were not of her time, they're of our present
and they continue to be used today
to sustain the powers of the dominant classes.
Merve Emre came out with a book of the personality brokers.
She made some assumptions and implied some things
I don't even want to repeat because I found them
so profoundly offensive.
Isabel did care deeply about preventing another Hitler
about intolerance.
And I think that her really primary focus was to appreciate
your own uniqueness
and be able to appreciate people who are different,
which has never seemed more relevant to me than it does now.
I think there are ways that it's being used
that she would want to get in there and correct.
I don't think she ever wanted to see it used to discriminate
in hiring, for example.
Increasing the speed
and memory capability of computers.
Like most sociologists I'd learned about bias,
in terms of human bias, and I never really thought
about the fact that bias could also be encoded
in computer programming.
With new technologies we're actually encountering
new forms of discrimination,
that were not really conceived of
when we created the antidiscrimination laws
that we have now.
Is there really evidence
that employment personality tests can be racially biased?
So, I would say yes.
The whole idea of people beating the system has definitely been
an idea that has it has existed for quite some time.
You know, people react to programs
that they feel are exclusionary and they resist.
Alright, so superstars, I've introduced you to a concept
about how to handle personality assessments, right?
This training is a follow up.
We call this the results show.
So that you'll see the results of your actions.
Whether your clicks, whether your answers
would have either proved valuable for you
or would have drained your access to the job, right?
Okay, so we start with number 14.
For the most part, all of you love yourself.
You're happy, you're happy with yourself.
All of you. For the most part...
You have to be able to be like water
as Bruce Lee said, you know, to be flexible
and the person that's the most flexible is going to be
the person that gets the job.
All right, here's another question.
It's hard to be optimistic about the future?
Adrian said yes, and Clyde,
I feel bad for you.
Not to get personal. This is not personal.
I mean, the click says maybe
what you felt at the moment, right?
And I agree,
sometimes it is hard
to be optimistic about the future.
But would you in the interview say, yeah.
now, that you mentioned it?
Future.
Can we talk about, can we talk about this?
These questions are coming from a person
with a distinctive difference from the people
that are receiving these applications or assessments.
You can have questions worded in a way that a person
has never heard before
and it could throw them totally off.
So people... I love that word, people.
People may have to suffer some criticism
in order to achieve a goal.
And everybody said "yes" except Adrian said "no".
No criticism from me.
I can achieve my goal my own way.
It depends how you feel because I don't have no--
You have to just ask yourself
why they're asking me this question, right?
And so they just asking you, I think,
Can you take some criticism?
Would you agree you could take some critic-- you might need.
Has Mr E ever criticized you?
-Yeah. -Ah, alright, so your answer
actually is yes if you think about it, right?
Oh, I love this one.
I do not recall... can't remember,
telling a lie in recent years.
And look at these angels.
Right down.
Now, that's very admirable.
They design these things very carefully
and I cannot get into the algorithms
of how they figure this stuff out,
but I do think it could be a trick question.
Obviously, it's very painful, it's discouraging.
See now, Adrian, you're getting consistent.
And now they're feeling where you're at, right?
That's right in the numbers.
The software is now saying, flashing red light.
I'm pleased to know that we believe we have a way
to train to it, but that's a very small portion
of the population.
You know, I have anywhere
from 10 to 25 students at a time.
We might get to 200, 250, 300 students a year.
It's New York City, that's not a lot of people.
Most people have no access to this kind of training
or this kind of framing.
I have suffered many times
before I even had this opportunity of coming to Hope.
But when I came here, it gave me hope.
It gave me a passion.
It gave me everything that I've been dreaming of,
when I couldn't get it nowhere else.
One day someone will take an interest in me.
Let's face it, most psychological tests
are written by middle aged, white guys like me
and we can't possibly assimilate all the complexity, cultural
and individual variation that our systems
are going to capture.
Therefore, we have to anticipate that our data sets themselves
could be the source of contamination
and we have to analyze that,
and in my own working life I've done research
with companies where patterns of discrimination were observed.
But I do also understand that if these algorithms
are configured properly, they're going to make far more
correct decisions than they're going to make errors.
[interviewer]
Of course, oh yeah.
I would say you may have applied for the wrong job.
Who wants a job you're going to hate?
Having work that is... makes us happy,
is the best, it's just the best
and it's a natural for human beings to actualize
as it is for a tree to put leaves out.
It's what we're designed to do.
And any time that doesn't happen,
that's a tragic loss.
Almost eight weeks ago,
my wife and I went over to Kyle's house.
We got there and saw that his car was in the garage.
The house was locked up.
We were able to open the garage door.
Went in the house
and went up to his bedroom
and found Kyle dead there.
He had taken his life and...
everything since then has been adjusting.
[sad music]
[child's voice]
[Kyle shouting cheerfully]
[sad music continues]
[indistinct chatter]
[slide projector clicking]
Kyle, had 29 years of wonderful life
that I am...
ever grateful for having had him for those 29 years.
For him having been a part of my life for that.
I would have liked it had been much much longer...
...and it's not.
But while he's physically not with us,
he still connects.
You know, you go a lot of places where we used to go.
You do things that we used to do or you continue on in this case
you know, fighting the fights
that he thought were important to fight.
I never met Kyle and I don't want to presume
to know what did Kyle feel
what was Kyle thinking.
When I hear about what happened in Kyle's life
with facing persistent ableism and cynicism in his attempt
just to find a little bit of work to do
and when I hear about his ultimate...
the ultimate end of his life, that he died by suicide,
I think of dozens of other community members
that I know and anytime that I learn that somebody
from our community is no longer here,
it is deeply sobering, it is deeply upsetting
and it is a further indictment of the society that we live in
of just how profoundly fucked it all is.
[interviewer speaking indistinctly]
So my name is Dr Nathan Mondragon.
I'm the chief industrial and organizational psychologist
with a company called HireVue.
HireVue is, in a nutshell a video interview platform.
We're growing significantly year over year.
Dr Scarborough's tests were kind of multiple choice questions.
You then roll answers to
those questions up into a score of some sort.
Savvy applicants start to figure out
what the answer key might be.
The next level of research that we're doing is
we look at the words.
We also look at the audio patterns
and then we're starting to look at
what's called the facial action units,
the movement of the face.
So an example. Do you like your boss?
And you say, "I like my boss."
Alright, good, but "I like my boss,"
has a different connotation to it when you layer
the video and the audio and the facial movement
on top of the text.
That's what we're researching.
That is unproven at this point.
When I first learned about HireVue
my reaction was, "I'm sorry, what?
Employers are trying to do what exactly?
How do you purport to be able to look at a video
of a person's speech and movement and say
"Oh, now, we know from this video,
whether or not you are going to be successful at this job."
What the hell does that have to actually do with anything?
Perception of emotions is very subjective, right?
And it's also very culturally specific.
So for example, somebody from Russia will have
different body movements or body language to express
even the same emotion as somebody from North America.
Humans are biased, yes.
But one biased human manager can only impact
maybe a hundred resumes at a time.
But one biased automated hiring system,
that is deployed throughout a corporation can actually impact
hundreds of thousands of resumes.
I think that very much goes against our Constitution.
It goes against who we are as Americans.
I mean what I'm saying we're doing is in accordance
with what's called the uniform guidelines
and professional standards and practices and principles.
Have we been sued? No.
There's stuff out there people are looking.
David Scarborough, he came under fire at Unicru
for some stuff as well years ago
and it's just part of the business
but if you do things correctly
you're maximizing that defendability.
One worry is the idea that automated hiring platforms
could actually create an underclass of people
who are permanently unemployable.
Once someone gets rejected from several jobs
that actually does create a gap in employment.
And then that gap in employment just gets bigger and bigger
each time they get rejected and that kind of puts them
in a position where they're now
no longer a preferred worker.
Then there's a worry that you're designating
certain groups of people as unfit for employment
and this really goes back to notions of eugenics.
Eugenics was this major movement at the turn of the 20th century
that gained enormous traction
to the point where several cities
in the United States founded their own societies
for the public hygiene.
Eugenics was the science of the future
of forward thinking people.
Eugenics was the science of devising a better society
by creating better humans.
But eugenics itself is, of course,
deeply white supremacist and deeply ableist,
because eugenics was the science of deciding
which kinds of people
deserve to reproduce and to be reproduced.
Which kinds of people deserve to exist
which kinds of people did not. Which kinds of people
would be counted as productive
and contributing members of society,
and in turn, which kinds of people
would instead be cast off as burdens.
And that's why we got to go the extra mile to show them
"No, I'm superior in so many different ways."
Eugenics continues to be mainstream science
in the United States, just not under that name.
We think that you're worthy because your personality is
the appropriate personality here.
Your personality is the one that matches those
of previously successful performers of this company.
And they want to see that you are the best person.
Not because you said it, because I demonstrated it.
Employers or other people who are using things
like personality tests to decide
who they want to offer opportunities to...
that is... let us be very clear about this and not mince words.
Who they want to make sure
and a roof over their head
fuck you, sucks to be you.
Then they're relying on the same type of pseudoscience
that you are doing when you were measuring people's skulls
to decide which person is intelligent or not.
[car engine]
Meeting today is an important step
because we're looking to change the law
to be able to more effectively protect those who are
discriminated against.
[plaintive music]
I don't think that there is an end to the quest
there's an end to this particular part of the quest.
He would have loved being part of today's meeting
up on the hill.
Yeah, he was there.
Just not as vocal as I would have liked him to be.
I mean, in my worst fears
of the future of hiring algorithms
it doesn't even just start at the moment of application.
We already have a system to get us to applying
that is problematic.
I would call it the pipeline, and that's now.
So the dystopian future that I worry about is this
but it goes backwards in time
in the sense that it starts in childhood.
These big tech companies are collecting data
about how our children learn.
At the age of seven, they are already pinned down
into their future job prospect
and as they go through junior high school and high school
they're just confirming,
"Oh, yeah, this is an unlucky person,"
they don't deserve a good job.
I know people are like, "Well I'm not Kyle,
why should I worry about Kyle?"
Sorry.
That... it is their story.
This is happening to everyone...
...all the time.
It's happening to literally everyone.
And the longer we let this... system,
the predictive AI system
the longer we let it remain completely unaccountable,
the more it defines us
the more it defines our futures.
I'd like to start by sharing a story of Kyle Behm
a bright college engineering student
who applied for an hourly job at Kroger.
He has held similar positions in the past.
Yet after taking a personality assessment,
he was scored red and rejected.
Sadly, Kyle is no longer with us today.
But his father Roland continues to abdicate to ensure people
with disabilities are not systematically excluded
by hiring assessment.
Breathe deeply with me and recite these mantras.
I am enough. I am capable.
That mean thing that my mom said on the phone
this morning is not accurate.
I don't know if I want to think about
what my life would have been like
if I hadn't come across typology.
It's like totally transformed everything.
It makes you realize that there are other people out there
who are functioning in the same way that you are
and that you're not alone
and you're not just some random weirdo.
[techno music]
The language of type
and the vision of the self that it encodes,
those are treated as naturally occurring phenomenon.
Just part of what it means to be a human being.
But they have histories and they have histories
that have all kinds of ideologies embedded in them
and that's why it's so important to understand,
where these instruments come from.
They wouldn't exist without corporations
and they wouldn't exist
without organizational psychology
whose whole purpose is to figure out
how to use the human psyche
to make corporations run better to run more profitably.
And to me, the most interesting response
to personality testing
would be to walk away from the individual
as a thing that we really, really need to understand
and think about what it might look like
to live in a world where was a sense of community
that we were invested in understanding.
To imagine a world where desires and needs
are more collective.
New generation of AI driven screens
are transforming the lives of America's workers
with profound implications for civil rights.
Employers are being bombarded
with thousands of applications sometimes.
And in its simplest form AI tools are capable
of simply scanning those applications or resumes
to screen out those who don't even have
the minimum qualifications for the job.
When video interviewing systems
are trained on white male voices and faces
this disadvantages both racial minorities and white women,
whose facial expressions and tone of voice
might be misinterpreted.
-[laughter] -Are you serious?
[people laughing and chatting]
Wow, I did not expect this right here.
I want to ask the whole panel
if there was one thing Congress could do right now
what would it be?
I believe a workers bill of rights is needed.
so that workers understand how algorithms are making decisions
and how that might impact them.
The person that I selected
for this week's employee of the week is...
[students cheer and yell]
The struggle for people is not merely one of insufficient
or inadequate laws and policies
but it is also one fundamentally of justice in society
to accomplish the kind of change that we want in the world.
[birds chirping]
Imagine you're looking out into your yard.
You can look in a magazine and see the perfect garden.
But what's going to happen over the years is,
as you put this garden together each time you add something
to the garden it's going to look
a little different from perfect.
And each time you add one more thing
it's not going to be perfect, it's not going to be perfect.
But then at the end of the day
after years of this imperfection you look out the window
and what you'll see is more beautiful
than you ever could have thought to put together
in the first place.
[friendly chattering] [uplifting music]
The white beads symbolize the loss of a child.
If you're wearing a white bead at this moment,
please take them off and hold them up high.
[triumphant music]
[cell phone rings]
- Hello. -Hello, this is Lashawn.
You get me Mr E?
Yes, Lashawn How are you doing, man?
I'm all right, about yourself?
I have some great news to tell you.
- What's that? -I got a job.
- You got a job? -Yeah, yeah.
- Oh, get outta here. -Seriously.
I am a superintendent for a building...
Oh wow, that's great... [fades]