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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]