Review of HBO’s “Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Test”

HBO’s troubling and well-done documentary “Persona” goes into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator’s (MBTI) backstory to reveal the both incredibly impressive and strange history of this particular assessment (the mother-daughter duo meticulously documenting observations for many years and running mini experiments despite no psychological training to eventually create the MBTI is awe-inspiring, IMHO), as well as reveals how ubiquitous personality assessments are in our everyday culture, whether it be social media influencers sharing their four-letter results as proudly as a fresh tattoo (I’m an INFP, according to some online fake version of the MBTI), filling out quizzes on dating sites, or answering personality assessments for employers.

If you have ever applied for a job and did some assessment asking you questions like, “Do you have hard time finding things to do?”, you are not just answering questions giving the company an idea of the employee you might be, but what kind of person in general they think you are (e.g., maybe you aren’t JUST someone who needs a supervisor to mop the floor, but you are not a self-directed individual at all; red flag!). While it is illegal for employers to discriminate based on disability, companies can and do use personality assessments as a way to guess that psychopathology is likely present in an…