Review: 'Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests' Reveals an Orwellian Trend in the Job Market

The fascinating HBO Max documentary "Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests" explores revelations behind Merve Emre's book The Personality Brokers," about the creation and implementation of the Myers-Briggs personality test in the American job market.

Inspired by Jung's psychological tests, Katherine Cooks Briggs created a "domestic experiment" watching her only surviving child, Isabel, to identify and classify personality types without any professional psychological training herself. When Isabel was older (and married, taking the last name of Myers), she and mom wanted to implement their findings and help the U.S. during World War II, but couldn't get it to happen at that time.

The personality classification system was then adopted by businesses to screen out undesirable candidates. The pseudoscience (not unlike skull measurement) has gained popularity on YouTube channels about relationships, and is used more and more in job recruitment as testing has been made easier through computerization. Yet, the clumsy classifications are also racist, sexist, classist and ableist, with no instrument to embrace neurodiversity.

The unscientific Myers-Briggs survey offers a personality quiz with 16 possible outcomes, including combinations of the pairs introvert v. extrovert, intuitive v. sensing, feeling v. thinking, and judging v. perceiving. Another popular quiz is the Big 5, which tracks extroversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.

Among other experts and activists, Emre is interviewed about her research into Isabel and Katherine, which revealed embedded racism and sexism deeper than "the prejudices of her time." Yet, the test, originally created for self-understanding, is now the gatekeeper to many American jobs as a workaround replacement for the polygraph tests that were deemed unconstitutional.

Lucrative companies like Unicru, HireVue, and knockoffs are used by large employers to reject any applicants with a whiff of nonconformity or other perceived issues. The current Myers-Briggs organization says that a quiz created to help people understand themselves should not be used by businesses as a personality test for hiring, but now "the genie is out of the bottle," wielded as a "Weapon of Math Destruction." Some interviewees liken the process to putting potential employees in a shoebox, with sizes printed outside, to "avoid a painful fit," or making job applicants into crash test dummies in order to clone best-performing staff.

These slanted surveys circumvent the ADA's rule disallowing questions about mental and physical health. HireVue is shown testing new software to interpret facial expressions as well, with an Orwellian feel. Interviewees note how these biased, white supremacist-leaning, automated hiring platforms currently affect hundreds of thousands of job applicants, creating a underclass of those "unfit for employment."

Opponents advocate for a Worker's Bill of Rights, and to hold the companies and their algorithms in check. "The more it's unaccountable, the more it affects us," one says, in this disturbing new account of AI gone awry.

"Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests" premieres on HBO Max March 4.