Personality or Pathology
Understanding Who We Are
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines and, in doing so, come up with unique insights and solutions. Fundamentally, a Polymath is a type of thinker who spans diverse specialties and weaves together insights that the domain experts often don’t see.
Today’s topic dives into a situation where, on one hand, people reject personality tests yet, on the other hand, pathologize personality. In the middle of all that chaos, true pathologies run amok without the refining light of imperfect, but useful, measures of personality. I promise, we’ll untangle that mess in the end!
Intro
Today’s exploration was motivated by Karina Schneidman MBA, MS, a therapy coach with a fantastic life story coming out of communist Russia and landing in the United States. We’ve engaged back and forth on Substack Notes for a few months (you can follow me here), and even though we come from very different backgrounds, we share many of the same ideas and insights. That’s why when I read her essay Lies, Manipulation, and the Silent Cult, I was surprised as she concluded:
Personality is our soul’s DNA and not a single human can measure its value, clock it or box it
Now, if you’ve read Investigating Personality Proclivities, you know I strongly disagree with that sentiment. Thankfully, what ensued was a genial debate (rare, I know) with Karina that spilled from her article, into notes, and matured into this essay.
The core of my disagreement is that I believe these personality tests are super useful to understand yourself. I think it’s pretty obvious that there are patterns to personality where some people are extroverted, some are introverted, some are open to new experiences, some are not, some are orderly, some are not, some are neurotic, some are not, some are agreeable, some are not, some are big picture, some are not.
The categories I just described are the fusion of the MBTI and Big 5, or OCEAN personality tests, and each pair lies on a spectrum rather than being binary. The problem isn’t the buckets, but when people force-fit others into pigeonholes they don’t belong. The measurements are quite accurate when properly applied.
I don’t find humans to be so purely unique as to not generally fit these categories. What Karina describes in her article isn’t a failure of personality tests but a failure of business environments that don’t respect diversity. Regardless of whether you measure personality or not, the people getting thumbed down today will still be thumbed down based on business incentives. This is something that we explored in Are You Asking a Fish to Climb a Tree? where I was expected to behave the same as others, and my leadership didn’t care about my different personality proclivities.
There’s also an interesting behavior among humans: we tend to focus on two oddly unnatural inclinations, akin to a Uterine Lottery. The first is that we have pure free will, and the second is that we are born as blank slates. Both are heavily rooted in religion, and neither is totally true. Nature vs. Nurture arguments abound, but you can’t deny that we understand the heritability of traits, behaviors, and personality in the animals we raise, but then we glitch and pretend the same doesn’t exist for us.
In contradiction to those two ideas, we don’t have pure free will. Heck, the vast majority of our existence is biologically coded in hormones, low brain functions, and genetics. While I don’t ascribe to the Sam Harris idea of zero free will, he does highlight that we have much less than we’d like to think.
As far as the blank slate theory goes, personality is not only measurable but it’s also heritable from both of your parents as well as passed on to your children. As the adage goes: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” It’s truer than we might like, and Karina was right when she said “Personality is our soul’s DNA,” but, just like DNA, it’s not so unique, and it can be measured in ways that can identify accurate groupings.
Underlying the issue, and a major reason I disagree with Karina on this point, is that if we don’t appreciate the differences in personality, if we don’t understand the spectrums and layers, if we don’t recognize the heritability and genetic encoding, we risk pathologizing personality.
Pathologizing
As Karina and my conversations spilled from the comments section to Substack Notes, she made a very interesting point:
When we studied the MBTI in graduate school, we took the test multiple times for many reasons. Mine mostly came back as ENTJ, which was then, ironically, grouped with ADHD, which fascinated me and still does.1
That comment helps identify her angst with the personality profiles in general, but also highlights a crazy insight into how personality can become pathologized. Why is ENTJ grouped with ADHD? Healthy personality linked with a disorder?
This is exactly the topic Freya India wrote about in Nobody Has a Personality Anymore, where she laments:
We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent. Now our clumsy mothers have always had undiagnosed ADHD; our quiet dads don’t realise they are autistic; our stoic grandfathers are emotionally stunted.
Freya has dozens of examples in her essay of the TikTok and Instagram influencers claiming that they have disorders to explain what we used to call personality quirks, as in the fun texture of unique people. Now, instead of a behavior that can be worked on or accepted, it’s a pathology that must be given special treatment or, worse, drugs.
In response to Karina’s comment, I replied:
Right. Here’s a thought I just had, if we don’t understand personality, we risk pathologizing ENTJ, not as a unique perspective that’s engaging, big-picture, hyper analytical and moderatly structured but as ADHD and must be drugged into submission to look more like an INFP!!
Think about that. If who I am isn’t something that can be measured as personality, there’s a growing population willing to measure it as a pathology and then force me into a different box, using drugs or societal expectations, that’s even worse than the box Karina wrote about regarding businesses.
Now, if you think this is exaggerated, I’d direct you to our exploration into ADHD: Pathology, Superpower, or Out of Context? where we found that:
It’s not about a superpower or neurodiversity. It’s certainly not a disorder that needs medicalization, nor is it driven by trauma or any other pop-psychology diagnosis that’s trending… …What they have is personality, not pathology, and it can be a superpower when properly leveraged and put in the proper context.
If we don’t understand personalities, we risk pathologizing healthy behavior. Also, lost in the chaos of this space is the inverse: if we don’t understand personalities, we risk hiding that there are pathologies known as personality disorders like the Dark Triad (Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy) and Cluster B (Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic, and Narcissistic personality disorders)
Personality Disorders
A benefit of personality tests is that they create a framework to measure legitimate personality disorders because, how can you measure a negative manifestation, without understanding the positive manifestation? Further, the personality proclivities help us understand that certain disorders tend to cluster around personality traits.
For example, in this study, the Feeling preference of MBTI was positively correlated with higher ratings of Narcissistic, Borderline, and Paranoid personality features. This doesn’t mean F-types are inherently disordered, only that the style of an F-type (valuing personal emotions and harmony) can, when extreme or unhealthy, tilt into emotionally-driven, erratic behavior. This is an underpinning of how empathy can become weaponized, as we explored in Toxic Empathy.
Another layer here is the Introvert vs. Extrovert in both the MBTI and OCEAN tests, as well as significant acceptance outside of the personality literature. When people state that personality can’t be measured, I merely point to this paradigm as case number one. The challenge is that introversion invites antisocial tendencies, as we found in Homo Socialis, where entire Reddit threads dedicated to introverts view extroverts as energy vampires. When you combine this type of introvert with the pathological feeler, you get a toxic internet troll.
Throwing out personality tests just muddies the water by stripping out descriptions of healthy personality from the true pathologies that lurk around them. I’d rather have an imprecise measure to juxtapose the bad behaviors off of than muddy the waters and invite pathologies. Ironically, those looking to diagnose personality as Freya writes against are often the very same cluster Bs who use it as an excuse. They just mask a worse pathology by obfuscating a healthy personality.
Conclusion
Pulling back up, we have to be careful not to pathologize personality while also recognizing that certain personalities can index toward pathologies, but not always in the directions we’d expect. ENTJ isn’t ADHD unless you value the ISFP characteristics more and demand that behavior. ISFP, however, carries risks in weaponized empathy that ENTJs don’t suffer from. Both of these tendencies stem from people not understanding who they are or what that means.
I’d love to just get back to personality and stay away from pathology, but that requires understanding the general characteristics we share rather than treating everyone as so unique as to be immeasurable. Bracketing these sorts of spaces is important so long as we don’t force-fit people into immovable stereotypes. But, then again, that’s why a few years ago we explored how to Stereotype Properly:
Stereotypes are a tool, they can be incredibly useful, and they can be incredibly damaging. But this isn’t different from virtually any social, or even mechanical tool. Stereotypes are absolutely critical to smooth social functioning.
Personality tests are nothing more than applying stereotypes of general proclivities. They can be damaging, as Karina has seen and we explored here, but they can also be incredibly useful. No matter what, if we don’t understand them, we risk listing healthy personality ad bad, and inviting bad pathologies to masquerade as personality. I say we bring back our understanding to ensure smooth social functioning.
Polymathic Being is a reader-supported publication. Becoming a paid member keeps these essays open for everyone. Hurry and grab 20% off an annual subscription. That’s $24 a year or $2 a month. It’s just 50¢ an essay and makes a big difference.
Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
Educating AI Integrating AI into education
Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights into the philosophy of agency
What’s fun is that Karina and I likely think similarly about things because we are both ENTJs. We think similarly, divergently, and counterintuitively. We are analytical and willing to engage, debate, and cordially disagree. What I’m looking forward to is the continued engagement in the future where we keep discussing these sorts of things.
 | A guest post by
|
What can I say? Brilliant.
In our current age of splintered reality (1 event=500 news stories), lack of modern day "mantra" which describes the overall mores or "RAISON D'ÊTRE" of our culture, and add in that medically (DSM-5), we spent a lot more time focusing on pathology than definitions of wellness, it is no wonder there is still so much confusion. There are literally hundreds of defined mental illnesses.
There are few paradigms of mental wellness or what I would call sanity.
Suicides and mass killings are increasing and are normalized. An epidemic of loneliness amongst young folks (and men in particular) is a thing. There are 110 million Americans that are described as suffering from various mental illnesses at any given moment. There are 3 million Americans that fall under the rubric of being pyschotic (1% of our population).
Personality, or what we used to call having a personality, or "he is such a colorful character" or "he is a real character", in now looked at from a lens of negativity. One theory is, it takes two people for personality to be revealed or to be formed, because it needs the context of a relationship to compare and contrast it. Babies have personalities from the gitgo and so do dogs. Isn't the real truth your personality is both your inherent sensibility and partially an ongoing choice you make as you go through life ? One is not necessarily the same at 20 as at 80.