Trials of the Warm and Welcoming
P.T. Barnum, Myers-Briggs, and Salary Hygiene
“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”
-Margaret Mead
Ghosting WebMD was great for my health.
I’m sure you know what I’m talking about…
I wake up with some mild symptoms, but do not want to go to the doctor. Instead, I search for my symptoms on WebMD. Immediately, I am terrified that my standard runny nose is actually the Yaba Virus.1 Or “better” yet, I get a forwarded email and suddenly become an expert on vaccines.2
The easiest way to avoid this problem is to go to the doctor, and not try and diagnose symptoms on WebMD (or really anywhere on the internet). The closest I got to being a doctor is being in the same family tree as a bunch of doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals; in other words, I have NO expert medical knowledge.
However, my temptation to freak out over vague medical diagnoses on WebMD, while foolish, is not surprising. This temptation is hardwired into our latest heuristic…
Barnum Effect
Does it matter whether or not Jacob’s predictions about his sons are accurate?
Parashat Vayehi includes Jacob’s last testimonial to his sons, statements about how his descendants will fare in the generations to come. The testimonials are sometimes encouraging, other times harsh. And somehow, what Jacob says to each son in this meeting will apply to every single member of that tribe for eternity.3
Yikes.
The Torah intentionally teaches universal lessons, and thus it makes perfect sense for individuals to see themselves in Jacob’s predictions (one of several reasons there are 70 faces of Torah).4 However, the Torah is the exception that proves the rule; just because a person reads a vague prediction about the future does not mean that this prediction applies to them.
This is the what’s known as the Barnum Effect5 or the Forer Effect, which holds that people tend to overvalue generalized modes of feedback like horoscopes and personality tests. To put it another way, if you ever read your horoscope and said “I can’t believe how well this describes me,” you are a victim of the Barnum Effect.
In 1949, Bertram Forer found that people tend not to realize that a “universally valid statement is a description of a cultural group rather than a psychological datum.”6 Noting how many of his psychology students would read a case study in their abnormal psychology textbook and immediately think it applied to their neuroses, Forer demonstrates that when an inference is “universally valid…the confirmation is useless.”7 Just because a few of my symptoms match WebMD does not mean that I have a rare disease; the description is designed to apply to a broad set of people, and experts are essential because they sift through what really applies to me, as opposed to what could be said about anyone.
Much like confirmation bias, Forer argues that the harm of this heuristic is that, “positive results obtained by a personal validation can…[lead a therapist]...into a false sense of security which bolsters his conviction in the essential rightness of his philosophy of personality or his diagnostic prowess.”8 Buying into a broad description can result in a false sense of security, leading a therapist not to intervene when they need to, or make impulsive mistakes, intervening when they should not. In either case, the therapist needs to make a judgment based on their expert diagnosis, not based on the patient's belief based on flawed information.
Regarding Jewish institutional life, I have never visited a congregation that does not claim to be “warm and welcoming.” And in certain respects, every synagogue is warm and welcoming; even the most toxic community has warm and welcoming people. However, “warm and welcoming” is better judged by a whole series of discrete actions the community does or does not do. And if leaders focus more on the cliche than the action steps, essentially the Forer effect underscores how that cliche can lead to harmful inaction.
The Personality Brokers
Now watch me make a 180…
I am a sucker for a popular personality test, even though the Barnum Effect is a pretty devastating critique. In my case, I’ve eagerly taken tests to find out my “type” as defined by StrengthsFinder, the Leadership Circle, and True Colors, and am embarrassed at how much research I’ve done on my Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). In case you were wondering, my type is ENTJ, with a touch of INTJ. And I use MBTI in spite of the fact that almost all research suggests that these tests are junk science, at best, dangerous, at worst. People are complicated…9
But if the Barnum Effect and related biases appeal to you, consider reading Merve Emre’s The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. This book is not instructional, but a history of the origins of MBTI.
To put it mildly, Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers, the progenitors of MBTI, were interesting personalities (pun intended). Although the MBTI is loosely influenced by Carl Jung’s Personality Types, neither Briggs nor Myers studied under Jung, and neither was a trained psychologist. And it gets weirder from there, so needless to say, the history of the MBTI is odd, and should give us pause.
However, Emre ultimately provides a sympathetic take on personality tests, arguing that personality tests merge “self-discovery” and “self-creation” because providing a window into “who we are” deepens our investment in becoming who we want to be. Emre writes that “Self-awareness remains a precious psychological offering no matter the end, and the painless knowledge peddled by the indicator can seem more appealing than other, more chaotic processes of self-excavation.”10 Personality tests are fallible, but so are the people who take them.
For me, while a personality test like MBTI is far from a complete picture of who I am, it constantly provides me with a more nuanced view of how to understand other people. The fundamental attribution error is a powerful force, which means a typical person is likely to judge other people too quickly. However, if someone is willing to tell me their “type,” I can access a deeper understanding of how this person operates, as opposed to letting my lying eyes do the evaluating. The test is an incomplete picture, but more complete than judging others on mental autopilot.
Weekly Links
Striking Findings from 2022: I always giggle when I hear leaders in the Jewish Community talk about “the Pew Study,” because the Pew Research Center publishes hundreds of studies every year. Here are Pew’s fifteen most surprising findings from 2022.
Supporting Jewish Colleagues at Work: In spite of rising anti-Semitism, too often anti-Semitism is seen as a separate category from the larger fight for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI); Ari Emanuel captured this tension in a recent column. As a result, I was inspired by this article in the Harvard Business Review about the importance of supporting Jewish colleagues in DEI efforts.
The Transcendent Brain: I always love anything written by Alan Lightman, particularly because Lightman was disciplined enough to stop using email. Most recently, Lightman wrote a fantastic piece on how the brain is drawn to beauty, which is a sample of a book he is writing on spirituality and science that I cannot wait to read.
Salary as Hygiene: The Leading Edge employee experience survey is always a must-read. As a result, I was intrigued by this piece from Amy Born and Gali Cooks of Leading Edge about employee engagement and employee salaries.
2023 Buzzwords: I try to avoid giving readers links to articles that simply tap into buzzwords that are already overused (like this one on “Goblin Mode”). That said, I loved how The Chronicle of Philanthropy wrote an article predicting what buzzwords they predict will dominate the nonprofit sector in 2023.
The official name is the “Yaba Monkey Tumor Virus.”
Lest anyone get the wrong idea, not only do I get all of my shots, I have no patience with the anti-vaccine crowd. Get yourself vaccinated. Like yesterday.
Traditional commentators like Ibn Ezra see Jacob’s speech as prophecies about the future, whereas modern commentators like Nahum Sarna see them as “retro-jections from later historical reality,” explanations as to why the tribes of Israel fared the way they did millennia later. Either way, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where any individual member reads Jacob’s testimonial about his/her/their tribe, and all of the sudden sees everything he/she/they do through the lens of Jacob’s words in our parasha.
Midrash Bemidbar Rabbah 13:16.
Why is this called the Barnum Effect? Because P.T. Barnum was a world-class manipulator who believed a good show “has something for everybody.” In other words, this is not a compliment to P.T. Barnum, but props to him for being so famous that he inspired his own term in the APA Dictionary of Psychology and a movie-musical starring Hugh Jackman. Not sure which is more impressive…
Bertram Forer, “The fallacy of personal validation: a classroom demonstration of gullibility” in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Volume 44, Issue 1 (1949), 118–123.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Here’s something weird. I am a huge fan of Adam Grant (who isn’t?), and Grant is not a fan of MBTI or personality types, to put it mildly:
However, while researching this article, I found that Adam Grant just created a personality test with investment titan Ray Dalio:
I will confess that I am left confused. Having taken a number of these tests and the read the accompanying literature, the creator always says that previous tests are not adequate for x, y, z reason, but this one is designed to really be the final word on personality (until the next one is created).
I am trying to withhold judgment, but it’s very strange.
Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (New York: Anchor, 2018), 269.