Personality types documentary
Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests (2021)
- Cast & crew
- User reviews
IMDbPro
- 20212021
- TV-MATV-MA
- 1h 25m
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5.5/10
787
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Documentary
Exploring the unexpected origins of America's obsession with personality testing, this documentary takes a look at the profound ways that ideas about personality have formed the world around... Read allExploring the unexpected origins of America's obsession with personality testing, this documentary takes a look at the profound ways that ideas about personality have formed the world around us.Exploring the unexpected origins of America's obsession with personality testing, this documentary takes a look at the profound ways that ideas about personality have formed the world around us.
IMDb RATING
5.5/10
787
YOUR RATING
- Director
- Tim Travers Hawkins
- Writers
- Tim Travers Hawkins
- Mark Monroe
- Stars
- Kyle Behm
- Roland Behm
- Lydia X.Z. Brown
- Director
- Tim Travers Hawkins
- Writers
- Tim Travers Hawkins
- Mark Monroe
- Stars
- Kyle Behm
- Roland Behm
- Lydia X.
Z. Brown
Photos
Top cast
Kyle Behm
Roland Behm
Lydia X.Z. Brown
Susan Cain
Ben Dattner
Jamaal Eggelston
Merve Emre
David Flemming
Katherine Hughes
Frank James
Sofia Jaskowsky
- Actress
Lindsay Johnson
- Self
- (as Lindsay Johnston)
Lashawn Mackey
Cathy O'Neil
Christine White
- Actress
- Director
- Tim Travers Hawkins
- Writers
- Tim Travers Hawkins
- Mark Monroe
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
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Storyline
User reviews41
ReviewFeatured review
5/
10
Interesting but mostly stays on the surface - Excruciatingly bad sound engineering
The documentary is a good introduction for anyone not familiar with personality tests however it stays on the surface of the matter in both branches it tries to touch upon (namely the science behind the test, and the socio-economical aspect/impact).
But what is the worst thing about this documentary, and if I was rating only that, it would have been 1 star (at most) is what they have done with the sound when loud music always plays on top of people talking so most of the times you can't understand a word they say unless you use subtitles.
helpful•22
9
- zouradespina
- Mar 6, 2021
Details
- Release date
- March 4, 2021 (United States)
- Countries of origin
- United States
- United Kingdom
- Official site
- Language
- English
- Also known as
- Persona: Mračna istina iza testova ličnosti
- Production companies
- CNN Films
- Diamond Docs
- Dorothy Street Pictures
- See more company credits at IMDbPro
Technical specs
- Runtime
1 hour 25 minutes
- Color
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'They become dangerous tools': the dark side of personality tests | Documentary
Scrolling dating apps in 2015, Tim Travers Hawkins didn’t know who his type was.
He didn’t even know what a type was. Hawkins, a British film-maker then new to New York, “noticed something that was very different to people’s profiles in the UK and that was the use of these four letters,” he said to the Guardian. Curious, he looked it up. “I was like, ‘Huh, that’s different’.”
The four letters issue from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the world’s most well-known personality quiz, which categorizes everyone into 16 distinct types gleaned from four binaries: people are either introverted or extroverted, sensing (relying on evidence from one’s senses) or intuitive, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving.
The four letters appeared again a few years later when Hawkins was reading about Carl Jung. “It dawned on me that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was actually derived from Jung’s work, and that absolutely fascinated me. The pop-culture element, the fact that it was still being used currently in dating apps, and the fact that it was this power structure that was brought to bear on people’s lives without people maybe even noticing” – a theme that resonated with his 2019 documentary XY Chelsea about Chelsea Manning – “that all made me think this was something that I really wanted to look into”.
Hawkins’ new HBO Max documentary, Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests, investigates America’s infatuation with personality testing, revealing the surprising origin story behind the MBTI while surfacing ethical questions and criticisms that these seemingly harmless instruments are profoundly discriminatory and reflective of larger troubling issues of who exactly is considered worthy and valuable in society.
Persona is informed by the 2018 book The Personality Brokers by the Oxford University professor Merve Emre – also one of the documentary’s executive producers – which traces the history of the two women who created the namesake Myers-Briggs instrument. “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,” Emre says in the film.
The business of personality typing as we know it was seeded in 1901 in a Washington DC living room. Following the deaths of two of her children, Katharine Briggs was determined to closely monitor her surviving child, Isabel, and conducted experiments on her and other neighborhood children.
Two decades later, Katharine became a devoted Carl Jung acolyte following his groundbreaking 1921 book, Psychological Types; his work provided a vocabulary and validation to her previously discarded projects.
Later, galvanized by a desire to aid humanity during the second world war, Isabel applied her mother’s research to the workforce, designing a questionnaire – again with the help of her own daughter and her friends around the kitchen table – intended to help people find the job best suited to them; this initial version of the MBTI was released in 1943 (There have been many iterations since – the four letters were never copyrighted).
Since the 1960s, some 50 million people have taken the test, and personality testing is a $2bn industry, growing around 15% per year. Today more than 2 million take the MBTI every year, including 60% to 70% of American prospective workers. All this despite the well-known facts that the MBTI has no grounding in clinical psychology (Jung’s theories weren’t drawn from controlled experiments or data either), its results are poorly correlated with job performance, and embedded within it are false and dangerous ideas about race, gender, and class that drive bias and discrimination.
“Personality tests are by and large constructed to be ableist, to be racist, to be sexist, and to be classist,” says the disability justice advocate Lydia XZ Brown. “That’s what happens when you have a test … based on norms devised from college-educated straight white men with no 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 someone’s life, they become dangerous tools.”
Kyle Behm learned that the hard way. In 2012, he applied for a job at his local Kroger supermarket that included an online personality test. (Employers’ use of online personality tests has surged since the early 2000s in attempts to streamline hiring, particularly for customer-service jobs, and they’re now used earlier in the hiring process to filter out applicants, as opposed to being considered alongside interviews and past experience.
) Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Behm found out he was rejected from the job because his test indicated that he was likely to ignore customers if they were upset or making him upset.
“I was taken aback because I’ve worked in customer service before and one of the things I’ve learned is to completely separate your personal feelings from the job,” Behm says in the film. “It’s not fair that by answering honestly about things that were related to my mental health I was excluded from work. In my head, I’m thinking, There’s no way this can be legal.”
In complaints filed with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Behm, with the help of his attorney father, accused Kroger and six other companies of discrimination against the mentally ill through their use of personality tests. (The Myers-Briggs Company claims it stopped selling to companies that use it for hiring, and the Wall Street Journal found in 2014 that Kroger dropped from its hiring test many of the questions the Behms found most troubling.
)
David Scarborough, co-creator of the Unicru Personality Test used by Kroger and numerous other employers, defends the tests as providing a valuable service. “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,” he says in the film.
Battling the personality-test Goliaths are groups such as the Hope program, which helps low-income New Yorkers find employment and preps program participants for these tests. But what’s on the horizon is perhaps even more disturbing: video-interview platforms that analyze words and speech with facial movements. As Brown puts it, it’s part of the same pseudoscience as measuring people’s skulls.
Understanding how all these things work has taken new importance in the pandemic age, Hawkins notes, with “particularly our work interactions being mediated so much through technology. I think that has accelerated the use of these kinds of psychometric tests.
Far from going away, these personality tests are becoming more and more prevalent. Because we are working in more isolated ways via technology, there’s just more windows for this technology to be inserted at different junctures of our interactions.”
Not to mention the added pressure on the job market because of increased levels of unemployment. “Companies cannot deal with the volume of applicants and so they’re looking for ways to legally cull applicants,” he says, which speaks to the promise of personality-test screenings.
Ultimately Hawkins hopes the film will make us all approach things like personality tests with a more critical eye. “We’re often drawn to systems that seem to explain the world in a way that’s simple and seems to be neutral, but I would always want people to be wary and to think about where these instruments come from. All of these instruments have a past, and if you really delve into them, you can start to find out things about why they exist that might make you uncomfortable.
”
15 Absolutely Essential Psychology Documentaries
15 Absolutely Essential Psychology Documentariesculture
MARCH 13, 2023
Psychology and neurosciences are often very difficult subjects to understand just from reading. There they go 15 documentaries about psychology must be divided by topic.
Social psychology documentaries
Below we offer you a selection of documentaries about psychology that can change your outlook on things. Note!
1. Act of Assassination (2012)
During the Cold War, Colonel Suharto came to power in Indonesia in a coup d'état. Thereafter, he led a campaign of communist massacres that killed thousands of civilians. The Act of Murder This is an Oscar-nominated documentary for Best Documentary in which Anwar Kongo and German Koto, two former mercenaries led by Suharto, explain and recreate the murderous crimes they committed years ago as part of their work.
The film consists of murder scenes and confessions of paramilitaries who have never been punished for what they have done and are still protected by the government. In this story, you can see clear cases of depersonalization and of reification of the enemy, very frequent processes in the face of systematic extermination and genocide.
2. Shock Doctrine (2009)
Reference in documentaries about social psychology. This is a film based on the famous book published by Naomi Klein in 2007 and given the same title. This explains how some unpopular political measures can be implemented using fear to create a permanent state of emergency.
3. Psychological Warfare (2010)
This documentary is about the maneuvers and methods by which public opinion has recently solved certain problems, forcing millions of people to think in a certain way through propaganda and public relations.
Among the people who appear in the psychological warfare story are Noam Chomsky, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
4. Consent to manufacture. Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)
Philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky talks about ways to deceive the public, sometimes publishing false data, and sometimes leaving out important information to prevent ordinary citizens from freely making decisions. Chomsky argues that there is no need to censor the creation of uniform and predictable opinions To do this, it is enough to throw out a huge amount of insignificant data that mask the absence of important information.
This explains an example of why freedom can only exist under certain conditions (among them, having all the important information). If you've ever wondered why everyone has such similar opinions despite having the theoretical freedom to control their lives, this might give you some clues.
Educational Psychology Documentaries
5.
The Finnish Phenomenon (2011) This is a documentary about educational psychology and value education , It looks at the world's most amazing education system: Finnish.
6. Forbidden Education (2012)
Argentine independent film that focuses on the problems of regular education its impact on young people. Other models of the educational system are proposed, although due to the nature of the documentary, a possible solution to the gaps in the current educational system is rather vague.
Most of the following psychology documentaries are in TV documentary format and are shorter in duration.
Documentaries on psychology and neuroscience
6. The Mystical Brain (2006)
A group of researchers from the University of Montreal study the neural processes that occur during meditation and mystical experiences.
7. Total Isolation (2008)
What happens when your brain is left completely alone, devoid of stimuli? This documentary answers the question about Investigation brain activity of people in complete isolation.
8. The Man with 7 Seconds of Memory
This short film follows the life of Clive Wire, a man who suffers from retrograde and antegrade amnesia due to lesions in the hippocampus, just like the protagonist Memento. Every 7 seconds your immediate memories disappear.
9. Seeing or believing? (2010)
Journey through the brain and physiological processes that explain optical illusions , This excerpt explains the McGurk effect:
Developmental Psychology Documentaries
10. Why are we talking?
Mechanisms of language revealed in this interesting documentary. Essential for those students or psychologists who are interested in language development.
11. The Secret Life of the Brain (2002)
The focus is on the development of the human brain (and the psychological stages that accompany this process) throughout human life.
Documentaries on Psychology and Mental Disorders
12. Maria and Me (2013)
A documentary on autism that analyzes a specific case of a person with this disorder.
Valuable if you want to know firsthand how an autistic person is. You can see it here.
13. My bipolar son
This is about parenting and living with young people with bipolar disorder. You can see it here.
14. 1% Schizophrenia (2006)
A film against frivolity and prejudice associated with schizophrenia. Directed by Ione Hernandez and produced by acclaimed Julio Medema.
Economic Psychology Documentaries
15. Taking Care of Money (2010)
Documentary examines the psychological factors that underlie decision making and management of finances and the economy.
#I VOLUNTEER. HISTORIES OF THE CARING. FULL DIRECTOR'S CUT. (March 2023).
20 sharp films about human psychology / AdMe
ADME has prepared a list of films that can not only keep you busy in the evening, but plunge headlong into the secrets of the human soul and psyche, excite the imagination and make you sit silently in front of a dark screen, thinking about what you see.
No textbook on psychology is capable of this.
The Master
The Master is an exceptional film about the power of human charisma and suggestion, to which many epithets can be applied. But its main feature is that it "works" with the viewer immediately at several levels of perception. With the help of a perfectly balanced production and powerful acting images, the film excites the deepest levels of the viewer's subconscious, causing both disgust, and strong empathy, and a desire to reconsider it. You yourself will understand why.
Dangerous method
This is a picture that ruthlessly exposes the human essence from a psychological point of view and opens our eyes to the difficulties that most of us are just trying to hide from. The film, at the helm of which is David Cronenberg himself, and the notorious Michael Fassbender, Viggo Mortensen, Keira Knightley and Vincent Cassel were noted in the team, will appeal to everyone who, at the mention of the names of Freud and Jung, has a sparkle in his eyes.
Tree of life
The most enigmatic American director Terrence Malick made a film that touches the spiritual and sensual side of human existence. Trying to unite the macrocosm and the microcosm, with the help of music and video, the author depicts the course of life - from its inception, the "beginning" of time, to the life of a particular average American family in the middle of the 20th century. Amazing pictures of the origin of the Universe deserve special attention.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
This film is one of the few that was received with a bang by critics, professionals, and the mass audience. Despite all the charm, the picture differs significantly from the book that served as the basis for the film adaptation. But director Milos Forman retained the main idea: numerous human problems can be solved if only one makes an effort, and not sit idly by. This is what the main character of the film McMurphy demonstrates.
Good Will Hunting
Good Will Hunting is a worthy sensual film that evokes a whole palette of emotions - laughter, sadness, tears and laughter through tears.
Director Gus Van Sant and screenwriters Ben Affleck and Matt Damon put their whole soul into the story about a genius lost in life. Every dialogue was thought through. Therefore, after watching the film, very unusual sensations remain in the soul and in the heart.
The sea inside
This is one of those films that you must see. Largely due to the brilliant performance of Javier Bardem. Someone will admire the main character, someone will sympathize, and someone will condemn, but everyone will surely find something of their own in this film. The Sea Within is a beautiful, deep and unhurried movie. And the feeling after watching is like jumping off a cliff into the sea. Something heavy, like a hoop, squeezes the chest, and it becomes difficult to breathe. And then the taste of salt appears on the lips...
Interrupted Life
A wonderful film that vividly illustrates the fragility of the human psyche. It touches the living. It’s even hard to explain: either by the very atmosphere of a psychiatric clinic, or by the replicas of the heroine Angelina Jolie, or maybe all together.
I want to watch the credits, and then stare at the dark computer screen for another 10 minutes in order to fully understand this film.
Full Moon Kingdom
Adventure and beauty are the main ingredients of this story. A young boy scout and a girl travel far from their lives in search of adventure. Just? Well, I do not. Director Wes Anderson has created a unique timeless film, perfect for those who want to hide on 90 minutes away from crazy adult life.
My boyfriend is crazy
The Rays of Hope Collection is the title of this film in the original, and perhaps it best describes the experience of watching it. A very interesting, memorable, touching story about people who are going through difficult periods of their lives, gives not even hope, but confidence - everything can be changed.
Planet Ka-Pax
A mysterious alien from the planet K-PAX suddenly appears at a busy train station. An unremarkable man in appearance - except that dark glasses and a slight smile of the observer distinguish him from the crowd.
This is how this undeniably great film begins. If you do everything right, you will understand: the world of Ka-Pax exists in parallel with our life. And everyone has his own. He is in ourselves.
Mulholland Drive
The film is from another dimension. The film is a riddle that David Lynch posed and that you can hardly solve even from the tenth time. The tape surprises every second, captivates with its style, attracts with its alluring charm, deprives of speechlessness and, in the end, sound sleep.
Black Swan
A psychological drama with amazing acting, an incredible atmosphere, a wonderful classic soundtrack and a whole palette of diverse emotions. From the tantrums of the ballerina Nina in a chic performance by Natalie Portman, in places she reduces her cheekbones. And the question pops up by itself: "What is more important - mental stability or imaginary perfection?"
The Heartbreakers
While The Heartbreakers is a comedy, don't expect a hackneyed plot and traditional comedic themes from it.
This is a rather complex and deep film. The place of man in the world, the place of peace in man, environmental protection, hypocrisy, love, loneliness and kinship of souls - these are the topics that are touched upon in this seemingly light picture.
Mister Nobody
All people have been immortal for a long time and enjoy watching the TV show with the main star, decrepit, crazy old man Nemo, who talks about how he lived. Only this is not an understandable chronological story, but different versions of his life. What path did Mr. Nemo ultimately choose? Or is it all just a fantasy? Perhaps this is the best film in which the past, present and future are intertwined together.
Ice Wind
This Ang Lee film doesn't give up on anything or make any judgments. But he shows that invisible side of marriage, that variant of the development of relations, which no one even thinks about at the very beginning. The film drags on slowly, and gradually more and more secrets are revealed.
This is a drama for those who like to feel heavy films and appreciate the excellent performance of excellent actors of the first magnitude.
Tidemaster
Barbra Streisand made a difficult and controversial film. On the one hand, a melodrama with a light sauce of psychoanalysis, and on the other, a serious drama about loneliness. Despite this, each frame here is saturated with light colors, romance and great music, so two hours fly by unnoticed.
Breaking the waves
This is Lars von Trier, and that says it all. Breaking the Waves is not intended for the general public. It shows love that knows no boundaries and leads to recklessness. The story looks in one breath, but at the very end the author strikes hard...
Soloist
Directed by Joe Wright, The Soloist is a very powerful and colorful work of art. She, like a bottomless vessel, contains many important things. But most importantly: this film is a cure for indifference.
