The need to measure a person begins before the person has had a chance to demonstrate what they are. The infant is assessed for developmental milestones. The child is tested for reading readiness. The adolescent sits examinations that produce scores.
The adult submits to aptitude assessments, personality inventories, competency frameworks, and the various other instruments that employers, institutions, and individuals themselves use to produce a number or a type or a category that claims to describe what kind of person this is and how much of the relevant capacity they possess.
The measuring is so continuous and so embedded in the institutional fabric of contemporary life that the question of why anyone needs to be measured at all is rarely asked. The question is not rhetorical. It is genuine, and its answer is not obvious once it is actually examined.
Intelligence, as the term is commonly used, is a noun—a thing that a person has more or less of, that can be assessed, quantified, compared across people, and used to sort them into categories of more and less capable. The IQ test is the most visible instrument of this usage, but the noun-framing of intelligence is prior to the test and would persist if the test were abandoned. The framing assumes that intelligence is a property of the person in the way that height is a property of the person—measurable, stable, independent of context, and capable of being ranked.
The alternative framing is that intelligence is a verb—something that people do rather than something that they have. Intelligencing, in this sense, is the activity of engaging effectively with whatever situation is in front of you, using whatever capacities are available to you, in the specific context that gives the engagement its meaning. The person who navigates a complex social situation with precision and care is intelligencing. The person who diagnoses a mechanical fault by listening to the sound of an engine is intelligencing. The person who writes a sentence that does exactly what it needed to do is intelligencing. The person who grows something in difficult soil is intelligencing. None of these activities are the same activity. None of them are reducible to each other. All of them are forms of engaged, responsive, effective action in the world.
The noun framing asks: how much intelligence does this person have? The verb framing asks: what is this person doing with the situation they are in? The noun framing produces a ranking. The verb framing produces a description. The ranking is useful for sorting at scale. The description is useful for understanding the specific person.
The comparison of fluency with language to fluency with nurturing is instructive precisely because the comparison is not symmetrical in the judgements the culture applies to it. Both are forms of skilled engagement with complex situations. Both require the development of capacities through practice and attention. Both produce outcomes that matter to real people in real situations. The person who is fluent with language can do things that the person who is not fluent with language cannot do. The person who is fluent with nurturing can do things that the person who is not fluent with nurturing cannot do.
The culture judges one superior to the other, and the direction of the judgement is not random. It follows the lines of what has been institutionally credentialed, what has been historically associated with public life rather than private life, what has been associated with the production of measurable outputs rather than the maintenance of relationships. The judgement is not a finding about the relative value of the capacities. It is a finding about which capacities the credential system has been built around and which it has not.
The word intelligence carries this cultural judgement within it. To say that someone is intelligent is to say that they are capable in the domains the culture has agreed to call intelligence. To say that someone is not intelligent is to say they are not capable in those domains, regardless of what they can do in the domains the culture has not agreed to call intelligence. The word is doing evaluative work that it presents as descriptive work, and the evaluation it is doing reflects the cultural preferences of the people who built the systems that use the word.
The personality typing systems that have accumulated around the need to classify people are worth examining as a group, because they share a structure and a function that persists across their considerable differences in content.
Myers-Briggs divides people into sixteen types based on four binary dimensions—introversion versus extraversion, intuition versus sensing, feeling versus thinking, perceiving versus judging—producing a four-letter identifier that is widely used in corporate contexts and personal identity formation.
The Enneagram assigns people to one of nine types based on core motivations and fears, with wings and subtypes that allow further differentiation. Numerology derives personality characteristics from the numerical values of a person’s name and birth date. Astrology assigns characteristics based on the position of celestial bodies at the moment of birth, a system whose astronomical basis has been complicated by the fact that the precession of the equinoxes has shifted the constellations from the positions the original system assumed, meaning that most people who believe they are one sign are, astronomically speaking, the previous one.
What these systems share is the conversion of the irreducible complexity of a specific person into a finite number of categories that can be named, described, and used to generate expectations about behaviour. The conversion is appealing because it produces manageability—the sixteen Myers-Briggs types are a tractable number of things to understand, whereas the seven billion specific people on the planet are not. The category provides a shortcut to the person. The shortcut is useful in the same way that all shortcuts are useful: it gets you somewhere faster than the full journey would, at the cost of some of what the full journey would have given you.
The cost is the specific person, who is not the category they most closely resemble. The INTJ who does not behave like an INTJ in the relevant respects is not a failure of the person. They are evidence of the limit of the category. The Scorpio who does not demonstrate the characteristics attributed to Scorpios is not evidence that astrology works poorly in this case. They are evidence that the celestial positions at the moment of someone’s birth do not determine their personality, which is a conclusion the evidence has consistently supported.
The question of why people use these systems, given the evidence that they do not reliably predict what they claim to predict, is a more interesting question than whether the systems are accurate. They are not accurate in any scientifically defensible sense. They are widely used. The reason they are widely used is not primarily that people believe they are accurate in the scientific sense. It is that they serve a function the accuracy question does not address.
The function is identity and community. The person who identifies as an INFP or a Four on the Enneagram or a Virgo has acquired a vocabulary for talking about themselves, a set of characteristics to affirm or dispute, and a community of people who share the vocabulary. The community is real even when the underlying system is not. The Scorpios who gather around their shared identity are having genuine social interactions, experiencing genuine recognition, participating in a genuine community—regardless of whether the celestial position at their birth has anything to do with their personality.
This is the function that measurement systems serve for individuals who cannot find community through other channels. The person who does not fit the available social categories—who is not conventional enough for the mainstream, not marginalised in the specific ways that produce the identity communities that have formed around specific forms of marginalisation, not part of any obvious tribe—may find in a personality typing system a vocabulary for their difference and a community of people who use the same vocabulary. The system provides the belonging. Whether the system is accurate is secondary to whether it is useful for this purpose.
The problem with using inaccurate systems for community building is that the community is organised around a fiction, and the fiction shapes how the community’s members understand themselves. The person who has internalised the INFP description as a description of themselves has acquired a set of expectations about how they will behave, how they will feel, what they will be capable of and incapable of, that the description does not actually support. The description was generated from a questionnaire that captures a small sample of behaviour on the day it was taken, in the frame of mind the person was in, and produces a category that claims to describe something more stable and more fundamental than the questionnaire can measure.
The self-understanding that results from the category may constrain as much as it enables. The INFP who believes they are not suited to confrontation because INFPs are not suited to confrontation has used the category to close off a capacity that their actual experience might have revealed differently. The category has done something that a useful self-understanding should not do: it has told the person what they are before they have found out.
If every person is genuinely unique—if the specific configuration of capacities, history, experience, values, and cognitive style that constitutes a specific person is not adequately described by any of the available categories—then measurement of the kind these systems perform is not a finding about the person. It is a finding about the category the person most closely resembles among the available categories.
This is useful for population-scale management, where the goal is to allocate resources efficiently across large numbers of people and the specific person is not the operational unit. It is not useful for understanding the specific person, where the distance between the person and the category is exactly what matters.
The measurement tells you where the person sits in the distribution.
It does not tell you what the person can do with the situation in front of them.
Those are different questions.
The first produces a number.
The second requires attention.
The attention is what was being asked for when the measurement was taken.
The measurement was easier to provide.
The Vorpel Foundation