💡 Diagnostic Label series For the full picture of why more testing leaves you less certain of who you are — and where the exit lies — start with the cluster pillar. → Are Personality Tests Accurate?
Introduction: Two Very Different Meanings of “It Was Accurate”
The Enneagram is known as a personality classification sorting people into nine types. Learn your type, read its characteristics, and you nod deeply: that is exactly me. And you do indeed behave as the description of the type says — when it feels that way, we conclude that the assessment was accurate after all. But two entirely different meanings hide inside that accurate.
Material on making use of the Enneagram has been discussed at length. What this article places is the question one step before it: why a name — because I am type such-and-such, this is how I am — genuinely produces, after the fact, the self that the name described.
Here is the conclusion first. A name does not become real because it was accurate. The order runs the other way. Believing I am this type is what makes the name real afterwards. It did not hit the target; you were steered into becoming the target. What follows dissects that inversion in order.
📖 Contents
A Name Changes How Information Is Picked Up
Once you settle on I am this type, the first thing to change is how the events of your days are received.
We do not receive everything happening around us equally. Of countless events we pick up a small portion and let the rest pass. A name begins quietly to operate that selection. Events corroborating what you already believe are engraved as this confirms my type, while events running against it slip past as a chance exception. Live the same day, and only the events matching the name accumulate as evidence about you.
What makes this selection formidable is that the assembled evidence looks genuine. Every event serving as grounds actually happened. These are not false memories. It is only that events matching the name were selected and events not matching were discarded. Each individual piece of evidence is genuine while the manner of collection carries a heavy bias. So the conviction — with this much evidence there can be no mistake — can grow without limit.
People Behave According to the Label Applied
Once the pickup of information changes, behaviour itself changes next.
The sociologist Howard Becker analysed the process by which a person becomes a deviant, advancing the view later called labelling theory [Becker, 1963]. On his account the order is not characteristic first and behaviour second. The label comes first and the characteristic second. Behaving in accordance with the label applied, a person fitting that name is produced afterwards. Someone who has settled on I am this type begins unconsciously to select the behaviours a person of that type would take. And, observing the results of their own behaviour, deepens the conviction that they are indeed that type.
The change does not complete itself inside one person. When you behave according to the type, those around you who observe that behaviour begin treating you as that type as well [Goffman, 1963]. They see you through the type, and their treatment engraves your self-image from the outside. The name you applied and the name others applied join hands and reinforce one another.
▸ How this sense of belonging connects with the circuitry of approval is treated in the sister cluster, what the need for approval actually is.
A Name Producing Reality: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
When the pickup of information, the behaviour, and the treatment by others are all aligned under one name, something decisive occurs. The name begins, by its own force, to produce reality.
The sociologist Robert Merton called this the self-fulfilling prophecy [Merton, 1948]: a belief that may have been mistaken at the outset becoming true as a result, through the behaviour of the person who believed it. Someone believing I am poor at dealing with people avoids people, gains no experience through avoiding them, and becomes genuinely poor at it for want of experience. The prophecy realises itself.
What makes the mechanism troublesome is that the realised outcome looks like evidence of the prophecy’s correctness. Actual difficulty with people strengthens the conviction I really was poor at this. But that difficulty may not be proof of an innate deficiency so much as the consequence of avoiding people in the belief of being poor at it. When an Enneagram type feels to have been really very accurate, those words may be not testimony to the precision of the assessment but a report that a self-fulfilling prophecy has completed.
There is one sign for detecting it: whether you can remember when you acquired the self-image. An innate essence should have been with you since your earliest awareness. In most cases, however, we remember the moment of receiving the name. An essence has no date of commencement; a name does.
Conclusion: A Name Is Not a Mirror but a Chisel
An Enneagram type appears accurate because the name changed how information was picked up, changed the behaviour, changed the treatment by others, and eventually produced a self that genuinely matched it. It did not hit the target; it steered you into behaving as the target. A name was not a mirror reflecting you but a chisel carving you.
On the reverse of that fact, though, lies a considerable hope. If your present self was produced as a result of believing a name, then choosing a different name — or a way of living not bound to names at all — can produce a different self. The power of a name to make reality is at once the power that binds us and the power that releases us. What is required is not a more accurate type but standing on the side that holds the name. Receive the overall design as your next step. How this inversion operates across diagnosis as a whole is set out in are personality tests accurate.
References
Academic papers and theory
- Merton, R. K. “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” (1948) The Antioch Review, 8(2)
- Becker, H. S. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963) Free Press
- Goffman, E. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963) Prentice-Hall
