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How Do Your Traits Help or Hurt You?
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The guy who discovered handwashing prevented deaths after childbirth was kind of a jerk, calling everyone who didn’t believe him “murderers.” Did his personality prevent the adoption of one of the most important innovations in medicine ever, or was he just frustrated? New co-hosts Olivia Masterson and Caroline Van Bell, along with returning co-hosts Lilly Schmidt and Melia Patrick, talk with Dave about personality. Or at least, the pop-psych version.
Listener Elizabeth asked for a personality episode, so we get to it. Now, most tests–including the Enneagram, which we all took–have no published validation data. The Enneagram concept started life in mysticism before some people decided it was psychology and some other people decided it was a business. But the real questions: would your mom describe you the way the test does? Why is it so hard to tell whether a test result is who you are or who you want to be? Somewhere in there we get to the fundamental attribution error, the halo effect, and the two non-psychologists who built Myers-Briggs to help women find jobs in post-war America.
What about the personalities of famous people from medicine and science? Walter Freeman turning the lobotomy into a road show, William Osler published a hoax about a disease that doesn’t exist to piss off a colleague (which then spent decades in a textbook), Oliver Sacks was painfully shy and unable to recognize faces while writing about how brains make selves, Richard Feynman cracked safes at Los Alamos for fun and to prove security there was a joke. Was Ignaz Semmelweis an abrasive jerk or a reasonable man watching patients die from a problem he knew how to fix? Rosalind Franklin was called prickly largely by the men who used her data. Werner Forssmann threaded a catheter into his own heart in 1929, walked to radiology to X-ray it, and got fired.
But, personality is a weak signal in medicine. What few studies are out there suggest that effects on things like specialty choice or admissions success are significant but small. Mostly, it’s about diligence (and neuroticism), although it can be helpful to pretend to be an extravert in interviews–people like to know if you’re cool to work with.
Episode credits:
- Producer: Dave Etler
- Co-hosts: Olivia Masterson, Lillian Schmidt, Melia Patrick, Caroline Van Bell
- Production: SCP Media Lab–Anna Royer, Cyrus Barati, Isa Perez-Sandi, Zach Grissom, Sarah Upton, Srishti Mathur, David Lee, and Jacob Thompson
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The views and opinions expressed on this podcast belong solely to the individuals who share them. They do not represent the positions of the University of Iowa, the Carver College of Medicine, or the State of Iowa. All discussions are intended for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Nothing said on this podcast should be used to diagnose, treat, or prevent any medical condition. Always seek qualified professional guidance for personal decisions.
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