An Empirical Assessment of the Enneagram Personality Typing System Mark D' Cloud, Amelia N' Perez, R

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An Empirical Assessment of the Enneagram
Personality Typing SystemMark D. Cloud, Amelia
N. Perez,Rosemary Savoia, Bradley S. Morder

• Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern
  Psychological AssociationBoston,
  MassachusettsMarch 11, 2005

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The Enneagram
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Experiment 1Hypotheses Tested

• Congruence between two common methods of
  assessing an individuals enneagram type
• Prediction that people often possess features of
  the two surrounding enneagram types (wings)
• Prediction that certain childhood behaviors and
  feelings correlate with specific adult types
• Role of labeling the enneagram types on
  participant responses. We expected that the
  labels would influence participant responding
  through a confirmation bias.

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Method
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Results

• Little congruence between the two assessments
  (only 43 were congruent)
• Large role of chance in determining an
  individuals typemost selected many inventory
  items from each type as accurately describing
  themselves.
• Disconfirmed the validity of wings
• Disconfirmed the relation with childhood
  characteristics
• Found evidence labeling creates a confirmation
  bias in participants

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Experiment 2Hypothesis Tested

• That P.T. Barnum effects could predict the
  proportion of types found in our population of
  college students for both the paragraph test
  and the inventory test.

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Method
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Results for Paragraph Test
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Results for Inventory Test
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Conclusions

• Creates an illusion of explaining human behavior.
• Our experiments disconfirmed many aspects of the
  enneagram theory.
• May stimulate self-reflection and interactions
  with others.
• Slippery slope
• Believers may be more inclined to believe other
  psychobabble and pseudoscientific procedures.

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Questions?