Health Beyond the Blog: The Maintenance Phase Podcast

Debunking the Myers Briggs Personality Test on “Maintenance Phase” with Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes

by Lauryn Palacio

Health claims and myths can be detrimental, even without scientific evidence. The podcast Maintenance Phase challenges the audience to engage and think critically instead. 

Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes host a health and wellness podcast that aims to help listeners understand the rhetoric and pseudoscience of health trends. Maintenance Phase covers many popular health topics including Ozempic, calorie counting, veganism, and more. Each episode is an exploration of the history and popularization of health misconceptions and the odd ways scientific data is misused. The most recent episode, which aired on September 12, addresses the infamous Myers-Briggs (MB) Personality Test and the challenges of categorizing human personalities.

The MB Personality Test is a pseudo-psychological metric used to determine personality types. Participants answer 94 questions, after which they are sorted into 1 of 16 archetypes. Each type is mapped to a four-letter code. A participant could be introverted (I) or extroverted (E), Intuitive (N) or Sensing (S), Feeling (F) or Thinking (T), and Perceiving (P) or Judging (J). These letters indicate on which end of a personality trait spectrum a person falls. 

The creation and popularization of the MB Personality Test is attributable to a mother-daughter duo in the mid-twentieth century. Parenting groups initially adopted the tool to help mothers better understand the needs of their children. Industry co-opted this test following World War II. This implementation, in turn, provided for a basis for prejudice based on personality types. 

Gordon and Hobbes criticize the test for its inability to capture the complexity and fluidity of human personalities and dives deeper into the foundational psychology of practice, creative liberties taken, and workplace discrimination. They bring educated yet humorous insights about the topic throughout the episode, a staple to their podcast. They take time to explore the history of each episode’s topic to help the listener understand the culture influencing health trends and social, economic, and political implications. The show notes and references clearly display attention to journalistic integrity. The dialogue is conversation between friends, making it more accessible to those without extensive education on the subject. With Maintenance Phase, Gordon and Hobbes fight health misinformation and its grasp on the general public one episode at a time.

This episode can be found on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and other audio-streaming platforms.