DiSC is nonsense. Why the four colours tell you nothing

On the four colours and four letters "that supposedly tell you something profound about your personality," after which "everyone in the office walks around saying well of course she's a high D, as though they've cracked the code of human behaviour."

Where he's seen it used: corporate training days, team away days, luxury retail onboarding, five-star hotels, private aviation — "brands that absolutely should know better."

> **"It's complete nonsense. And I don't mean slightly flawed, nor useful if you don't take it too seriously. I mean complete nonsense that has borrowed words and phrases from psychology to make it sound credible."**

The origin — genuinely strange

William Moulton Marston, 1920s. Technically a psychologist with a Harvard PhD, but "more of a showman or publicist" — "a man who loved big ideas and wasn't overtly troubled by the need to validate any of them."

Three things he's responsible for:

1. The precursor to the lie detector — the systolic blood pressure test, which he claimed could detect deception. It couldn't, "not reliably — but it made great theatre." He spent years trying to get it admitted as courtroom evidence. Lie detectors are still not admissible in court.
2. Wonder Woman — he invented her and wrote the early strips. ("There's a whole other story involving polyamorous households and some fairly unsubtle bondage imagery — a video for another day.")
3. The four-type theory of human behaviour: dominance, influence, steadiness, conscientiousness (or compliance, depending on the version).

The critical historical point

> Marston never actually built an assessment tool. He wrote a 1928 book, Emotions of Normal People, laid out the theory, "and then moved on to the lie detector and the Amazonian princess with the lasso of truth."

The questionnaires, profiles and colour wheels came much later, when other people commercialised the framework — first in the 1950s–60s, then again in the 1970s. "Repackaged and resold so many times that what you're buying today is several generations removed from anything Marston wrote."

> Everything modern "is built on a theoretical foundation that was never empirically tested by its creator," modified and polished "to the point where the connection to the original is mostly just branding."

> "When someone tells you DiSC is based on psychology, what they actually mean is: a Harvard psychologist in the 1920s had some ideas, never bothered to validate them, went off to create comic books instead — and then generations of consultants built a commercial empire on top of his framework without ever checking whether any of it was true."

Why it feels scientific

It borrows the language and formats you'd expect from something scientific: you fill in a questionnaire, get a profile, there's a quadrant, a wheel, maybe some percentages. > "It looks official, it sounds technical, and the language is tremendously confident" — "your DiSC style is..." as though something has been measured.

Cross-references

• Overview of all the tools → yQMvSFmrvTU · MBTI and Barnum → DaNr2wygvpQ
• Borrowed credibility → aXS0gG7ppn0 · Practitioner tradition as science → gjw8y7SsYIY