The Sorting Hat

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantan. It's one of the most famous scenes in the Harry Potter series. Two lines of kids newly arrived at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry marched into a vast and glorious dining hall. The air glows with light from hanging torches and graceful flying candles.

The ceiling looks like a night sky, full of stars. This is the witch. The endless dining tables glitter with silver plates and golden goblets. Young students make their way to the front of the hall, where an old and crumpled wizard's hat awaits them.

It is the sorting hat. Now, when I call your name, you will come forth. I shall place the sorting hat on your head, and you will be sorted into your houses. The hat peers into the minds of the youngsters.

After judging their personality traits and potential, it decides which house they belong to during their Hogwarts education. Will it be brave Gryffindor, gentle Hufflepuff, smart Ravenclaw, or ambitious Slytherin? But where to put you? Not Slytherin, eh?

Are you sure? You could be great, you know. It's all here in your head. And Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness.

Is there no doubt about that? No? Well, if you're sure, better be Gryffindor! There is something deeply appealing about the sorting hat.

It's wise. It knows people better than they know themselves. It tells them who they are and to which drive they belong. Are they courageous, loyal, curious, or cunning?

All humans, old and young, love this kind of insight. Hi, my name is Mikayla Blackburn, and the house I'm in is in Gryffindor. I ran into a ten-year-old Mikayla and a group of her friends at Potoverse, a Harry Potter convention in Baltimore. I'm Haley and I'm in Ravenclaw.

I'm Lily and I'm in Gryffindor. I'm Riley and I'm in Ravenclaw. I'd come to the conference to learn more about the Hogwarts houses and the appeal of the sorting hat. Mikayla and her friends are huge Harry Potter friends.

And do you all know each other really well? Yeah. Okay, here's a little test that I want to do, okay? We're gonna pick Mikayla, and you're not gonna say it, but the rest of your friends on the count of three are gonna call out and say, what house you think she should be in, not what she says she's in or what she wants to be in, but based on what you know of her, what house you think she should be in, all right?

So the count of three, ready? One, two, three. Slither in her and I'm in the room. What had you said?

I said I was in Gryffindor. Wait. Your friends got you completely wrong. I went to this camp and it sorted me into Slytherin, but I am sort of cunning.

So yeah, so yeah, they're right, and she's right as well, because I am sort of nice. Yes, you are loyal to your friends, I would think. Why do you think she's a Slytherin? Because me and her went to a camp and we had a Harry Potter camp called Hogwarts, and we got sorted into Slytherin and I got Ravenclaw.

Why did you think she was a Slytherin? Because my sister is actually a Slytherin and she kind of has the same personality as my sister. Even among these young girls, it's easy to see how the question, what house are you in, flows into a larger question. What kind of person are you?

Your Hogwarts house is a window into your identity. Walking around the convention, I met Brittany Overman and Devin Valverde. All right, yeah, we're on a social media now. Brittany spotted a line on Devin's profile that she liked.

It said, talk Harry Potter to me. She responded with the inevitable question. What's your Hogwarts house? She actually told me to cover my house.

I was working on my house. Yeah, and I was living on my house. Yeah, and I'm a Slytherin, so it's actually a very unlikely pairing, but it's a very sweet one. Got it.

And what was the social media website? It's a little embarrassing, but it was Tinder. It's an app. Right?

So when you're on Tinder, someone says, talk Harry Potter to me. That's what happened. Oh my God, but it was the best thing ever because obviously people on Tinder don't look for people to talk about Harry Potter, and I was like, really worried because I initially did not want to join the app at all, just because I know what people look for on there, and I was like, that's not what I'm looking for, but I know that there's a lot of people on there, so I was like, chances are I might find somebody who doesn't want what's usually asked for on Tinder. Okay, I got to try to talk to him.

Hopefully he talks back to me and it worked out pretty well. The desire to find our tribe is universal. We do it all the time. If it's not Hogwarts houses, then it's whether we are night people or morning people, dog people or cat people, Aquarius or Leo.

Hi, I'm the star goddess, and here is how to spot a Leo. You can spot a Leo because they're right in the center of the room. You're a dog person. Okay, dog people are way better than cat people.

I'm going to have a glowing hair like Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. This is going to be country-versity. Dog people are conformists. I was actually born in the city.

And so it goes. People on the other hand are more abstract. All these categories, just like Hogwarts houses, offer insight into why we behave the way we do. They offer us guidance on how to navigate a complex world.

This need to understand ourselves as far as the thriving industry, built on the marketing and sale of personality tests. These tests promise to tell you who you are, why you are the way you are, and what it all means. Some of these tests are long, some are short, some are free, some cost a lot of money, some categorize you by your favorite color. And today, you'll discover your true colors, the unique combination of traits that make up your personality.

If you like to be prepared, according to the true colors test, you must be a gold. Innovative people are green and blues. Blues pay attention to their emotions, and one of their favorites is romance. There are personality tests that promise to match you with the perfect job.

Find your purpose and be successful in work you enjoy. Others promise that discovering your personality will guide you to love. Ever hear of the term hopeless romantic? Ever wonder if it happens to describe you?

Well, welcome to It's All Viral. And today, we're going to be seeing if you are indeed a hopeless romantic. There are even personality tests to help you shed weight. There is some new research in the book, Out That Says, the Key to Losing Weight, is avoiding the foods that clash with your personality type.

Help the business. These tests may seem silly, but there's something unsettling about them. They make me uneasy because there's been a long history of classifying people by their personalities. This history hasn't always been as benign as labeling someone or hopeless romantic.

There was a time when scientists would openly, without any discomfort, classify people's personality by their race. Asians were meek or awkward, Europeans were ambitious and brave, Africans, wild and animalistic. Or think about the association people have long had about gender. Men's personalities are supposed to be dominant.

Women, submissive. There's a reason many of us feel horror today about personality classifications that were once considered scientific. We recognize now that they were just simply racist or sexist. As we fought to eliminate these old systems, why is it we keep coming up with new ways to classify ourselves?

For one thing, there's something enormously seductive about such tests that we offer quick and easy insights into the messy and complicated problems we face every day. And as I heard at the part of our convention, classifying people can be a source of joy. So let's make this look hard now on the count of three. One, two, three.

Slither in. But as fun as they can be, personality tests can also lead to serious outcomes. Many corporations today are using such tests to make important decisions. When we ask listeners to share their experiences of personality testing in the workplace, we got a huge response.

The most famous of these workplace personality tests is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or the MBTI. It sorts people into 16 personality types, and it's hugely popular. It's used by most of America's Fortune 100 companies and some 2 million people take the test each year. The test categorizes you along four axes.

Each describes a way of seeing or dealing with the world. For example, if you're an ENFP, that means you're an extrovert, rather than an introvert, you rely on intuition, more than facts, you're emotional, rather than cerebral, and you prefer to go with the flow rather than have a highly structured life. We had lots of people calling about the Myers-Briggs. Many praised the test for helping to improve their lives.

Some said it helped them find love. I took the personality test as part of a Christian club that I was in as an undergraduate in college, and discovered that I am what Myers-Briggs calls an ENFP. This is listener Hayley Jones. She said she didn't think much about her Myers-Briggs category until she made a discovery.

The last three guys who I dated had all had the same Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. They were all INTJs. Once she realized this, she began to use this pattern as a screening tool. And I absolutely look for them.

It's one of the first questions I ask people. And on all my dating profiles, it says ENFP seeks INTJ. And I know that that sounds kind of funny, but it's just been true for me. Alia Adler took the Myers-Briggs during a hard time in her career.

She was 26 and miserable in her job. The test told her that she was an ENFJ. This was a surprise because Ali didn't think of herself as driven by emotion. But she soon began to see things about herself that told her the test was right.

And it really helped me understand myself in a way that I hadn't understood myself before, so that I could work around and manage challenges both in my personal and my professional life, related to the emotionally feelings driven person and part of my personality that I hadn't really acknowledged before. And it turns out it's really central to who I am. So learning about my personality type has actually been, I think, critical to my happiness and my success since then. And I am really glad I did it.

Some listeners said that test results had even shaped their very identity. In college, my best friend and I both took the Myers-Briggs personality test. And we both wound up getting ENFP. This is Christina Healy.

And we both were just so excited about it. We read the description of what that meant for us and the type of job we were most likely to get and just different personality traits. And that really helped solidify a lot of our personality during that time. Christina says those last years of college were an important time of self-discovery.

And that did a lot of hard work for us, being able to just read and agree with and then therefore live the rest of our lives that way. What Christina is saying is that the test played the role that a friend or a teacher or a mentor might have played. The test told her, Christina, this is who you are, this is your destiny. She had a mold and she was happy to shape herself to it.

Years later, Christina was asked to take the test again. A lot had happened in her life since she and her roommate learned that they were both ENFPs. She'd gone to graduate school, relocated to a new city, matured. She'd changed and she worried her Myers-Briggs category would change too.

She didn't want that. So when she re-took the test, she made sure to give answers that would allow her to remain an ENFP. She'd found her tribe. She didn't want to be kicked out.

For all those who loved Myers-Briggs and other personality tests, there are plenty of people who don't. They feel that rather than helping, these tests can be deeply destructive. And I started feeling like Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde, like there was this person that would come out and I had no idea that it was there. When we come back, we look at how personality tests are being used for more than dating advice and career counseling. Increasingly, they've turned into a tool to decide who should do what in the workplace, who should get a promotion, who should get fired. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Stay with us. I'm Shankar Vedantam, you're listening to Hidden Brain. Today we're talking about the power of personality tests. These tools tap into a deep desire we have to discover our place in the world.

For some people, they offer comfort and relief. But that's not always the case. Hello, Hidden Brain friends. My name is Matthew.

I am in Westminster, Colorado. And my experience with Myers-Briggs played no small part in destroying my life, ruining me emotionally for years. Matthew Gail says that after being promoted to technical director at a theatre he worked at, he and other managers went on an over nitro treat. Among other team building activities, they all took Myers-Briggs.

And now my job required that I be organized and have ideas and do math and all these sort of technical and intellectual things. And when we did the Myers-Briggs, I came out to be like this INFJ. I was mystic and quiet. And so after that, after that moment, any time I made a mistake or I said something or had an idea, either my co-workers or myself would say, but that's just because you're this personality type.

Maybe there's a job better suited to your personality type. And it made it so people didn't trust my opinion, didn't trust my ideas, didn't trust my conclusion, didn't trust what any action that I took throughout the day. Matthew began to doubt his own skills. I thought I was this sort of organized and logical person.

And I started feeling like Dr. Jekyll at Mr. Hyde, like there was this person that would come out. And I had no idea that it was there.

That I was really this. Artsy Fartzi, the head in the clouds guy who couldn't get anything done, who really just needed to have a pottery studio and sit around some pot all day. That's kind of how people were treating me. Matthew says his colleagues stopped trusting him.

And he stopped trusting himself. A veterinarian I spoke with also felt that the personality test she took at work had gotten her completely wrong. Cynthia works for a private animal emergency hotline. We're not using her last name or the name of her company to protect her privacy.

Cynthia says her job is very stressful. Often people call in panicked. She remembers one call from a person whose Labrador retriever had eaten rat poison. The owner was really really anxious, so the dog had just gotten into it five minutes earlier.

And when they're really anxious they say, usually at the end is my dog gonna die. Often, Cynthia takes 30 calls like this from around the country in an eight-hour shift. It's a work that requires a combination of knowledge and patience and empathy. Cynthia and her colleagues rely on one another for support.

We're all very conscientious of each other. We have a good group there. We don't have any scheduled breaks when we're at work. We only take breaks when it's not too busy and the other person isn't gonna be swamped by too many calls.

We are just very considerate of each other and everybody on the team tends to be real good hard workers and considerate of each other that way. To Cynthia, it was obvious her team was good at what it did. But she says that didn't stop the company's Human Resources Department from conducting personality tests to draw out deeper truths about the employees. Our company, which is a smaller company was purchased by another company, and the HR department for the larger company sent an email out to all of us in the new company asking us just to do a personality test.

And they said the reason they wanted us to do it was just to help our managers better manage us. Cynthia says she and her colleagues were in a bind. We were concerned that if we refused to do it that maybe, I don't know, maybe they would fire us or something like that. And they were sending out a number of reminders to do the test.

So she took it. The test was called the Culture Index. It was very short. On the first page, Cynthia was asked to pick adjectives that described her.

On the second page, she had to pick adjectives that described her on the job. That was it. What kind of words were they on these two, when you saw the pages describe the test to me? Yeah, so the words were things like calm, patient, knowledgeable, logical, friendly, outgoing, attractive.

Cynthia remembers speaking words that she felt reflected who she was. Calm, patient, resourceful, logical, friendly. A couple days later, she says HR emailed her the results. They rated people in seven categories.

Autonomy, social ability, pace, conformity, logic, ingenuity, and energy units. Most of the scales ran from one to ten were ten being the best. Cynthia learned she'd scored a one for all the categories except energy. That category had a maximum score of 100.

She got 12. Then there's a write-up. So they have a graph when you get your results. So there's two very scientific looking graphs and then they have a write-up.

And the write-up for me said, let's see, let me just say. It says, this individual has very little energy and may require more breaks during the workday than most individuals. And most people, a lot of my coworkers got kind of similar comments. Some, not quite as severe, some said this person runs out of energy by the afternoon and will need breaks in the afternoon.

So what was your interpretation when the scale of the energy scale runs from two to a hundred and you were rated at 12? What was your reaction to that? Oh, I thought it was ridiculous. I had no idea how they calculated that.

And it really is of all the things that they said about me that is the most blatantly wrong. And anybody who knows me would actually know that's true. I mean, honestly, I think if you make it through veterinary school, you have to have a certain amount of energy. And I just, you know, I just always work very hard and I always have.

It's really been kind of the defining characteristic of my life, I would say. Cynthia says the experience felt insulting. So I looked into the test honestly, it was my reaction. You know, I got into it assuming that it was an accepted test by the psychological community.

And then when I looked into it, I saw that they have no peer review and published data at all. And actually, they don't call themselves a test. They insist on calling themselves a personality survey. So I just couldn't believe that any company would put any validity to this.

Gary Wollstrom is the founder of the Culture Index, the test that Cynthia took. He declined to do a recorded interview but spoke to us by phone. He says that Cynthia, quote, doesn't know what she's talking about. Gary is not a psychologist but says the survey was developed in consultation with a psychology professor.

He agreed that the Culture Index has not been through a scientific peer review process, but he has confidence that it helps companies manage and motivate people based on their personality. He says it helps with hiring decisions. It allows managers to make sure the personality of the individual fits the personality of the position. The Culture Index is one of many personality assessments that companies can choose from.

As advertising and information will make it abundantly clear. For most of the positions we create, they're being used all the time in important decisions. So instead of me attracting 100 people for one job, I'm going to get 50 that will be naturally more successful in that specific role. In fact, job applicants are so aware of how seriously companies take these tests that services have popped up to tell people how to hack the tests.

We searched YouTube and found homegrown videos like this one. Let us go through a couple of examples through our false questions. Despite the poor audio quality, this video, How to Pass a Pre-Employment Personality Test, has racked up nearly 300,000 views. I always love to be in large, noisy crowds.

You may not always like to be in large, noisy crowds, so you might answer false. What they are really asking is whether or not you like people and can deal with it at work when it is busy. That makes the answer true. Most companies use the Myers-Briggs, which is widely considered to be an industry standard.

This test has an interesting history. It originated in the ideas of a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung. He identified three dimensions of personality. This is Alan Hammer, a psychologist and former chair of the Myers-Briggs Foundation.

One was, where you tend to focus your attention. He said that there are two opposite ways you can focus your attention. One is on the external world. He called that extraversion.

And one is on the internal world. He called that introversion. Category 2 is about how people perceive the world. Some people focus on details, on facts.

Others are more intuitive, imaginative. The third category is whether people are driven by thinking or by emotion. Thinking is a way of objectively looking at a situation, making it detached, objective, logical, analytical decision or judgment about something. Whereas the opposite of that is what he called feeling, the subjective, interpersonal way of making a decision.

In the 1940s, an American woman named Isabel Myers became interested in Jung's ideas. Her mother actually was interested in Jung first. And then Isabel, who was a housewife at the time and a writer. She got interested in type and then started looking at applications in particularly around careers.

Isabel Myers, along with her mother, Katherine Cook-Briggs, turned Jung's theories into a test. She also added her own ideas into the mix. Isabel Myers added a fourth dimension, which she described as which are those two processes you tend to use in the outer world. So she said you either tend to use a judging function in the outer world or a perceiving function in the outer world.

And that's represented by the letters J and P. So those are the four dimensions. And when you combine the four dimensions in two opposites on each dimension, you get 16 different types. Even though Isabel Myers and her mother were self-taught, many of the researchers who have worked on the test since then are psychologists.

Nonetheless, despite the widespread popularity of the Myers-Briggs test, it's generally not held in high regard by top psychologists who study personality. Adam Grant is a professor of psychology and management at the University of Pennsylvania. When he first took the Myers-Briggs, he learned that he was an INTJ. In other words, an introvert, an introvert, a thinker, and a judge.

Fine, he said. But then, a few months later, he took the test again. I got opposite scores on every dimension. I scored now I was ESFP.

Adam says fans of the Myers-Briggs tend to shrug off such discrepancies. Well, they say either you're gaming the test and you want a different answer. I could not have wanted something more opposite. I wanted to know who I was.

I was trying really hard to answer them the same way. I began to question whether this test had any validity and reliability whatsoever. Reliability and reliability. These are two of the most important scientific factors to consider when judging the value of any psychological test.

Reliability indicates the extent to which the test measures what it is supposed to measure. Reliability refers to whether the test produces consistent results when repeated measurements are made. Adam Grant says, the Myers-Briggs comes up short in both areas. It doesn't do very well in reliability or validity.

It falls well short of most conventional reliability standards. The Myers-Briggs proponents themselves will tell you that it doesn't predict anything. The thing that concerns me about personality test is less the stuff that might be inaccurate but is mostly just fun. More the stuff that is increasingly being used to gauge who should be doing what in the workplace, who is best suited for which career, to select the people who you want to rise within an organization.

It's a great way to weed out all kinds of diversity. There was a company in Canada not long ago where there was a major acquisition made and the CEO gave every single person who was acquired the Myers-Briggs and then fired everyone who didn't match his type. Good grief. That's terrifying.

Many personality researchers put greater stock in a test known as the Big Five. It measures things like how much you care about the opinions of others versus your own judgment. It also measures qualities such as introversion and extroversion. At first glance, there are similarities between this test and the Myers-Briggs and other personality tests.

But Adam says the Big Five has large amounts of peer-reviewed data to back it up. That data, he argues, makes for better predictions. And what you're saying is that scores on this Big Five personality test do what compared to the Myers-Briggs. We can predict your job performance, your effectiveness in a team with different collaborators, your likelihood of sticking around in a job versus leaving, as well as your probability of your marriage surviving depending on the personality fit between you and your spouse.

But Alan Hammer, the psychologist who's a proponent of the Myers-Briggs test, disagrees with Adam. He believes the Myers-Briggs is as reliable as other personality tests. And he says that Adam's wrong when it comes to the evidence that the Myers-Briggs cannot predict real-world outcomes. When people matched roommates on their psychological type, they got a 65% decrease in requests for roommate changes.

But Alan agrees with Adam is that the Myers-Briggs is often used in ways it should not be used. The people who go through the certification programs learn how not to do this, but yes, this instrument as well as any instrument is misused. That's true. The Myers-Briggs Foundation has an ethics statement for the MBTI.

That statement says, although there are many useful applications of the MBTI assessment in the workplace, there are ethical concerns in using it for hiring purposes. Again, Alan Hammer. I don't think the MBTI should ever be used to either select people into an occupation or to promote them. And I've worked in large corporations with large corporations for the past, I guess, 25 years.

And we've never ever used it that way. I hear what Alan is saying, but I would argue that these tests are popular precisely because they purport to give us a quick snapshot of who someone is and what they're good at. If you're a manager and you're one of your employees is an introvert according to the test, it's absurd to think this won't shape the way you decide whether that employee should have a public-facing role. I show with hands and wand how many people are familiar with my degree I can give.

Back at the Harry Potter Conference, I start by a panel discussion. It was called Hogwarts Houses as personality types. It was packed, standing room only. People were even sitting in the aisles.

The panel leader, Jessica Comstock, was listing off the personality traits that made people suited for each of the different houses. The people who are extroverts are people who like to be the center of attention, people who like to have things go go go all the time and people who recharge by being around others. Gervindors. Jessica is a self-described Harry Potter nerd.

She spends much of her free time researching, analyzing and lecturing on various themes in the books. She saw a graphic on the internet one day that correlated Harry Potter characters to the Myers breaks. It was cute, but she felt misguided. She thought the houses rather than individual characters made for a better correlation.

How many people know their personality type? So Jessica designed a detailed chart to show how closely Hogwarts houses align with Myers breaks categories. I'm going to do a little experiment with the first few people. So what is your M.T.I.?

Jessica looks at her chart. ISTP matches to Slytherin. What is your house? Yes it is.

Something from another section, yellow. So ESFJ or Hufflepuff? Right again, the audience sucks it in. Anybody thinks I'm cheating, you're welcome to come and look at my notes.

To the folks at Potterverse, the fact that there's a connection between being an ESFJ and Hufflepuff is proof that the Hogwarts houses are real signs. But as I said and listened, I find Jessica's chart dumbfounding. If Harry Potter houses can replicate personality tests that companies are using to determine which employees get jobs or get fired, as I said earlier, good grief. By this point, you know where my head is at.

I was disturbed by the multi-billion dollar industry that has been created around personality tests. But then, as often happens, I heard a mind-bending story that made me think about these tests in a different way. I'm Shankar Vedantam, this is Hidden Brain, we'll be right back. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

As I talked to Adam Grant about personality tests, I became convinced it was a terrible idea to use such tests to hire and fire people. But then, as we were reporting the story, I came across some research that made me think about personality classifications in a different way. Now, it's absolutely true that many personality tests are unscientific and unreliable. But does that mean they're useless?

At Louisiana State University, the economist Nanji Mojan was looking at how beliefs shape economic choices. His subject wasn't the Harry Potter sorting hat, but a more ancient way to classify personality. The Chinese Zodiac. Our story begins in Anwe Province in China in 1987.

A young Chinese couple had decided to start a family. Shao Chi and his wife Yangsheng were happily married, and the timing was right. It was soon going to be 1988. As hundreds of millions of Chinese knew, this was the most significant year.

After 11 years of rats and roosters and snakes and sheep, it was finally going to be the year of the dragon. According to Chinese tradition, there's no better year for a child to be born than the year of the dragon. Dragon kids are destined for greatness. Shao Chi was a doctor at one of the province's largest hospitals.

He knew it was going to be a crazy year. Pregnant women were already pre-booking rooms at the hospital. Birds were going to skyrocket. It was the same across the country.

It seemed that pregnant women were everywhere, dreaming of the greatness of their coming dragon babies. Shao Chi and Yangsheng lived in Hafe, a city with a famous history for producing brilliant minds and well-educated people. So when their son Hanyu arrived as planned, in that most auspicious year, they already had big plans for him. Shao Chi wanted Hanyu to be even better educated than himself, ideally at a top-ranked university in the United States.

And so, mother and father quickly instilled in the very young child, the conviction that great things were expected of him. This idea is kind of indoctrinating my mind. So when people ask me what I want to do, when I think about it, I really think that I want to be a PhD in the future. I want to be a doctor.

That was the beginning of a long march. Han recalls that when he was in middle school, his father came home one day at lunchtime, bearing an armful of textbooks. And he just came back at noon one day and put some books in my bookcase, and I asked him, hey Dad, what did you buy? He told me that those are some textbooks for master-degree students to practice their English.

At that time, I was 13. Master's degree books for a 13-year-old. Shao Chi explained to Han that mastering English would be essential if he was to do well at that fancy university in America. He and Yangsheng spared their child from doing any household chores.

All Han had to do was to achieve his parents' dreams. When I was at home, my father always said, hey, Sun, I don't want you to do any housework at home. You just need to focus. Perhaps not something right.

But he said that we just need you to focus on study. Han finished college and his master's degree in China. And then, as planned, he went off to the United States for even more education. Han enrolled in an economics PhD program at Louisiana State University where he met a mentor whose expectations of him were every bit as high as those of his own parents.

My name is Najee Mojan. I am a professor of economics at Louisiana State University and research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Najee is Han's PhD advisor. When Han told Najee about life in China, they talked about the Chinese zodiac and the power of the year of the dragon.

They were sure that belief in the zodiac was just superstition. In fact, they were certain that anyone who was born in the year of the dragon would actually be at a great disadvantage. If there is half a million extra kids born in the year of the dragon, those kids will have more peers in the classrooms. There's going to be fewer resources per child in the schools.

The classrooms will be a little bit more crowded, etc. We would expect worse education outcomes rather than better. They decided to prove their hypothesis that dragon kids would fare worse than other kids at school. As it turned out, the Chinese government has a treasure trove of data, the academic performance of middle schoolers, demographic surveys, interviews with parents about their own education and household income, and so the two economists collected all the data, controlled for different variables, and crunched the numbers.

And they found that in middle school, dragon kids did better than their peers. They actually have higher test scores in middle school. These kids also outperformed their peers in high school. Even at this standardized nationwide university entrance exams, dragon kids scored better.

And they did better in college. Individuals who were born in the year of the dragon, they are 14% more likely to have earned at least a bachelor's degree. This was not the outcome that the economists expected to find. Yes, it was really unexpected, frankly.

At first, Naji and Han came up with a straightforward explanation. Middle and high school teachers in China probably also believe in the zodiac. They were just granting high grades to dragon kids. But that account fell apart because college level entrance exams are graded by a computer, not by a superstitious human being.

Also, dragon kids were outperforming peers in the same classroom. Kids who were born right before and right after the auspicious year. According to our results, it seems that when dragons compare with other zodiacs, average, they are really doing better. Okay, dragon kids were doing better because they had higher self-esteem.

So if everybody tells them, oh you are superior, you are smarter than everybody, you are destined for a great and simple fortune, they may believe that this is the case in their self-esteem. You know that from other research that self-esteem is important in learning. People, kids who have more self-esteem, they do better in school. But when they looked at how children reported their own beliefs about their IQ, there was no difference between dragon kids and kids born right before and right afterwards.

And dragon kids are not more confident about their own abilities or about their own future. In fact, the dragon kids weren't really smarter. They scored the same on IQ tests. So what explained their success at school?

It's just the software, basically every Chinese uses this thing. From his office at Louisiana State University, Han-Yuk calls his parents in China. It turns out the success of dragon babies doesn't lie with the schools or the teachers or even with the kids themselves. It's because of parents like xiao qi and yangqing.

From the moment Han was born, his parents had sky-high expectations for him. That turns out to be the case with many parents of dragon babies. The parents of these dragon children, they are actually more likely to believe in comparison to other parents. That their children will obtain at least a high school education, at least a college degree.

And dragon parents are more likely to believe that their children will become a leader in professional life in the future. So dragon parents are different from other parents in the way they sort of believe in their kids' future. These beliefs become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Parents who believe their kids are destined for greatness act in ways that help their kids achieve greatness.

Han's parents pushed him, giving him master's level textbooks in middle school and telling him as a toddler that his goal in life was to get a PhD in America. As Han chatted with his parents, I asked if he could translate a question for me. Could you ask your parents whether they think that your success is partly because you were born in the year of the dragon? Uh, he said that during those years when I grew up, perhaps this also affects their behaviors, they are invested on me.

Han's own parents, in other words, were the living embodiment of the research Han was doing. Life had folded back on itself. Here was Han in America, getting his doctorate and publishing research about dragon kids that validated his parents' belief in his own dragon potential. Could you ask him then what is his reaction or feeling upon seeing that dream has come true?

I'm not sure if he's going to be able to do this. I'm not sure if he's going to do this or not. I'm not sure if he's going to do this or not. My father said that actually his dream has not completely become true.

He wished he expects that I should have more and better achievements, a complex man. And also he expects me to continue studying in the US. So I guess for me it's going to be a post-off. Yeah.

Well, I guess I'll work harder. I don't want my parents to let them down, I think. And to get a post-down in a good better university is also my dream. So, yeah.

Test that purport to tell you who you are, are nonsense, until they're not. That brings us back to Harry Potter. Jessica Comstock, the woman who connects Harry Potter Houses with the Myers-Briggs Test, tells me the story of Neville Longbottom. You're sneaking out again, aren't you?

No, Neville, listen. No! I won't let you. You'll get Griffin going to trouble again.

In Harry's year, you had Neville Longbottom, who actually turns out to be a really important character to the story. He starts off as kind of a bumbling weird kid. When it's Neville's turn with the sorting hat, it turns out to act as a very hard time deciding where to put him. And Neville, the hat took three minutes to figure out where to put him, which is a really long time, considering that for some characters that had barely touches their hair and it knows.

And Neville was almost a hat stall between Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, and Neville argued with the hat that he wanted Hufflepuff, and the hat put him in Gryffindor. So, the hat kind of listens to you, but it depends on what your potential is, because Neville grows to be one of the bravest characters in the books. And is that because the hat knew that or because the hat put Neville in Gryffindor and Neville learned to be brave as a result? That's magic.

Does the hat put you because it knows you have the house or do you become the house that puts you in? Does the hat put you in the house in which you belong, or do you become the house that the hat puts you in? Throughout our lives, we evaluate our children, our students, our friends, and our colleagues. We enthusiastically look at tests that supposedly reveal the aptitudes and interests of others.

What isn't always clear to them or to us is the power of these expectations to transform people's lives. Sometimes our beliefs lift people up, make them run harder, reach for more. Other times our expectations attach leaden weights to wings, and keep dreams from taking flight. I can't say I have much confidence in personality tests, but I come to understand there is huge power in the faith we have in there.

Since this story first aired, Hanyu, having completed his PhD, is doing a postdoc at Texas A&M University. We hope his parents are happy. This week's show was produced by Jenny Schmidt and Parth Shaw. It was edited by Tara Boyle.

Our team includes Raina Cohen, Laura Quirrell, and Thomas Liu. We had original music in this episode by Ramtine Arab-Louis. You can follow the show on Facebook and Twitter. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend.

I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you next week.