History of DiSC assessments and personality styles. DiSC assessment includes 28 tetrads after the addition of four more tetrads

1. History of DiSC

2. Prehistory
• In 444 B.C. Empedocles recognized that people behaved in
different manners. He associated these differences to the
elements that constitute the environment i.e. Fire, earth, air and
water. In fact, multiple astrology disciplines still utilize this concept
to determine the personality styles.
•
However, the concept of personality differences took a new turn
in 400 B.C. when Hippocrates shifted the focus to internal factors.
He established the four temperaments model which suggested
that four body fluids affected the human personality traits to form
four temperaments – Choleric, Sanguine, Phlegmatic and
Melancholic.
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3. MBTI
• There on, psychology moved at a fast pace, but it wasn’t until
1921 that there was any development towards DiSC.
• In 1921, Carl Jung attributed the personality differences to the
way in which we think and process information.
• He came up with four styles – Thinking, feeling, sensation and
intuition which are now employed in the Myers Briggs Personality
Test (MBTI).
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4. DiSC Theory
In 1928, William Moulton Marston published his book “Emotions of
Normal People”.
Marston theorized that the impact of normal human emotions on
creating behavioural differences among groups of people and the
changes that one could see in a person’s behaviour over time.
In his book, Marston laid the foundation for the instrument by
identifying four “primary emotions” stemming from the person’s
perceptions of self in relationship to his or her environment.
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5. DiSC Theory
William Moulton Marston understood that the DISC Personality
Styles (What are DiSC Behavioral Styles?) were both internal and
innate, but were impacted largely by our external environment.
These four types were labelled by Marston as
• Dominance (D),
• Inducement (I),
• Submission (S), and
• Compliance (C).
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6. Theory to Assessment
Walter V. Clarke published the Activity Vector Analysis in 1956. With
this, he became the first person to build an assessment instrument
based on Marston’s model.
The tool used by Clarke since 1948, consisted of a checklist of
adjectives on which he asked people to mark descriptors they
identified as true of themselves. The four factors in his data
were aggressive, sociable, stable and avoidant.
A decade later, the instrument was developed further by John
Cleaver and called Self Description. The new instrument forced the
test-takers into making a choice between two or more terms
depending upon what was most and least like them instead of using
a checklist as earlier. Additional validation of this assessment came
with the use of factor analysis.
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7. Personal Profile System
John Geier, in 1970 used Self Description to create the original
Personal Profile System® (PPS).
The tool took the responses from John’s instrument to further
understand the 15 classical patterns discovered by Clarke.
The Personal Profile System was revalidated in 1994 as over the
years meanings of some words had evolved and were changed in
the forced-choice instrument.
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8. Personal Profile System
Today, DiSC assessment includes 28 tetrads after the addition of
four more tetrads. This self-scored and self-interpreted tool is used
for enhancing self-awareness and known as DiSC Classic.
In 2003, Inscape launched an online version of the paper profile with
a richer narrative feedback calling it DiSC Classic 2.0.
Today, DiSC has benefitted the people around the world by the
continuous efforts of Inscape Publishing towards developing a more
valid and reliable instrument with multiple uses.
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9. Thank You