About WiredType

DISC began with a book published in 1928.

In 1928 the psychologist William Moulton Marston published Emotions of Normal People. He wrote that the everyday emotions of ordinary people had escaped the attention of psychologists, and he described four patterns he saw in how healthy people act. Marston called them Dominance, Inducement, Submission and Compliance. Later writers renamed three of them, and today they are the D, I, S and C of DISC: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness.

Marston never wrote a test. The researchers who came after him did. Walter V. Clarke built the first assessment tied to Marston's four patterns in the 1940s and published how he built it in 1956. Clarke's firm introduced the format most DISC tests still use, where you pick the answer most like you and the one least like you. In 1972 John Geier published the Personal Profile System, which set the pattern for the DISC products sold since.

Later research compared a DISC-style assessment with a Big Five measure, the five-trait model used across academic personality research, and found that the two overlap. That study tested a different assessment, and we have not yet run the same comparison on ours. In 2011 Brown and Maydeu-Olivares published a statistical model for scoring answers that people rank in order, and our scoring uses its ranking math. We have not yet calibrated our questions, so your scores describe the order of your own four styles and do not compare you with other people.

You can read Marston's book on our site. The Science page gives the full citation for each study named here and explains what our scores mean and what they do not mean yet.

We also learned from people who use DISC at work.

The research is one source. The other is years of DISC training in corporate settings and industry meetings, and the feedback from the people in those rooms. Our 25 type profiles draw on both, and we used AI writing tools to draft them.

AI helps you use your result with the people in your life.

Your type comes from a fixed scoring method, the same for everyone, and AI plays no part in scoring your assessment. We use AI in these features:

• Scout, our AI coach, answers your questions about a coworker, a message or a meeting.

• Team pair reports explain how two teammates tend to work together, from both of their results.

• The writing-sample analysis estimates your style from writing of your own that you paste in.

• Some of the emails we send you are worded for the way your type likes to read.

• From October 22, 2026, the WiredType Care Team, our AI support team, answers email sent to us.

The AI can misread a situation or get a detail wrong, so treat what it says as a starting point for your own judgment. The AI Use page lists what each of these features sends to our AI providers and what comes back. We do not train any AI model on your answers, reports or conversations.

You decide whether your results help our research.

Research sharing is off unless you turn it on. If you have an account, you can turn it on or off at any time on your account page, under Research participation. Each result you share is stored under a random research ID, with no name or email attached, and your answers to individual questions are left out. A separate table, which only our server and the staff who run our database can read, connects that ID to your account. That link is how Delete my research data, in the same section of your account page, removes what you shared. The Research privacy page lists what is recorded.

Every person who chooses to share helps us learn how the four styles show up in real life, and we plan to put what we learn back into the site. No study has been published yet. With the results people share, we plan to measure how much results change when people retake the assessment. Two other studies need information that research sharing does not record today: one to calibrate the assessment so that scores can be compared from one person to another, and one to compare our results with an established personality measure. Before either study starts, we will update the Research privacy page and ask for your agreement.

Separately from research sharing, we look at all completed assessments together, with no names, to check and improve the questions and the scoring. Our Privacy Policy describes that use, and the research setting does not turn it off. Every finding we publish will come only from results people chose to share, and it will go on the Science page with the number of people it came from and the date.

You can also tell us what is wrong or missing with the Feedback button, or with Send feedback in the site menu. When we fix something you reported, we list the fix on our public changelog. The entry shows your first name and a short quote from your message only if you checked the box that allows it, and otherwise it names nobody. Ideas that people send and we build are listed the same way on the "You asked, we built it" page.

WiredType is an independent business.

No other DISC publisher owns, sponsors, endorses or is affiliated with WiredType. DISC, the model, belongs to no one. Marston published it in 1928 and never claimed it.

You can write to us at hello@wiredtype.com about anything, including privacy and research.