- 1928: William Moulton Marston, a Harvard-trained psychologist, described four dimensions of everyday behavior in Emotions of Normal People.
- 1940s to 1956: Walter V. Clarke built the Activity Vector Analysis, the first assessment tied to Marston’s model.
- 1950s: Clarke’s firm built the Self Description for the consultant John Cleaver. Its blocks of four words, where you pick the one most like you and the one least like you, became the classic DISC format.
- 1972: John Geier published the Personal Profile System, which set the pattern for the commercial DISC products that followed.
William Moulton Marston and the four dimensions
Marston wanted to understand how healthy, ordinary people behave. Most psychologists of his time studied illness. In Emotions of Normal People he described four dimensions he saw in everyday behavior:
- Dominance describes how a person meets a challenge and takes control.
- Inducement describes how a person persuades and wins people over. Later writers renamed it Influence.
- Submission describes how a person cooperates and keeps things steady. Later writers renamed it Steadiness.
- Compliance describes how a person works with rules and standards. Later writers renamed it Conscientiousness.
The first letters of those four words give the model its name. Marston described how people do behave. He did not rank one pattern above another, and DISC still treats every style as equally valid.
Marston also trained as a lawyer at Harvard. In 1917 he published a blood pressure test for deception, a forerunner of the polygraph, and he created the comic book character Wonder Woman.
You can read his book in WiredType’s public-domain edition of Emotions of Normal People.
Who made the first DISC test?
Marston described the four dimensions and never turned them into an assessment. Walter V. Clarke did that. In the 1940s he built a checklist of adjectives, found four factors in the answers, and matched them to Marston’s four dimensions. He published the construction of this test, the Activity Vector Analysis, in 1956.
Clarke’s firm then built the Self Description for John Cleaver. It had 24 blocks of four adjectives. In each block you chose the word most like you and the word least like you. That forced choice is still the classic DISC format. It makes it harder to rate every flattering word highly, though it does not stop it.
In 1972 John Geier, at the University of Minnesota, adapted the forced-choice format into the Personal Profile System and published it through his company, Performax. It became the most widely sold DISC instrument, and later commercial DISC products followed its pattern.
Who owns DISC?
Nobody owns the DISC model. Marston’s 1928 book is in the public domain, and anyone may build an assessment on his four dimensions. What a company owns is its own questions, its own scoring, its own report text and its own brand name. That is why many DISC tests exist, and why two of them can give the same person different results.
WiredType wrote its own questions, scoring and reports from Marston’s public model. The result names one of 25 types built from the four styles. The science page explains how the scoring works and what it can and cannot tell you.
The free test asks you about five everyday scenarios and shows your result on the page when you finish. It is free, and you won’t be asked for a credit card or any payment details.
Sources
- Marston, W.M. (1917). Systolic blood pressure symptoms of deception. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2(2), 117-163. DOI: 10.1037/h0073583.
- Marston, W.M. (1928). Emotions of Normal People. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Public-domain edition on WiredType.
- Clarke, W.V. (1956). The construction of an industrial selection personality test. The Journal of Psychology, 41(2), 379-394. DOI: 10.1080/00223980.1956.9713011.
- Geier, J.G. (1972). Personal Profile System. Minneapolis: Performax Systems International.