DiSC® has a long history and continuous work to make it more reliable, easier to administer and more memorable for the user.
The DISC Model of Behavior was first proposed by William Moulton Marston, a physiological psychologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard. His 1928 book, Emotions of Normal People, explains his theory on how normal human emotions lead to behavioral differences among groups of people, and how a person’s behavior might change over time. His work focused on directly observable and measurable psychological phenomena. He was interested in using practical explanations to help people understand and manage their experiences and relationships.
Marston theorized that the behavioral expression of emotions could be categorized into four primary types, stemming from the person’s perceptions of self in relationship to his or her environment. These four types were labeled by Marston as Dominance (D), Inducement (I), Submission (S), and Compliance (C).
From theory to assessment
Walter V. Clarke, an industrial psychologist, was the first person to build an assessment instrument (personality profile test) using Marston’s theories, even though that was not initially his intent. In 1956 he published the Activity Vector Analysis, a checklist of adjectives on which he asked people to mark descriptors they identified as true of themselves. The tool, used by Clarke since 1948, was intended for personnel selection by businesses. The four factors in his data (aggressive, sociable, stable, and avoidant) were based on Marston’s model.
About 10 years later, Walter Clarke Associates developed a new version of this instrument for John Cleaver for business use. It was called Self Discription. Instead of using a checklist, this test forced respondents to make a choice between two or more terms. Factor analysis of this assessment added to the support of a DISC-based instrument.
The Personal Profile System® (PPS)
Self Discription was used by John Geier, to create the original Personal Profile System® (PPS) in the 1970s. Through hundreds of clinical interviews, he furthered the understanding of 15 basic patterns as discovered by Clarke. Geier formed a company named Performax that was the first publisher of a DiSC assessment. Performax eventually became Inscape Publishing.
The new assessment was named the Personal Profile System 2800 Series (PPS 2800) and was first published in 1994. It was primarily used for increasing self-awareness in a setting where an individual could use the insights in their interactions with others.