We sit down with Danielle Fuller, creator of Scientific Enneagram, to preview her brand-new podcast coming to our channel in January 2026.

Subscribe : on iTunes or on Spotify .

Danielle is an engineer and a systems thinker who sees a huge gap between the world of Enneagram teaching and the world of science and research. Her passion is to become a bridge-builder between those two spaces, helping us ask better questions, see the limits of what we know, and slowly build a real body of work around Enneagram and science.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Why doing good science with the Enneagram is so hard (self-reporting, motives vs. behavior, and the limits of current tools)
• How psychology has moved through introspection, behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and the cognitive revolution—and where the Enneagram might fit in that story
• The tension between qualitative narrative work (like panels and coaching) and quantitative data (stats, brain scans, validated scales)
• The ways cultural bias shows up in psychological research (WEIRD samples, Western assumptions, college-student data) and what that means for a tool that claims to describe 8 billion people
• Why motive may be one of the most important things science could study—and how the Enneagram offers a lens, not the final word

We also get into funding, grad students, file-drawer problems, conspiracy thinking, and why Danielle is doing this as a passion project even though there’s basically no money in it.

If you’re a scientist, grad student, therapist, or researcher who’s Enneagram-informed (or even Enneagram-skeptical) and want to talk, Danielle would love to hear from you: hello@scientificenneagram.com

I’m genuinely thrilled about this show. My hope is that The Scientific Enneagram becomes a hub for serious conversations about motive, method, and what we can actually know when we bring the Enneagram into the lab.

Thanks for supporting us on Patreon. You’re making experiments like this possible.