Personality tests are often treated as objective assessments of one’s innermost intentions. People relish using their results as justification for their less understandable impulses.
There is something that personality tests such as the Enneagram and Myers-Brigg aren’t telling you, though: It is possible to have a bad personality.
“They don’t get into the dirty underbelly of personality,” said David Watson, a professor of personality psychology at the University of Notre Dame.
There is one test that might be better at reflecting what personality traits you have and how that could affect your behavior, he said: the International Personality Item Pool Test, or IPIP.
‘Academic personality research tends to be trait-based’
Like other tests, the IPIP presents a series of sentences, and respondents denote how much they agree or disagree with them.
“Have a vivid imagination” and “Get angry easily” are among the dozens of statements you can mark as “very inaccurate,” “moderately inaccurate,” “neither accurate or inaccurate,” “moderately accurate” or “very accurate.”
The test will then tell you how much of the following five personality traits you seem to have:
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Conscientiousness
- Neuroticism
- Openness to experience
“Academic personality research tends to be trait-based,” Watson said. This is often a “better predictor of behavior,” he said, than the more popular personality tests.
[Personality tests] don’t get into the dirty underbelly of personality.
David Watson
University of Notre Dame professor of personality psychology
‘If you study society, is everybody nice?’
The IPIP test doesn’t provide what is probably the most satisfying part of the personality test experience: a type.
Like astrology, many of these personality tests combine characteristics into one neat little box.
“One thing people seem to like are typologies,” Watson said.
It doesn’t hurt that the box tends to be very forgiving.
“The types themselves are all couched in positive terms,”…
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