A personality type test. Is there any point?

Is there any point in taking a personality type test? Yes, it is entertaining. Will it tell you the truth? Here you get an overview of which tests exist, how they came about and how reliably they describe you. And at the end, advice on how to learn as much about yourself from a test as you can.

There are a great many tests, and you can google them well beyond this article. Their endless variety makes your head spin.

Some tests are for entertainment. Others are serious and licensed, and may only be taken under the supervision of a specialist. One of these, the MBTI, costs between 15 and 40 dollars, and two to three million Americans take it every year. Can you imagine the kind of money involved?

There are a great many such tests. Today there are around 400 more or less coherent theories of personality in psychology, not counting all sorts of small author's schools. Those that turn out to work survive a fairly long stretch of time and become the benchmarks. And so three kinds of typological questionnaire have survived the decades:

1. the Big Five,
2. the Myers-Briggs typology (MBTI) and
3. the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI, which is used in psychotherapy.

A far more interesting everyday question is what use they are. Let us try to work that out by going into the detail of each typology.

Big Five. The Big Five

You have probably heard of the scandalous (because unexpected) victory of Donald Trump in the presidential election of 2016? Or perhaps you remember the no less scandalous (unexpected even for the British) exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union in that same 2016? There is even a film about it, "Brexit", from 2019:

And you may have heard that both scandals are connected with the firm Cambridge Analytica, which applied this typology to the population.

The Big Five is a descriptive model. It does not look into a person's depths; it describes people the way those around them see them. Its origins lie in linguistics, in the attempts of various scholars such as Allport, Eysenck and Cattell to group the words describing people's properties, qualities and characteristics into clusters of meaning

What does this analysis look like in German, for example? Researchers analysed and grouped by meaning:

• 4,504 words describing attitudes to the surrounding world. For example, "aggressive", "awful", "party animal"
• 4,541 concepts expressing states, moods and activity. Cheerful, sad, inspired
• 5,226 concepts representing evaluation and reputation. Magnificent, valuable, mediocre
• 3,682 words containing physical and other concepts

That is how the models appeared that describe in words such human qualities as

1. extraversion,
2. agreeableness, or willingness to co-operate
3. conscientiousness and dutifulness,
4. neuroticism, or emotional stability
5. openness to experience, or highbrow curiosity.

You can read about how this model works in another article, "From Mad Men to Math Men", in English. And here is how it was used in the election of the American president Donald Trump:

Does the Big Five describe character as something permanent and unchanging? Since its origins lie in linguistics, that is, in words describing a person's current state, its conclusions are of the same kind: descriptive. Right now I am "sad", yesterday I was "cheerful".

What is more, the words describe a person as he perceives himself, personally and at this particular moment. And of course, since a state can change, the results of the test can change too. But what about a person's permanent, unchanging qualities?

Jung, MBTI, socionics, 20 million a year

Probably the most popular and most heavily promoted test in the world is the Myers-Briggs. Its equivalent in the Russian-speaking world is socionics. It goes back to Jung's observations. He noticed that in people's typical behaviour one can spot similar:

• psychological attitudes, which can be extraverted or introverted,
• mental functions, that is, the dominance of thinking, feeling, sensation or intuition.

In the 1970s Isabel Briggs Myers developed Jung's model and created the "Center for Applications of Psychological Type". But the MBTI would never have become so popular if the distribution rights had not been bought by Consulting Psychologists Press, which set about promoting it.

The consulting company started convening annual conferences, setting up professional associations and founding schools for testers. Books and journals followed, and today the company's turnover is 20 million dollars a year.

The strength of the MBTI, or socionics, lies not in its science but in strong marketing.

Will you learn anything about yourself? Yes, rather more than from the Big Five before it, since introversion and extraversion have not gone anywhere and are obvious in many cases. The trouble with socionics, however, is that it rests on Jung's observations from the dawn of psychology as a science and has never been extended by later psychotherapeutic observations. Which ones exactly — in the next chapter.

How human lives found their way into tests. The MMPI

And here at last we come to the fates of millions of people. Where can you find the fullest typical picture of a person's life, starting with their family line, the circumstances of their birth, early childhood and upbringing, adolescence and the things they have lived through? There is, of course, only one source of information: psychiatric clinics. And so out of psychiatry there came a truly "popular" typology, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).

The MMPI is a psychodiagnostic instrument, widely used in clinical assessment and even recognised in law.

Just look at the questions used to detect tendencies such as:

1. Hypochondria ("I am falling ill") through questions on the theme of over-control: "Several times a week I am troubled by heartburn", "My sleep is broken and restless", "I often feel burning, tingling or numbness in various parts of my body"
2. Depression, or pessimism: "The slightest noise wakes me up", "Work costs me considerable effort", "I am troubled by bouts of nausea and vomiting"
3. Hysteria ("and why is it that I keep fainting"), or emotional lability: "I often feel a "lump" in my throat", "I notice that it has become hard for me to concentrate on a particular task or piece of work", "Once a week or more often I am suddenly "flushed with heat" for no visible reason"
4. Psychopathy, or impulsivity: "The hardest fight for me is the fight with myself", "Most of the time I feel as if I have done something bad or wicked", "Some people are so fond of giving orders that I want to do the opposite, even when I know they are right"
5. Paranoia, or rigidity: "I know there are people who are set against me", "Something may be being prepared against me", "There has been someone who followed me"
6. Psychasthenia (phobias, "I am terrified of little spiders"), or anxiety: "Life is a strain for me most of the time", "At school I found it very hard to speak in front of the whole class", "Most of the time I feel lonely even among people"
7. Schizophrenia (detachment, or "why do I keep to one side") or individualism: "I find it unpleasant to be among people", "I often have dreams on sexual themes", "I have never been in love with anyone"
8. Hypomania (activity, or "everything is always fine with me") or optimism: "My appearance never causes me any worry", "I do not condemn anyone who tries to grab everything he can out of life", "I have had states in which my actions were interrupted and I did not understand what was going on around me"

Jung was not forgotten either, nor social standards with their questionnaires

• On masculinity — femininity, or womanliness: "I think I would enjoy the work of a librarian", "I would like to be a singer", "I liked playing "gardener" or "the little ring" (that is, games where boys and girls chose each other out of personal liking)"
• On introversion — extraversion: "I have never gone into a dangerous venture for the thrill of it", "Criticism and reproof hurt and wound me terribly", "I find it hard to keep up a conversation with people I have only just met"

Will the test tell you what you did not know about yourself? Yes, considerably more than the Big Five or socionics. If only because the questions are derived from other people's life stories and from the work of thousands of specialists over the last 100 years. But there is one thing:

The MMTI test is so widely known that the internet is bursting with "cheat sheets" on how to pass it. In other words, people are not only inclined to lie in order to get a firearms licence, get into university or get a job — they also know how to do it. And that would not be a problem if people did not lie to themselves...

How do people usually take tests?

To find out whether people answer tests truthfully, we personally surveyed a statistically significant number of people. Not thousands, no, but a great many. And here is what we noticed:

• People tend to answer from the picture of their "ideal self", or from what they would like to see in themselves. Even when what they think about themselves does not match their outward behaviour
• The more unbalanced or stressed a person is, the more he answers all over the place, in every direction at once. He is both an introvert and an extravert, both active and passive, both emotional and rational
• And the most obvious thing should not be forgotten either: every personality type understands one and the same question in its own way. It is impossible to convey all the subtleties of human behaviour in a single short question.

That is why no set of 8 to 30 questions will pinpoint your personality type. There are two ways to get a reliable result:

1. either a long test of 200 to 400 questions, like the MMPI, which takes 2 to 3 hours, where one and the same question is repeated several times in different forms and with built-in "traps, or lie detectors",
2. or taking the test in a personal interview, where the specialist can tell from experience whether you are answering truthfully.

So what should you do?

What to do? Whom to believe?

If you really want to learn something about yourself that you did not know before, the test has to take at least the following into account.

1. You should be tested in person by a qualified specialist. Only a person can recognise whether you are fooling yourself first of all, check that you have understood the question correctly, and see where contradictions are beginning to show. This is taken into account in the Myers-Briggs testing procedure and is not taken into account in psychiatric tests.
2. It should take account of innate temperament, or of what you were already born with into this world. That means the family script, the course of the pregnancy and the first moments of life. You do not have to know this about yourself, specialists will recognise it. This is part of Myers-Briggs, but without the latest psychotherapeutic knowledge
3. It should take account of how the first six months and the first six years of childhood went. By that time your character is already formed, which is what the MMTI tests draw on.
4. It should take account of shifts of "mood", or of the dynamics of everyday life. This is a commonplace, widely known in Transactional Analysis, and deeply ignored in all the tests listed above.

Is there anything that brings all of this together? Yes! If you want to take a full test, take a look at the Dating Club. There, over two hours, we personally profile clients on the basis of a psychoanalytic model that takes all of the above into account. How exactly? Read about it in our other posts!

Even if everything is fine in your personal life, going through a typing session over two hours together with our specialists will teach you a great deal about yourself: how to get on with those close to you and those further away, whom to give a wide berth, and how to accept other people.