Name: Are Personality Tests Accurate? This One Is & Here's Why You Should Do It
Uploaded: 2020-08-09T19:40:54.000Z
Duration: 11 min 23 s
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What about your Minnesota Multiphasic results, or how did you do on your Rorschach test?

There are dozens of personality tests and assessments with varying degrees of utility.

Which tests are backed by science, and which tests are more entertaining than helpful?

For those who are new here, I earned my MD a few years ago, matched into plastic surgery,

and ultimately resigned, but that's a story told on my vlog channel.

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While personality assessments and tests have blown up in the past century, they originated

for a simple purpose – help with personnel selection in the armed forces.

More specifically, the developers of these tests hoped that by studying personality and

potential mental health issues, one would be better able to determine which soldiers

were better or worse suited to fly military aircraft.

Since then, dozens of personality assessments have emerged, each with a different theory

on personality and how to best describe it.

Our understanding of personality and models to describe and approximate it are purely

Each system has its own language and ideology, theories and philosophies in determining which

traits are determinative and how to go about assessing them.

Are they binary or plotted along a bell curve?

While seemingly based in science, few have truly followed any resemblance of the scientific

In fact, most assessments were built on the creators' subjective feelings about personality,

rather than rigorous scientific protocols.

For that reason, most personality tests tell us less about the individuals who take them

and more about the individuals who devised them.

For example, Hermann Rorschach was the Swiss psychiatrist who turned a parlor game into

Starke Hathaway was a Midwestern psychologist who found it important to ask questions about

religious beliefs, sex life, and bathroom habits in his Minnesota Multiphasic Personality

If you've gotten to your psych rotation in medical school, you've likely heard of

And of course, there's Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs, the mother-daughter housewife

duo who studied Carl Jung's texts and were inspired to create a personality test despite

having zero background, training, or credentials in anything psych related.

Myers and Briggs are credited for creating the all too famous Myers Briggs Type Indicator,

According to CPP, the publisher of the MBTI, it “measures four pairs of opposing preferences,

which are inborn and value-neutral, to form a person's four-letter type.”

The assessment discerns between “Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I),” “Sensing (S)

or Intuition (N),” “Thinking (T) or Feeling (F),” and Judging (J) or Perceiving (P),”

resulting in 16 different personality types, like ENFP or ISTJ.

A few decades after the birth of the MBTI, a group

of scientists began developing what would become the Big 5 Personality Traits, or the

Rather than relying on their intuition to select criteria for their test, they compiled

every word that could be considered a personality trait and created simple questions about them.

For example, on a scale of 1 to 5, would you say you get upset easily?

Based on these answers, the statisticians grouped traits that seemed to cluster together,

such as talkative and sociable, in to five basic categories: Extraversion, Conscientiousness,

Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Openness to experience.

Chances are that you've heard of Myers Briggs, but maybe you weren't aware of the Big 5

or its more recent derivative, the HEXACO test.

Some suggest its because of the thousands of people who have invested time and money

in becoming MBTI-certified trainers and coaches.

Others say it's because the test focuses only on the positive and therefore it seduces

test takers with an image of their own ideal self.

I argue that the biggest reason for its success is the neatly organized and binary manner

There are four categories, each with a binary option.

It's easy to comprehend, easy to explain, and you're able to readily identify with

Other personality tests, on the other hand, are not binary and are more of a continuum,

which is less entertaining, less easily understood, and less sexy.

But unfortunately for the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, people and their personalities

are not binary, but are much more on a continuum.

You're not a pure introvert or a pure extrovert, but usually somewhere in the middle.

The insights of the MBTI are comparable to tarot cards or palm reading – being generic

enough such that when you read your description, you can certainly identify with parts of it,

but it's not a truly accurate and comprehensive depiction of who you really are.

When scientists look at such personality tests and assessments, two primary elements come

Validity is a measure of how well a test measures what it claims to measure.

Within validity, there are different types, such as content validity, criterion-related

validity, construct validity, and face validity.

Reliability is a measure of whether the test reliably indicates accurate results, meaning

you would get the same results if you took the test more than once.

Unfortunately for the MBTI, it receives piss poor scores on both fronts.

In one study, researchers found that 50 percent of people received different results the second

time they took the test, even just five weeks later.

Other studies have found similar results ranging from 24-61% of people receiving different

results when taking the test multiple times.

The MBTI misses the mark in a few other ways, including one key element of personality – emotional

stability versus reactivity, meaning the tendency to stay calm and collected under stress or

This is one of the most important predictors of individual and group patterns of thought,

The judging-perceiving scale reflects whether the test taker is more of a planner or the

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Are Personality Tests Accurate? This One Is & Here's Why You Should Do It

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