Personality Tests: Definition, Examples, & Psychology

By Charlie Huntington, M. A., Ph. D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
Personality tests are rigorously designed to give a complete picture of a person’s personality. Let’s dive into the psychology research behind personality tests and look at some examples.
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As a child, I identified very strongly with my dad. I knew I loved books just like he did, and I wanted to learn to play the piano like him. I wanted to have the kind of job he had when I grew up, the kind that involved putting on a suit and tie and getting on the train into the city with all the other dads (and some moms!) in their suits and ties. As I got older, I recognized more distinctions between my dad and me. I still loved to read and play music, but I wanted a job that involved more interaction with other people. I wanted to socialize more often, to explore more. Like father, like son – to a point.
The things I like to do, and the character traits that underlie my hobbies and preferences – they’ve been pretty consistent my whole life. And that make sense – our personalities tend to stay mostly the same throughout our lives. Perhaps this is why personality tests are so appealing to us – maybe they can unlock the mysteries of who we really are, highlighting the aspects of ourselves we just haven’t quite understood yet. Let’s look at personality tests as defined by psychological science and see how they might help increase our self-knowledge.
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What Are Personality Tests? (A Definition)

Personality tests are (in the realm of science, at least) rigorously developed and reviewed psychological measures designed to give a complete picture of a person’s personality (Sartori, 2010). Some are more comprehensive than others – they can range from a very short survey of ten questions to one with over two hundred. Most personality tests are based on at least one theory of personality.
 
There are two types of personality assessments: projective and psychometric (Sartori, 2010). Projective measures present people with pictures or sentences whose meaning is incomplete or unclear; each person responds to these stimuli in their own unique way, and their responses are interpreted by psychologists to determine their personality. The most famous projective personality assessment is called the Rorschach. In this test, the participant is shown a series of inkblots – images of black ink, in some kind of configuration, against a white background. Participants are asked to describe what they see. The idea is that how the participant interprets these images will reflect aspects of their personality.
 
The other kind of personality test – a psychometric one – usually consists of a list of questions or statements that are very clear in their meaning. The person being assessed is expected to choose whether, or how much, each statement is true for them.
 
Projective techniques are generally considered by the scientific community to be less useful, and research bears this out (Sartori, 2010). This may be because psychometric measures require us to think about ourselves, while projective measures require us to make judgments about things outside ourselves (Meyer, 1997). We are used to thinking about ourselves in the ways that psychometric measures ask us to think, and it feels easier to have a limited range of answer options presented to us (Meyer, 1997). In other words, psychometric measures feel a lot more like a personality test to the people being assessed than projective ones do (Sartori, 2010).

Why Are Personality Tests Important?

One reason personality tests are important is because personalities do not change that much over time, and this means that knowing a lot about a person’s personality at one point in time can help us predict how they will behave at other times (Smits et al., 2011). Another reason these tests are important is that they are very consistent across people and across time (Smits et al., 2011). Third, personality tests have been established by hundreds, if not thousands, of research studies, to be useful predictors of many outcomes in our lives, from mental health outcomes to job performance (Sellbom, 2019). Finally, the chief components of personality seem to be fairly consistent across cultures and societies, so personality tests can help us have a common language for describing how people are and aren’t alike (Smith et al., 2021).

Benefits of Personality Tests

The primary benefit of personality tests is that they can offer insight into who we are and why we behave the way we do (McCrae & Costa, 2003). In particular, they can offer a more complete picture of our personalities than we might be able to see otherwise. Indeed, the expectation is that if people answer honestly on a personality test, the aspects of themselves that they may try to hide from others will be revealed.
 
Personality tests – especially psychometric ones – measure personality traits on a spectrum (McCrae & Costa, 2003). Almost all traits are normally distributed – this is a fancy psychology term that means most people are in the middle on this characteristic, and there are fewer people with extremely high or low levels of the trait.
 
We can use an example to illustrate how this is helpful. Most personality tests will measure a person’s level of conscientiousness, and most people will score around the middle of the range on this trait. A score in the “normal” range on conscientiousness suggests that the person’s conscientiousness probably doesn’t impact their functioning that much.
 
However, for a person who scores very high or very low in conscientiousness on their personality test, this trait is probably more influential in explaining their personality and their behaviors. A person very high in conscientiousness may follow the rules so rigidly that they have trouble functioning in situations where some flexibility about rules is helpful. A person who never follows the rules, because they are very low in conscientiousness, is likely to harm other people or get in trouble with the law. They may also be at risk of being diagnosed with a personality disorder that involves low conscientiousness, such as antisocial personality disorder (McCrae & Costa, 2003).

Personality Tests in Psychology

Personality tests that are not scientific are all over the Internet – I bet you have been sorted into your Hogwarts house by now, haven’t you? – but the ones used in psychology are almost always based in rigorous science. The most famous personality test among psychologists is called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). An assessment for adults, it involves answering well over two hundred questions. But it’s worth your time, as it generates dozens of personality trait scales that can be interpreted by psychologists and that are related to all kinds of real-life outcomes (Sellbom, 2019). For example, people may take the MMPI before they undergo an intensive surgery, so that the surgeon knows how they may respond to the surgery and behave afterwards.

Are Personality Tests Accurate?

The short answer to the question of whether personality tests are accurate is, yes! Prior to being published and widely used, they have been tested on thousands of people. Their scales consistently predict how people will behave, whether they will develop or already have psychiatric disorders, and how well they can regulate their emotions (Sellbom & Ben-Porath, 2005).
 
Personality tests are even designed to account for the likelihood that people will try to intentionally fool the tests. Whether people want to look better, look worse, or just generally make a mess of the assessment process, the tests are designed so that these kinds of intentions can be noticed and considered by the psychologists scoring the measure. For example, a person who describes themselves as incredibly nice – nicer than anybody you’ve ever met before! – on the personality test would likely be flagged as potentially answering those questions dishonestly.
 
Interestingly, personality tests may be more helpful when test-takers are asked to think about themselves in a certain context. For example, in one study, college students took the same personality measure twice – once while thinking about themselves in general, and once while thinking about themselves “at school”. The answers they gave regarding their “school selves” were better predictors of their well-being and grades at school than the “general” personality answers they gave (Pomerance & Converse, 2014).

Personality Tests: The Big 5

Nearly all personality tests created by psychologists attempt to measure the Big Five personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, neuroticism, and conscientiousness (Smith et al., 2021). Since there are many facets to each of these traits, the measures can often involve many questions.
 
Why do personality tests measure these five traits? These traits were identified through what is called inductive reasoning. After asking people many, many questions about themselves, researchers used statistical tests to see which test questions “hung together,” or tended to be answered by people in similar ways. In this way, they grouped together questions that turned out to reflect the Big Five personality traits (Smith et al., 2021).​

Personality Tests: Enneagram

An increasingly popular personality theory is that of the Enneagram. The Enneagram is a nine-sided figure, reflecting how the Enneagram consists of nine different personality types. Although it has not received nearly as much attention as the Big Five personality traits, the Enneagram’s method of breaking down personality types does have some scientific backing and does seem to predict things beyond personality (Sutton, 2012). Specifically, it is clear that people can be categorized into these nine personality types, and that the types are distinct from each other (Sutton et al., 2013). This may explain why the Enneagram is often used in professional settings and in churches as a way to better understand ourselves.
 
There is research showing that people who study the Enneagram in depth, by first identifying which type they are and then spending lots of time learning about that type and reflecting on it, can grow in their self-awareness (Daniels et al., 2018). Speaking from experience, I find it very helpful to think about myself in terms of my Enneagram type. This personality type shows up in both my good and bad moments – it is most certainly a consistently effective way to describe how I relate to other people.​

Personality Tests in the Workplace

Personality tests have been used in the process of hiring people for decade (Tett & Christiansen, 2007). They clearly are related to people’s job performance, and with the Big Five personality traits model becoming more popular, human resources personnel find personality tests more and more helpful. At the same time, since people may fake their personality tests – especially if they think they know “who” they’re supposed to be to get the job – controversy continues over whether personality tests should be used in the hiring process.

At the same time, personality tests are also used to help people identify what kinds of jobs may fit them best and be most satisfying to them (Tang, 2018). These tests are usually not as rigorously designed or as long as those used to understand a person’s entire personality; instead, they focus on the aspects of personality known to matter most in selecting a profession.

For more scientifically-backed information on personality tests and hiring, I suggest you watch this video from the American Psychological Assocation:​

Video: Can a Personality Test Determine If You’re a Good Fit For a Job?

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Final Thoughts on Personality Tests

My professional experience with personality tests has come mostly in the realm of assessing people who are struggling with their mental health in some way. Often, it is not quite entirely clear what is going wrong just from interviewing the person and asking them to complete psychological measures that focus specifically on certain disorders. At this point, a personality test can help the evaluator consider other personality aspects that may not be readily apparent at first.
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If you or somebody you know is having a hard time and nobody seems to have a clear answer as to why, I would suggest seeking the help of a psychologist who has been trained in performing this kind of evaluation. Although personality tests generate tons of information, they should only be interpreted by a trained professional. 

If you have already taken a personality test, I also don’t want to leave you with the impression that this tells the whole story of who you are. Our personalities can and do change over time, especially if we choose to take significant action to change our lives. I encourage you to see personality tests as a potentially useful tool, but not the be-all and end-all. There is always more room to grow and change than we might initially believe or see.​

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