TOW: Take this personality test

Lately, when I've been in a mood, either good or bad, I've taken to taking personality tests.

As anyone can tell you, personality tests are both interesting and, at times, misleading.  Sometimes they can tell us things about ourselves that are illuminating.  Other times, it can lead us to believe we fit well within the confines of a psychological summary.  But should we take other people's perceptions of us to be the truth?  Just who are you, anyways?


The first personality test was created in the 1920s for military personnel. Before that, people measured personality by phrenology, or measuring people's skulls.  (I am sure I would come up as a narcissist based on the size of my skull.)  They also looked at people's appearances to determine personality....it makes you wonder if this is where the phrase "Appearances aren't everything" came from.

Most of us have taken the Myers-Briggs personality test, but did you know that there are many, many other kinds that are used?

• The Big Five Personality Traits test:  openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

• The Hans Enyck Test:  He based his theory on the model developed by Hippocrates, which had a scale used three dimensions: Extroversion, Neuroticism, and Psychoticism.
• The 16 Personality Factors test developed by Raymond Catell. (I won't list them all, but you can find them here.) 
• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) developed in 1939 to measure psychological balance levels.  (Not to be confused with the MMPI2)

These tests often helped psychiatrists help their patients.  But being honest, most of us use personality tests to tell us something about ourselves.  But, what, exactly?

I think many of us get a thrill out of the idea that someone can tell us who we are.  That our dispositions and feelings are classifiable, and even understandable (even if those feelings aren't rational).  We all would like someone to make it easy for us, and just tell us who we are supposed to be....or even who we are right now.

But personality tests are not a good measure of what we're all capable of.  They're a measure of our psychological state when we take a test.  We all have free will; many, many times we work against our own 'natures' and do things that surprise people around us.  There may be a model and mold, but most of us break it on a regular basis. 

Sometimes, life feels like one big personality test.  Will you be rude to someone in public, will you fight with a spouse or family member?  Would you betray a friend to help yourself?  These questions are all ethical, but they all say something about our capacities, and if you ever want to find out who someone is, ask them personality questions that aren't about themselves, but about difficult problems that affect them.  Ask a gay man what he thinks about sexual diversity.  Ask a woman what she thinks about abortion laws.  Ask a black man about the role of law officers in our society. 

There is something interesting and internal to personality tests, but they can only measure capacity; they don't measure reality.  And even if we did try and measure reality-we would probably fail to take in all the necessary factors.  We can only measure small slices of it; small pieces of our realities, and then bring it back to ourselves, to our 'personality.'

Personality is an interesting piece of social science, but it's not a rational response to how people should live in the world.  It is only the application of the scientific method to a field where persuasiveness matters as much as data.  While that has its value, we must never believe that our free will is somehow connected to our personalities.  Each of us has the unalienable right to choose, to be, and to make ourselves again.