The truth about personality tests

Personality tests have become increasingly popular in daily life. From hiring to dating, they promise to help us understand who we are and how we are similar, or different, to others.

- BY KELVIN (SHIU FUNG) WONG Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, Swinburne University of Technology Wenting (Wendy) Chen Casual Academic, School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney

But do these tests paint an accurate picture? And could it be harmful to take them too seriously?

What are personality tests?

A personality test is an instrument designed to elicit a response that may reveal someone’s “personality” — that is, their patterns of behaving and thinking across different situations.

These tests can take the form of self-reporting questionnaires, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (first developed in the 1940s) and the Big Five Inventory (developed in the 1990s).

Or they may be “projective” tests, where the individual talks freely about their interpretation of ambiguous stimuli. One famous example of this is the Rorschach inkblot test, developed in the early 1920s by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach.

Early beginnings

Personality testing isn’t new. Historical texts from across the globe suggest humans have been interested in understanding and categorising personality for thousands of years.

Around 400 BCE, Greek philosopher Hippocrates suggested an individual’s temperament was influenced by the balance of four bodily fluids, known as “humours”.

Even earlier, around 1115 BCE, government officials in ancient China examined the behaviour and character of individuals to determine their suitability for different jobs in the public system.

However, the systematic and scientific development of tools to understand and categorise personality only began in the 20th century.

One of the first was developed in 1917 by the United States army to predict how new recruits may react to war, and whether they were at risk of “shell shock” (now classified as post-traumatic stress disorder). The goal was to identify individuals who may be unsuitable for combat.