Types of personality: the systems people use, and what they measure

How many personality types are there?

The honest answer is that the number depends on who is counting, and every count is a choice rather than a discovery. Four temperaments came from ancient medicine. Sixteen types came from cutting four preferences in half and multiplying. Nine Enneagram types came from a teaching tradition about motivation. Four DISC styles came from work on how people respond to their environment. Twelve archetypes came from storytelling.

The reason the numbers disagree is that the underlying material is continuous. When you measure a broad disposition such as sociability or orderliness in a large sample, you get a hump with most people in the middle and fewer at each end, not two separate clusters. A type system takes that hump and draws lines through it. Where the lines go decides how many types there are, which is why one system finds four and another sixteen from the same human beings.

That does not make the systems pointless. It does mean the right question to ask of any of them is not how many types there are, but what each type is built from and what it has been shown to predict.

What are the main personality type systems?

Six systems account for most of what people mean by a personality type. The table adds the trait description that has no types at all, and the approach taken on this site. The last column is what the research record supports, which is a different question from whether a system is enjoyable to use.

Two of them are doing something different. The Big Five and HEXACO describe people without sorting them, which is why they have no number in the second column. The archetypes are a set of characters rather than a set of scores.

Why did psychologists move from types to traits?

Because the data kept coming back continuous. When the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was scored alongside a five-factor inventory in one adult sample, its four scales lined up with four of the five broad traits and behaved as relatively independent continuous dimensions, with no support for the view that they measure dichotomous preferences or qualitatively distinct types (McCrae & Costa, 1989). A review of the instrument's record drew the practical consequence: a person whose score sits near a cut point can fall on either side of it, and the four-letter formula will not carry the inferences commonly drawn from it (Pittenger, 2005).

The trait description was not designed as a rival product. It came out of decades of asking which words people use about each other cluster together, in dictionaries and in questionnaires, converging on a small number of broad dimensions that outlasted repeated attempts to replace them (Goldberg, 1993). Adding Honesty-Humility to the five gives the six-dimension structure that lexical studies in several languages recover (Ashton & Lee, 2007). Everybody has a position on all of them, and the position is the finding.

Traits also earned the predictive record. Broad traits forecast outcomes such as occupational attainment, relationship stability and longevity at a level comparable with socioeconomic status and measured cognitive ability (Roberts et al., 2007). Those are group-level associations rather than forecasts about one person, and they are still more than any type system has shown.

What is a personality type good for?

Three things, and they are real. A type is a name, which turns a loose sense of how you work into something you can hold. A type is a conversation, because four letters or a number travel between people who have never read a psychology paper. And a type is a starting point, because a label is easier to look up than a dimension.

What a type is not good for is a decision. The moment a label is used to choose who gets a job or who leads a project, its instability stops being a curiosity and starts costing someone something. The same caution applies to trait scores used that way.

There is one more reason types feel more informative than they are. Forer handed a class an identical, generic sketch and found that students rated it as a highly accurate description of themselves (Forer, 1949). A description built from statements true of most people will be recognised by most people, so the feeling of being seen is not evidence that the label fits you better than anyone else.

How do you find out which type you are?

Start from the system you already have a word from, read what it measures, then translate it into something with degree in it. These pages take each one on its own evidence.

• Four letters from a free test. Wellington vs 16Personalities covers the most-taken version, and Wellington vs MBTI covers the official instrument and the research on it.
• A number from one to nine. Wellington vs Enneagram sets out what the system claims about motivation and what the published literature supports.
• A letter from a work training day. Wellington vs DISC explains what the four styles describe and which traits they run along.
• Sanguine, choleric, melancholic or phlegmatic. Temperament tests trace the four humours to what temperament means in research now.
• A hero, a sage or a caregiver. Archetype tests explain where the twelve figures come from and what they are useful for.
• None of the above, just the question. What is my personality type works through how to answer it without a box, and the Portraits show what a name built from measured bands looks like.

Whichever you take, two habits improve the answer. Answer for your typical self over the past year rather than for today, since a hard week tilts a self-description. And ask someone who knows you well to place you on the same descriptions.

Why does Wellington use scores and bands instead of a type?

Any of these systems can be checked against the ground it covers. Measure a broad disposition in a large sample and the scores form a bell, dense around the average and thinning toward both extremes. The measurement finds degree rather than kind.

No point on that curve announces itself as a boundary, so every boundary is drawn by hand, and a box costs the distance between a score and the line. The cost is largest for people nearest the line, who can sit again a month later and be handed the neighbouring label. Type scales studied against trait inventories behaved as continuous dimensions with no distinct types beneath them (McCrae & Costa, 1989), and the dimensions themselves were assembled over decades of descriptive research (Goldberg, 1993).

Wellington keeps both halves. The measurement is a percentile on each dimension against a reference sample. Over it sit three bands with published cut-offs: Quiet as far as the 30th percentile, Balanced as far as the 70th, High above, on norms that stay provisional until the norming sample is complete. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside.

A named Portrait then summarises which bands you landed in, because a name is easier to carry around than a row of numbers. It is chosen from the scores rather than put in their place, for practicality. The numbers are the measurement.

How does Wellington answer the question?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

The free Snapshot asks 60 questions and takes about 7 minutes. It scores 6 continuous dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience and Honesty-Humility. Each dimension is the average of several statements on a five-point accuracy scale, placed against a reference sample as a percentile and reported in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above it. Those norms are provisional while the norming sample is completed, and the methods page says so.

Because people do want a name, Wellington builds one from the bands rather than instead of them. The combination of your 6 bands maps to one of 243 named Portraits, a short summary you can send to a friend, with the bands and percentiles kept underneath it as the actual report. In the written report, every dimension has three pages, one per band, prepared in advance by the writing and psychology team, and your answers decide which one you read. The Wellington Membership adds the facets beneath each dimension and the 24 VIA character strengths, 90 traits in all.

The first ten Snapshot questions are answered before anything is asked of you; after question ten you sign in with an email address so answers are saved and results can be shown. No card is needed. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not built for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

How many personality types are there really?

Personality research does not find a fixed number of natural kinds. It finds a small number of broad dimensions, commonly five or six, on which people are spread continuously (Goldberg, 1993). Every count of types comes from choosing cut points on those dimensions: sixteen is four cuts, nine is a different scheme, four is another. None of those numbers is discovered in the data.

Which personality type system is the most accurate?

None of the type systems measures accurately enough to carry a decision, because sorting a continuous score into a category throws away the distance from the cut point, and a psychometric review of four-letter formulas concludes they will not support the inferences drawn from them (Pittenger, 2005). If accuracy is what you want, use a trait questionnaire built on the Big Five or HEXACO, which reports a position on each dimension instead of a label.

Why do two personality tests give me different types?

Usually because you sit near the middle of at least one scale, which most people do on most dimensions. A small change in mood, wording or the day you take it can move the score across the cut point and change the whole label (McCrae & Costa, 1989). Continuous scores shift a few points in the same situation, which is easier to read honestly.

Is the Enneagram a personality type system?

Yes, in the sense that it sorts people into nine types built around core motivations, with wings and lines linking them. Its evidence base is different from its popularity: a systematic review of 104 samples found the evidence mixed, with factor analyses typically recovering fewer than nine factors and no study deriving the nine types empirically (Hook et al., 2021). Many people still find the vocabulary useful for reflection.