What is my personality type? A better question, and how to answer it

Why do people ask what their personality type is?

Two reasons, and both are good ones. The first is that a type is a name for yourself. It turns a loose sense of how you work into something you can hold: the reason meetings drain you, the reason a messy desk does not bother you at all. The second is that a type is a way to talk about it. Four letters travel. You can put them in a dating profile or a group chat, and the other person has something to reply to.

There is a third pull, quieter than the other two. A well-written description of almost any type feels accurate, because it is built from statements that are true of most people most of the time. Forer showed this in a classroom in 1949: students given an identical, generic personality sketch rated it as a highly accurate description of themselves (Forer, 1949). That does not mean type descriptions are worthless. It does mean the feeling of recognition is not, on its own, evidence that the label fits you better than it fits anyone else.

So the honest version of the question is not which of sixteen boxes you belong in. It is which stable dispositions shape how you act, and how much of each you have.

What does type mean, and does the evidence support it?

In the Myers-Briggs tradition, a type is built from dichotomies. You are sorted to one side of four either-or scales, the four letters are combined, and the result is one of sixteen types. The appeal of that design is that it is memorable and easy to explain. The difficulty is that the underlying scales do not behave like either-or choices.

When researchers scored the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator alongside a Big Five inventory, its four scales lined up with four of the five broad traits. They also behaved as four relatively independent continuous dimensions, and the study found no support for the view that the instrument measures dichotomous preferences or qualitatively distinct types (McCrae & Costa, 1989). A review of the instrument's psychometric record reached a similar conclusion, warning that the four-letter formula will not carry the inferences people commonly draw from it (Pittenger, 2005).

The trait alternative was not designed as a rival product. It emerged from decades of work asking which descriptions of people 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). These are dimensions, not doors. Everybody has a position on all of them.

None of this makes type tests worthless. They give people a shared vocabulary, which is genuinely useful. It does mean that if you want an answer that will still be true next month, and that can tell you apart from a friend who shares your letters, a type is the wrong shape of answer.

How can you tell where you sit on the six dimensions?

Here is a rough guide, not a score. Read each dimension and ask which description fits an ordinary week of your life better, and by how much. If neither side fits clearly, that is information: it means you are somewhere in the middle, which is where most people are on most dimensions. A real measurement asks several questions per trait and compares your answers with a reference sample. Use this to get oriented, not to conclude.

• Extraversion. Higher: you think out loud, you leave a party with more energy than you arrived with, you speak early in meetings, you find silence in a group slightly uncomfortable. Lower: you rehearse before you speak, you need an hour alone after a long social day, you prefer one long conversation to six short ones.
• Agreeableness. Higher: you give people the benefit of the doubt, you find it hard to leave a disagreement unresolved, you notice when someone in the room has gone quiet. Lower: you say the blunt version, you are comfortable being the one who disagrees, you are slower to assume good intentions.
• Conscientiousness. Higher: you keep lists and finish them, you arrive early, you tidy before you start work, you dislike leaving something half done. Lower: you work in bursts near a deadline, your system lives in your head, you change plans easily and are not troubled by loose ends.
• Emotional Stability. Higher: criticism stings and then passes, you sleep before a big day, you recover quickly from a bad hour. Lower: you replay conversations afterwards, small setbacks colour the rest of the day, you feel the week's stress in your body.
• Openness to Experience. Higher: you follow curiosity down side roads, you like unfamiliar food and unfamiliar music, you enjoy ideas for their own sake. Lower: you prefer what is proven, you value routine, you would rather do a known thing well than an unknown thing badly.
• Honesty-Humility. Higher: you would return the extra change, you are uncomfortable with special treatment, you do not much want status. Lower: you are comfortable negotiating hard for yourself, you enjoy recognition, you see a little self-promotion as simply how things work.

Two cautions. People tend to know their own inner life better than they know how they come across, while the people around them often read the visible, evaluated traits more accurately (Vazire, 2010), so a friend's view on your Extraversion or Agreeableness is worth asking for. And a single bad week can tilt a self-description on Emotional Stability. Answer for the last year, not for today.

What does a trait profile give you that a type does not?

Four things, mostly. It keeps the middle, so a position at the 55th percentile is reported as a balanced position rather than rounded up to a label. It keeps degree, so you can see that your Conscientiousness is your strongest trait and your Openness is close to average, which a four-letter code cannot express. It lets the dimensions move independently, so you are not handed a package of traits that are supposed to travel together. And it can record change, because a shift of fifteen percentile points is something you can see, whereas a type either flips or does not.

Trait scores also carry 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). That is a modest claim, correctly stated: these are group-level associations, not forecasts about you. But it is more than any type system has shown.

Why report scores and bands instead of a type?

Each of the dimensions is continuous, and the spread of scores across a large sample is bell-shaped: the middle is crowded and both ends are sparse. That is a fact about people rather than a shortcoming of the questionnaire.

Because the curve has no natural break, any line across it is a decision by whoever built the test, and a box loses the distance between a score and that line. It costs most for those sitting closest, who can answer a little differently after an ordinary week and swap labels with themselves. Type scales measured against a trait inventory behaved as continuous dimensions with no distinct types underneath (McCrae & Costa, 1989), running along the structure decades of descriptive research had settled on (Goldberg, 1993).

So the score comes first. Wellington places each dimension against a reference sample as a percentile, then adds three bands with stated cut-offs: Quiet up to the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above it, on norms 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. The bands exist because a band is easier to discuss than a two-digit number.

A named Portrait sits on top as a summary of the band pattern, chosen from the scores rather than replacing them. The name is for practicality. The measurement is the numbers underneath it.

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. The first ten are answered before anything is asked of you, so you can see the questions before you commit. After question ten you sign in with an email address so your answers are saved and your results can be shown to you. No card is involved. At the end you get a band and a written page on each of the 6 dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience and Honesty-Humility. Each band is one of three, placed against a reference sample, and our norms are provisional while the norming sample is completed. 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 designed for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Because people do still 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, shareable summary you can send to a friend. The Portrait is the headline. The bands and percentiles underneath it are the report. If you want more resolution, the Wellington Membership adds the facets beneath each dimension and the 24 VIA character strengths, reaching 90 traits in all.

Questions people ask

Can my personality type change?

Your position on each trait can move, and for most people it does. Rank-order stability rises with age but is never complete (Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000), and adults tend on average to become more conscientious and more emotionally steady, mostly between 20 and 40, with agreeableness changing mainly in old age (Roberts et al., 2006). A type flips when a score crosses a line. A trait profile shows you the movement itself, which is the more useful record.

Is 16Personalities my type?

It is a type, from its makers' own model, written with the four-letter style the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator made familiar. It is free, well designed and taken by a very large number of people. What it reports is one of sixteen labels rather than your position on each scale, so if you sit near the middle of a scale, as most people do, two different sittings can hand you two different descriptions.

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. Any count of types comes from choosing cut points on those dimensions. Sixteen types is four cuts, nine Enneagram types is a different scheme, and neither number is discovered in the data.

What is the most accurate way to find out where I sit?

Take a questionnaire built on the Big Five or HEXACO that asks several questions per trait and reports continuous scores against a reference sample. Answer for your typical self over the past year rather than for today. Then, if you can, ask someone who knows you well to read the same descriptions and tell you where they would place you.