Article on personality tests

Posted by Psilocybin at 12:06am May 18 '24
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Today I read an article on Scientific American online: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/personality-tests-arent-all-the-same-some-work-better-than-others/

It reveals the research done into predicting people's success and happiness by using their Big 5/Ocean scores, Myers-Briggs results, and sun signs. (There's
a more detailed report on the methodology at clearerthinking.org, which includes the detail that they also tested people's Enneagram types -- a fact not mentioned in the
Scientific American article.)

Big Five was the most accurate in predicting how people's lives turned out from their personality assessments. Astrology (i.e. sun signs) did no better than chance. As
for Myers-Briggs, the researchers found it was "halfway between science and astrology". So they assessed it not as pseudoscientific nonsense, but more as a protoscience that
led up to, but was not as good as, Big Five. (The long academic article on the study found that the Enneagram actually did better than Myers-Briggs!)

What's more, once the dimension of neuroticism was taken out of the Big Five results, the Big Five results didn't have that much more predictive value than Myers-Briggs.
This underscores the cruciality of neuroticism vs. equanimity in predicting someone's life success and happiness. The 16personalities.com version of the
Enneagram, however, remedies this in adding a fifth letter, -T for turbulent vs. -A for assertive, corresponding to the dimension of neuroticism. (When I
take that test, it says I'm an ENFP-T.) When Myers-Briggs was converted into a Likert-type scalar dimension instead of discrete categories AND the neuroticism
dimension was removed from the Big Five results, the difference in predictive value between Big Five and Myers-Briggs almost disappeared.

You can take the test they used yourself, at https://programs.clearerthinking.org/personality.html .

My results:

https://programs.clearerthinking.org/personality_report.html?A_5=37&C_5=4&E_5=94&En_1=22&En_2=70&En_3=64&En_4=91&En_5=15&En_6=0&En_7=94&En_8=37&En_9=11&N_5=95&O_5=53&anti_cluster_i=8&anti_enn_type=6&anti_image_i=16&cluster_encoded=Passionate_Dreamer&cluster_index=10&enn_type=7&gender=0&image_index=20&jung=ENFP&jung_E=94&jung_J=0&jung_S=1&jung_T=20&s_A=60&s_B=75&s_C=83&s_D=22&s_E=40&s_F=8&s_G=83&s_H=79&s_I=83&s_J=55&s_K=88&s_L=60&s_M=56&s_N=73&s_O=50&s_P=50&s_Q=17&s_R=63&s_S=33&s_T=29&s_U=50&s_V=6&s_W=80&s_X=81&theirEmail=savegraduation%40yahoo.com