Is the 16 Personalities test a free MBTI®?
Since SO many people apparently get their personality type information from 16Personalities.com, I’d like to take a moment and point out some basic, but significant, differences between this tool, and the work of certified Type practitioners like myself.
You’ve seen the graphics
You heard the stats
You maybe even vibe with their profile names
So, is the NERIS® personality test a free alternative to the MBTI®?
TL/DR: No, it isn’t.
It has misappropriated the MBTI® letters, it is based on a different approach, and the two questionnaires measure different things.
Ready for some context? Here we go:
What is personality, and how do we use it?
According to the American Psychological Association, “Personality refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.” (Link)
The earliest studies on personality that I’m aware of date back over 2,000 years, when Hippocrates formulate his theory of four temperaments. He called them sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic, and suggested that the prevalent fluids in a person’s body influence behavior. (Given the time and limited resources he had, I’d say good effort. We know about different blood types now, and how they might affect our metabolism. We know hormones affect moods, emotions, and behavior. But we know more today.)
During the turn of the last century, European thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung introduced concepts of the human mind and psyche like ego, shadow, and the collective unconscious. Historically, the study of psychology was focused on pathology and dysfunction, but these new models not only enabled a better understanding of the self, they also offered a path for growth and development.
Since the 1950s and 1960s, the trend in the scientific community has been to break down complex systems into smaller, measurable parts. Statistical analysis tools like Cronbach’s Alpha, factor analysis, and Item Response Theory became the guardrails for making sure an instrument’s scales (i.e. items on a questionnaire) were measuring what they said they were measuring with a degree of reliability and validity. Thus, wanting to capitalize on psychological insights into behavior, personality “tests” were born.
With the rise of industrialization and capitalism, a specialty field of industrial/organizational psychology emerged, dealing with “issues of recruitment, selection and placement, training and development, performance measurement, workplace motivation and reward systems, quality of work life, structure of work and human factors, organizational development and consumer behavior.” (APA) Despite their low correlation, trait instruments are often used to predict performance. (If this sounds familiar, feel free to refer back to my take on HBO’s Persona.)
How do we measure personality?
At the heart, it’s a question of are you looking at personality as a cluster of behaviors (traits / how much), or as a living system evolving around an organizational principle (types / what and why)?
A trait is “a relatively stable, consistent, and enduring internal characteristic that is inferred from a pattern of behaviors, attitudes, feelings, and habits” (reference).
A trait instrument like the Big 5 (aka OCEAN - Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) measures how much of something you have, and the result can be mapped on a bell curve. It is not based on an underlying theory, but rather defined by descriptions of actions that empirically cluster together around certain factors.
In other words, if you usually behave a certain way (e.g. initiating conversations) you’ll score proportionally higher on that factor (e.g. extraversion). And while the five factors may be observable in what you do, they’re not asking why you do it, and they’re not assuming you’ll grow or change. The trait model doesn’t know why you behave the way you do, and doesn’t provide a framework for development, because it’s only designed to measure how much or how often you do it.
Trait instruments are popular in the job market, as they describe and are supposedly able to predict behavior. Spoiler alert, they’re not. E.g., someone who scores high in Agreeableness is supposedly most likely to engage in “counterproductive behavior,” i.e. intentional behavior against company interests. (Reference) (Yes, I’m choosing to share an extra-biased example to illustrate the potential harm these "tests" can do.)
A type in the sense of psychological or personality type is a holistic pattern organized around a core. The pattern itself is stable, and it has a driver, an energy system, a structure, and (cognitive) processes that support the pattern development.
A type instrument like the Myers-Briggs® doesn’t measure what you do, it understands that you can adapt your behavior according to circumstances. It sorts your cognitive preferences into categories of equally valuable options, i.e. knowing you can use your brain to do both things, which one comes easier and has less of an energy cost?
A Type self discovery process based on models like Interaction Styles™, Essential Motivators™, or Cognitive Dynamics™ helps you understand not just how you like to use your brain, but the underlying pattern of why you prefer to behave in those ways.
Most personality Type instruments and models are based on the work of Carl Jung, who published his theory in 1921. He based his theory on over 10 years of empirical observation of his patients, and then went deeper to formulate and explain how personality is part of the larger system of the human psyche. Knowing your preferences and applying the insights is an active way to balance your psyche and overcome one-sidedness, a process Jung called individuation.
By now, you already know what I’m going to say next:
Provided by NERIS® Analytics Limited, the questionnaire on 16personalities.com is based on the Big 5 trait model.
In their own words:
Parting thoughts
At a recent Type conference, over 50% of participants who know their best-fit Type preferences said they did not get the correct result from 16personalities.com.
I don’t know if that means we can extrapolate that nearly 200,000,000 people may have been mistyped, but it goes to show you can’t get a type result from a trait instrument. Either way, it’s misleading for them to use the type letters when what they’re serving is trait.
There is measurement error in all instruments, and I sincerely hope nobody who’s reading this has ever just filled in any free questionnaire and taken the result at face value.
There are Type practitioners who are literally trained, like, that's our job to help you find your best fit and then support you in figuring out how best to apply it to your goals. Type is never a "this is what you do" kind of conversation, it's always more of "here's how you came into the world, now how can you use that to your advantage, and let's overcome some blind spots while we're at it."
Hope this helps you better understand the difference between type and trait, and how both models have different applications.
