I have always found personality tests fascinating. In sixth grade, I discovered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which assigns you one of 16 personality types expressed as a four letter code. According to 16 Personalities, the test that I took, I was an ENFP. That stands for Extroverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Prospecting. According to their website, “These people tend to embrace big ideas and actions that reflect their sense of hope and goodwill toward others. Their vibrant energy can flow in many directions.” For some reason, that definition really spoke to me when I was 11 years old.
A year later, I took the test again. Only this time, my results were different — I was an INTJ (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging). I was confused. Was I really more of an “intellectually curious” person and less of a “free spirit”? Couldn’t I be both? Did I really have to choose one or the other? And was one year of middle school really enough to change my personality so radically?
My identity no longer relies upon seeing myself as an ENFP or an INTJ. But I think 11-year-old me was onto something: there is something fascinating about personality tests, despite — or maybe even because — the fact that most of the tests you find online have little or no scientific basis. It’s the mystique. Answering a couple dozen simple questions (“I enjoy going to parties”) will give you an explanation of exactly what kind of person you ostensibly are, presented as an immutable fact.
And there are so many personality tests out there. There’s the Enneagram test, which assigns you one of nine numbers, each further modified by a “wing” number(s). According to the internet, Donald Trump is an 8-wing-7. There’s the Big Five test, which claims some psychological validity. It numerically evaluates your personality along five dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. There’s a test that will assign you a personality type based on the four classical Greek humors. There’s a test that will assign you one of four “masculine archetypes”
King, Warrior, Magician, or Lover. There are, of course, myriads of BuzzFeed personality tests.
And then there’s the CliftonStrengths test. If you are an Oberlin student who enrolled anytime after fall 2023, you have probably taken the CliftonStrengths test. The version of the test that Oberlin students have access to tells five out of 34.
I said that I have always found personality tests fascinating, and the CliftonStrengths test is no exception. For one, it’s a product of a number of bizarre design choices. Each question presents you with two statements and asks you to choose where you fall on a scale between them. The term for this is “ipsative.” Ipsative personality tests do have some benefits, but the tradeoff is that the CliftonStrengths test can’t tell you how strong your strengths are relative to other people’s. If your number one strength is “Positivity,” that could mean that you indeed exhibit very strong “contagious enthusiasm.” However, it could also mean that you have merely average “contagious enthusiasm” and no other redeeming qualities. Another bizarre design choice: the 34 strengths range from adjectives (“Analytical”) to nouns (“Empathy”) to agent nouns – nouns that describe a person performing an action (“Activator”). Why aren’t they all nouns or all adjectives? What’s the point of this grammatical grab bag? It’s unclear!
What really fascinates me about the CliftonStrengths test is the ideology behind it. Most personality tests implicitly express a certain worldview. Implicit in the Enneagram test is the idea that nine-sided polygons are somehow intricately linked with human personality. Implicit in that “masculine archetypes” test is the essentialist idea that men should aspire to be a “King” or a “Magician” or whatever. What idea is implicit in the CliftonStrengths test? It’s the notion that everybody is better at some things than other things and that you will be happier if you have an opportunity to do the things you’re relatively good at.
This is fine, I guess. It seems plausible, and there are certainly worse ideologies to base a personality test around. I certainly don’t think the CliftonStrengths test is a panacea, although their website makes the remarkable claim that people who regularly use their strengths are “less likely to report experiencing … physical pain.” But I can see how a test that tells you what you are good at relative to everything else could be a useful reflection tool.
That’s precisely how I see the CliftonStrengths test, though: as a tool for reflection, which has its uses but which might not be capable of representing the messy realities of the real world. Personality tests are a lens, a framework for interpreting your thoughts and actions. If it helps you, in whatever way, then it’s a good framework. But there’s clearly a danger here: If the framework you use is not helping you, or if you come to overidentify with your test results, then it’s a bad framework.
That’s something to be wary of, especially if you are a young person. Taking a personality test is a very adolescent thing to do. It’s about answering the questions: Who am I? What kind of place is this world that I live in, and what unique faculties do I bring to it? In retrospect, 11 years old was a very natural age for me to become obsessed with the Myers-Briggs test. But as someone who was obsessed with the Myers-Briggs test, I have learned that the most important thing a personality test can tell you is that you are the kind of person who spends their time taking personality tests. It’s fun to place yourself in a box, but it can become counterproductive. There is a time for thinking about your place in the world, but it may be more satisfying to spend your time actually living in it.
