Personality tests fail test

Have you ever clicked on a link like “What does your favourite animal say about you?” wondering what your love of hedgehogs reveals about your psyche? Or filled out a personality assessment to gain new understanding into whether you’re an introverted or extroverted type?

People love turning to these kinds of personality quizzes and tests on the hunt for deep insights into themselves. People tend to believe they have a “true” and revealing self hidden somewhere deep within, so it’s natural that assessments claiming to unveil it will be appealing.

As psychologists, we noticed something striking about assessments that claim to uncover people’s “true type”.

Many of the questions are poorly constructed — their wording can be ambiguous and they often contain forced choices between options that are not opposites. This can be true of BuzzFeed-type quizzes as well as more seemingly sober assessments.

On the other hand, assessments created by trained personality psychologists use questions that are more straightforward to interpret.

The most notable example is probably the well-respected Big Five Inventory. Rather than sorting people into “types”, it scores people on the established psychological dimensions of openness to new experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

This simplicity is by design; psychology researchers know that the more respondents struggle to understand the question, the worse the question is.

What makes tests less valid can ironically make them more interesting. Since most people aren’t trained to think about psychology in a scientifically rigorous way, it stands to reason they also won’t be great at evaluating those assessments.

We recently conducted a series of studies to investigate how consumers view these tests. When people try to answer these harder questions, do they think to themselves “This question is poorly written”? Or instead do they focus on its difficulty and think “This question’s deep”? Our results suggest that a desire for deep insight can lead to deep confusion.

Seemingly, the sillier the assessment, the better people think it can read the hidden self.

In our first study, we showed people items from both the Big Five and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS), a popular “type” assessment that contains many questions we suspected people find comparatively difficult. Our participants rated each item in two ways.

First, they rated difficulty. That is, how confusing and ambiguous did they find it? Second, what was its perceived “depth”? In other words, to what extent did they feel the item seemed to be getting at something hidden deep in the unconscious?

Sure enough, not only were these perceptions correlated, the KTS was seen as both more difficult and deeper. In follow-up studies, we manipulated difficulty. In one study, we modified Big Five items to make them harder to answer like the KTS items, and again we found that participants rated the more difficult versions as “deeper”. We also noticed some personality assessments derive their intrigue from having seemingly nothing to do with personality at all.

Take one BuzzFeed quiz, for example, that asks about which colours people associate with abstract concepts like letters and days of the week and then outputs “the true age of your soul”. Even if people trust BuzzFeed more for entertainment than psychological truths, perhaps they are on board with the idea that these difficult, abstract decisions reveal some deep insights. In fact, that is the idea behind measures such as the Rorschach, or “ink blot”, test.

In two studies inspired by that BuzzFeed quiz, we gave people items from purported “personality assessment” checklists.

In one study, we assigned half the participants to the “difficult” condition, wherein the assessment items required them to choose which of two colours they associated with abstract concepts, like the letter “M”. In the “easier” condition, respondents were still required to rate colours on how much they associated them with those abstract concepts, but they more simply rated one colour at a time instead of choosing between two. Again, participants rated the difficult version as deeper.

Seemingly, the sillier the assessment, the better people think it can read the hidden self.

So intuitions about psychology might be especially pernicious. Following them too closely could lead you to know less about yourself, not more.