Four types of personality ... so which one are you?
ARE you average, reserved, self-centred or a role model? According to studies of 1.5million people worldwide, all of us fall into one of these four personality types.
Teenage boys are most likely to be selfcentred, the least desirable type, the American authors say, while more women than men are likely to be role models.
Fitting people into categories has taxed philosophers and psychologists for millennia. But the latest research, published in Nature Human Behaviour, claims to have identified separate categories, with our personalities falling into distinct groupings of traits.
Professor Luis Amaral, one of the authors, from Northwestern University, Illinois, said: ‘Personality types only existed in self-help literature and did not have a place in scientific journals. Now, we think this will change because of this study.’ The research used results from several online personality tests which asked between 44 and 300 questions.
The team analysed the five widely accepted basic personality traits: Neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. After processing the data, four clusters emerged:
Average: These people are higher in neuroticism and extroversion, while low in openness. Researcher Martin Gerlach said: ‘The typical person would be in this cluster.’ Women are more likely than men to be this type.
Reserved: This type is emotionally stable, but neither open nor neurotic. They are not particularly extroverted but are somewhat agreeable and conscientious.
Role models: They score low in neuroticism and high in all the other traits. The likelihood that someone is a role model increases dramatically with age. These are people who are dependable and open to new ideas, and ‘good people to be in charge of things’. More women than men are in this category.
Self-centred: These score very high in extroversion and below average in openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. ‘These are people you don’t want to hang out with,’ said one researcher. There is a dramatic fall in the number of self-centered types as people age.