Commonly used personality tests

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

The gold standard of personality tests is the MBTI, which divides people into 16 types, depending on their self-reported preferences for things such as extroversion or introversion. The MBTI has been around since the 1960s, and an estimated two million people take it every year, a lot of whom seem to be management consultants; the test reportedly exerts considerable influence at McKinsey .

The Enneagram

This is a model of nine personality types. Based on the work of Bolivian human potential movement group founder Oscar Ichazo and Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, it represents these personality types in a geometric figure. They include: Reformers ■

Helpers ■

Achievers ■ Individualists ■ Investigators ■

Loyalists ■ Enthusiasts ■ Challengers ■ Peacemakers. ■

The Big Five

The Big Five personality traits was the model to comprehend the relationship between personality and academic behaviours. This model was defined by several independent sets of researchers who used factor analysis of verbal descriptors of human behaviour. The five best-established traits, or Big Five, are:

Openness ■ Conscientiousness ■ Extroversion ■ Agreeableness ■ Neuroticism ■

The new entrant

A new study, based on huge sets of personality data representing 1.5 million people, has persuaded even the staunchest critics of personality tests to conclude that maybe distinct personality types exist, after all.

In a report published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois identified four personality types: Reserved, Role models, Average and Selfcentred.

“Personality types only existed in self-help literature and did not have a place in scientific journals,” one of the researchers announced. “This will change because of this study.”