Are Personality Tests Accurate? Why More Testing Leaves You Less Certain

Introduction: The Relief Does Not Last

Late at night, a free personality test that asks only a few questions. You read the row of letters and the short description of the sort of person you are, and something sounds quietly in your chest. So that was it. An outline of yourself you had long been unable to put into words feels finally to have been drawn by somebody’s hand, and you breathe out. The relief does not last. What was supposed to make things easier turns at some point into the increasingly frequent phrase because I am this kind of person — and when it stops fitting, you are looking for the next assessment.

Material on choosing an accurate personality test has been discussed at length. What this article places is the question one step before it: why taking assessments leaves you less certain of who you are, and why the searching never ends.

This article makes a single claim. The real problem with assessment is not insufficient precision. It is that the pen which draws who you are — sovereignty over your own self-description — is handed to an outside party, to a specialist or a diagnostic system, in exchange for the relief of being named. What follows dissects that whole picture in order, tracing established findings in psychology.

An Assessment Result Is a Map of Your Territory, Drawn by Someone Else

Take one comparison first. An assessment result is a map of the territory that is you, drawn by somebody else. Maps are useful. Walking unfamiliar ground, you can move forward by their landmarks. An assessment likewise supplies a few paths through a self that is hard to get hold of. There is nothing wrong with that in itself.

The trouble begins when the map is mistaken for the territory. The actual territory has lanes not drawn on the map and places nobody has yet walked. The moment somebody holding the map believes that this territory contains only the paths drawn on it, the undrawn paths cease to exist for them. A road that could have been walked disappears for no reason other than lying outside the map.

Three Layers: The Structure That Takes You Further From Yourself

The structure by which assessment takes you further from self-understanding can be dissected in three layers.

First, the relief of being named is not self-understanding. An assessment feels accurate not because the description is precise but because of the psychology of the person doing the fitting. In 1949 the psychologist Bertram Forer handed every student the same innocuous text assembled from astrology sources and showed that they each felt it had named them alone [Forer, 1949]. Into a vague description we pour our own memories, then look at what we poured in and conclude that it fits. Landing and being accurate are two different things.

Second, identification with a label fixes the self-image. Believe I am such-and-such and you pick up only the events matching the name, behave in accordance with it, and are treated by those around you through it. In time a self genuinely matching the name is produced — the phenomenon the sociologist Robert Merton called the self-fulfilling prophecy [Merton, 1948]. The name did not hit the target; it steered you into becoming it. And the story of impossibility, because I am this I cannot, closes off an untried future in advance [Dweck, 2000].

Third, that fixing rests on the surrender of sovereignty over your own self-description. We seek the answer to who we are in assessments, in specialists, in systems. The more we seek it there, the more the power to draw ourselves withers, and the outline is left to others. Life and temperament are translated one after another into diagnostic categories [Conrad, 2007], and we come to keep watch on ourselves with a measure of classification taken in from outside.

The Device Called “You Simply Have Not Found the Real One Yet”

Of the three layers, the surrender of sovereignty is the hardest to see. You take an assessment and something does not quite fit. That discomfort ought to be a clue for doubting the assessment itself. But the answer offered is always the same one: you simply have not met the real assessment yet.

That rewriting is what makes sovereignty irrecoverable. The discomfort is converted from a signal to stop into an instruction to look for the next assessment. The one road that is carefully removed from the options is doubting the arrangement itself — having an outside authority adjudicate who you are. A more precise test, a more accurate specialist: every attempt circles inside the arrangement and never works in the direction of leaving it. Unresolved anxiety is continually recovered as fuel for the next assessment.

Substituting the Question: From “The Right Label” to “Who Holds the Pen”

Where, then, is the exit? Not in finding a more accurate assessment. A journey in search of a more correct label can never, in principle, end, since no name captures a living person entirely.

The real exit lies in substituting the question itself. Not did I apply the right label but am I holding sovereignty over my own self-description. Is the pen that draws who you are in your hand, or has it passed into someone else’s? The issue is not the accuracy of the map but who holds the right to draw it. And unlike finding a perfect label, reclaiming the pen is something that can actually be accomplished. A way of beginning that substitution — returning a name to a changeable observation — is developed in how fixed ideas about yourself narrow what is possible.

What Psychology Points To Is Unglamorous

Once identification with a diagnosis is let go, the direction psychology points in is startlingly unglamorous. There are no spectacular miracles. But the footing is genuinely on the ground. This article sets it out as five changes of direction.

• Distinguish the relief of being named from self-understanding. A label is a description, never an explanation and never a fate.
• Return a name from I am such-and-such to I currently tend to behave this way, a changeable observation. That difference of a phrase leaves a margin for change in a self-image.
• Do not entrust the authority over who you are to a specialist. An assessment is a witness, not a judge. You pass the verdict.
• Do not take because I am this I cannot on as a limit on your future. A line drawn before trying is not a limit.
• Describe yourself from the goal you are heading toward rather than from a name out of the past. Draw a self that has not yet arrived as one heading there [Markus & Nurius, 1986].

These are not prescriptions but markers for confirming your own progress. Written out as far as procedure, they too would become a supplier deciding you in your place. So this article shows the direction and lights the first few steps, and stops there.

Conclusion: You Are the Territory Itself, and It Can Be Rewritten

Taking assessments leaves you less certain of who you are because the relief of being named was mistaken for self-understanding, because you identified with the name, and because the right to decide who you are was handed outward. Let one thing be explicit. This article does not deny the attempt to understand yourself. What it cuts is one point only: the surrender of yourself to a fixed name supplied from outside. Assessments and personality types present no problem whatever when used as instruments.

You are not one fixed name. You are a spread of selves you could become, the territory itself, rewritable at any time. An assessment, and everything in your history, is not an inscription binding you but one line partway through a draft you can go on rewriting. Receive the overall design as your next step.

Articles in This Cluster: Reading Each Argument in Depth

This article set out, as a whole picture, how personality assessment operates as a structure that surrenders sovereignty over your self-description to the outside. Each argument is dissected more deeply in its own piece, arranged in the order of this article’s reasoning — how accuracy is manufactured, how the self-image is fixed, the industry, and the design of the exit.

How accuracy is manufactured — why it feels as though you have been named

• What the Barnum effect is — the feeling of recognition is generated on the receiving side, not in the correctness of the description
• Is MBTI accurate — a classification that changes between sittings cannot be an unwavering essence
• Why fortune-telling feels accurate — on not substituting pleasure and relief for evidence of correctness

The fixing of the self-image — a name that becomes real

• The nine Enneagram types — the name did not hit the target; it steered you into becoming it
• How fixed ideas about yourself narrow what is possible — a line drawn before trying is not a limit
• What HSP is — identification with a label and necessary support belong to different layers

The industry — why the searching never ends

• Why self-analysis never ends — naming sells repeatedly and holds people at analysis before action
• Are career aptitude tests reliable — one name multiplies into compatibility, aptitude, and owner’s manual

The design of the exit — reclaiming the pen

• When you do not know who you are, the answer is not a better assessment — you are not a treasure to be found but a work drawn from your destination

This argument — the trap of surrendering sovereignty to the outside — can be analysed with the same structure from other domains. What the need for approval actually is dissects the surrender of the authority to determine your worth; what the law of attraction actually is dissects the surrender of sovereignty over what to want; and why passive income does not lead to freedom dissects the surrender of decision rights over economic survival. These are sister clusters, each separating a different face of the same trap — what this article treats is sovereignty over who you are, the axis of self-definition. To move from the individual arguments to the overall design, start from the structural autonomy master pillar.

Implementations for grasping yourself outside a label are handled in the articles under rewriting the mind’s operating system. Why you cannot change even when you want to and how the brain’s attention filter creates blind spots argue from the side that unlocks a fixed self-image.

The book-length treatment of this argument is available as You Are Not Your Type on Amazon Kindle.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Forer, B. R. “The Fallacy of Personal Validation: A Classroom Demonstration of Gullibility” (1949) Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44(1)
• Merton, R. K. “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” (1948) The Antioch Review, 8(2)
• Dweck, C. S. Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development (2000) Psychology Press
• Conrad, P. The Medicalization of Society (2007) Johns Hopkins University Press
• Markus, H., & Nurius, P. “Possible Selves” (1986) American Psychologist, 41(9)