Have you ever noticed the sheer number of quizzes available nowadays? It has never been so easy to learn something about yourself. However, you might feel lost in the sea of tests out there.
How can you tell which one to take?
What is the best personality test? And why take one in the first place?
Learning about different aspects of who you are can indeed be fun. However, personality tests deliver much more practical benefits. They help you advance in all life areas. How?
This article will explain what you can gain from top personality tests. Continue reading to find out:
- What personality is
- What personality tests measure
- Why take a personality test
- What the best personality tests are
What Is Personality?
The term personality comes from the Latin word persona. A persona was a mask an actor would wear to present a trait, emotion, or character.
Similarly, personality is a complex notion encompassing our traits, interests, motivations, values, capacities, emotional patterns, and self-concept.
According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, personality represents our unique adjustment to life.
Personality is relatively enduring. This means we are rather stable in how we behave, think, and feel over time. You probably feel that you are pretty much the same person you were as a teenager, at least in your most prominent features.
For example, you have always been quite social. Or you have been interested in learning (or sports or arts) since you can remember. Across different areas of life, your persistence always emerges to help you get good grades, excel at work, or fight for your relationships.
Although we develop as we mature, some of the significant features of our personalities tend to persevere. This is why the best personality tests deliver the knowledge you can leverage across time and life areas.
But how have you got to be who you are?
How Does Personality Develop?
Personality does not just come from a single source. The development of personality is an intricate process in which many forces interact.
- First, we are born with certain hereditary and constitutional tendencies. Particularly, our temperaments are mostly inherited. For example, you might be a firecracker like your mother — or a more mellow individual like your dad.
- Then, physical maturation plays a role in our personality development. Typically, our emotional responses change as our central nervous system matures. You were likely a bit easier to burst into tears as a preschooler than today. This is also why top personality tests are implemented in adults, while formal personality testing is not done in children.
- Nonetheless, we ought not to forget early training. This is the other side of the famous nature vs. nurture debate. On one side, we do not come to this world as a tabula rasa, a blank canvas. However, we are also not born a complete personality. The messages we receive during our childhood impact who we develop to be.
- Moreover, identification with significant individuals and groups shapes our interests and makes us work on developing particular abilities over others.
- Culturally conditioned values and roles also play a part in what our personality will be like. For example, some cultures promote collectivism instead of individualism. Within such cultures, ambitious people might direct that ambition towards achieving good for the group. In individualistic cultures, personal achievement and competitiveness could develop instead.
- Finally, certain critical experiences and relationships could affect our personality. If you were a trusting and open person, experiencing an abusive relationship or a trauma in which you were a victim of violence could change that. The opposite is also true, and many people experience post-traumatic growth that changes them for the better.
The best personality tests aim to encompass different elements of your personality that came to be due to such complex circumstances.
What Is a Personality Test?
If you are an animal lover, you might argue that they all have unique personalities. And that might be true.
However, what distinguishes humans from animals is our ability to think about ourselves. We think about our reactions. We analyze our preferences and explore our feelings. The moment we reach adolescence, we begin to ponder who we are. What kind of a person are we? What do we strive toward?
Our curiosity about ourselves led to developing personality theories — and, eventually, personality tests.
Theoreticians and researchers offered their varying stances on what constitutes personality. Gordon Allport suggested a complex model of over 4,000 personality traits. Raymond Cattell statistically established 16 base traits. Hans Eysenck, conversely, proposed only three traits: extraversion–introversion, neuroticism–ego–stability, and psychoticism.
Therefore, the theory of personality seemed rather chaotic.
As a result, personality testing emerged as the more practical way of deliberating personality. Best personality tests today connect theory and decades of research and practice.
The first personality test was Woodworth’s Personal Data Sheet in 1917. That test was developed to identify soldiers prone to nervous breakdowns during an enemy bombardment in World War I. Since then, many other personality tests have been created.
So, What Do Popular Personality Tests Measure?
Personality tests measure different constructs of personality. In other words, personality tests aspire to capture that permanent and all-encompassing essence of who you are.
Regardless of the theory in their basis, personality tests detect the tendencies in your interactions with the world. What moves you? How do you typically respond? What does your set of priorities in life look like? What abilities do you rely on the most — and how and why do you choose to get engaged?
The outcome of taking a personality test is learning your profile and how it explains your usual behavior and feelings.
How do personality tests accomplish this?
Two Types of Personality Tests
There are two main types of personality tests: self-report and projective tests.
- Self-report assessments ask you to get introspective and state how you act in certain situations. Those tests consist of questions that prompt you to respond about how much a statement relates to you. Some of this category’s most popular personality tests are the Big Five, MBTI, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).
- Projective tests do not require you to think about particular situations and define yourself within those descriptions. Instead, they present vague content (such as ink blots, photographs, and images) and let you interpret it. The notion behind this sort of test is that your personality will shape your responses, given that the test stimuli could be interpreted in countless ways. Some of the top personality tests in this category are the Rorschach Inkblot Test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).
What Are the Benefits of Taking a Personality Test?
Since many top personality tests are based on self-report, is there a point in taking one? You could think about yourself and figure your personality out, right?
Well, not exactly.
Personality tests were developed following rigorous methodological principles. Moreover, they were founded on personality theories. Such characteristics make them superior to lay thinking about the type of person someone is.
One of the reasons is the inescapable faultiness of introspection. When we think about ourselves, we are highly susceptible to cognitive distortions. Our self-image is often skewed, and we do not even realize it. This is where psychological instruments prove superior to soul-searching.
The best personality tests bring to light patterns and regularities that likely evade your attention. They were designed to detect particular traits from seemingly unrelated behaviors and reactions.
By now, you still may be wondering:
- What are the chief benefits of taking a personality test?
- What to do with the results once you receive them?
- How to leverage their full potential?
Let’s answer those questions!
Why take a personality test? Here are 3 good Reasons!
1 - Gain a Clearer Direction in Life
By taking a personality assessment, you become better equipped to arrange your efforts in any area of life when you learn your preferences, inclinations, and motives. Knowing who you are, along with your strengths and weaknesses, is a key component of creating a personal development plan.
Let's say you always felt uneasy taking the initiative and putting yourself out there. However, society pressures you to be a go-getter. When you take a personality test such as the MBTI, you can learn that that kind of success does not drive you. Your preferences, for example, revolve around building healthy relationships or creating art. As a result, you can stop pressuring yourself to go down the road you are not made to go.
Our psychological structure and the culture’s expectations are often in conflict. This can cause severe stress or even expose you to the risk of depression. When you learn your likes and dislikes, you realize which situations are optimal for you. And how your responses change in the face of stress or when you grow. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses can help you avoid situations where the latter will surface.
Because you know your personality type, you can reshape your life and start seeking experiences and circumstances that align with your identity.
2 - Optimize Your Career Path
One of the prerequisites of a happy life is having a job you like. As an adult, you spend at least one-third of your time working. Therefore, you need the job to correspond to your foundational principles, values, and aptitudes. Otherwise, you are bound to feel like a fish out of water. What is more, you risk burnout and other adverse effects of having a job you dislike.
Take highly extroverted people, for example. Sitting in an office with little social interaction would make them wither.
Why would you want to take a career personality test? When you take a career personality test, you learn what kind of career fits you like a glove. You can then optimize your job search and avoid losing time and energy on completely wrong jobs.
3 - Enhance Your Relationships
All quality relationships are based on understanding — understanding the other person, yourself, and how your personalities interact. And what is the best way to gain such a grasp? To take one of the popular personality tests, by all means.
Personality test results do not simply reveal your traits. They remind you that there are other profiles. Inventories such as the MBTI or Big Five show you that different combinations of traits produce utterly diverse personalities.
Most of us mistakenly believe that others share our vision of the world. However, a person who is highly open to experiences, for example, will feel differently about a sudden trip than someone who is not too keen on adventures.
No one personality is in any way better than the other. However, when you fail to recognize your differences, you might be tempted to judge others. At the same time, when you acknowledge a person’s uniqueness, you open the door to a respectful and fulfilling relationship.
The best personality tests help you build a profound appreciation of yourself and others.
Our Best Personality Tests List
Now that you have learned the basics of personality testing, you might wonder, “What is THE BEST personality test?” There are so many quizzes out there — which one to take?
However, before we move on to the list of top personality tests, we need to ask — What does “best” even mean?
The short answer is — it depends on what you want to find out. We will list several quality personality tests you can expect to deliver fantastic insights into your personality.
However, which is the best will rest on where you are on the self-discovery path. Personality tests measure different constructs. Once you learn, for example, what your foundational personality type is using the Big Five test, you might want to explore how your personality corresponds to different jobs. You can do so by taking the career personality version combined with the Holland personality type test related to your career.
You will likely find that one discovery leads you to need another. You will appreciate the breadth of information about yourself you can gain from taking a variety of the most popular personality tests.
Here are our top picks for the best personality tests you can take on your own:
Big Five Personality Test
The Big Five made our top personality tests list because it is one of the world's most widely acknowledged psychological instruments. Researchers tested it across cultures and in various settings. It has proved to be a valuable and informative measure of personality traits.
This test is built around a five-dimension model of personality. These personality dimensions are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Each represents a continuum (Openness vs. Closedness, Conscientiousness vs. Lack of Direction, Extraversion vs. Introversion, Agreeableness vs. Antagonism, Neuroticism vs. Emotional Stability). The test shows you the degree to which you exhibit these traits.
When you take the Big Five assessment, you learn how you score on all five traits. You are not assigned a personality profile; instead, you explore each of these dimensions and how they are reflected in your actions. Although there are only five dimensions in this model, practitioners agree that the test offers a comprehensive understanding of the taker's personality in many contexts.
If you want to learn more about the Big Five Test, you can read all about it here.
Take the test to gain the most wide-ranging explanation of your personality and see why it is one of the most popular personality tests.
Holland Code Career Personality Test
The next test on our list of the most popular personality tests is the Holland Code. It got here because it is an established instrument specifically designed to match personality and interests with career fields.
Moreover, research and practice extensively confirmed the test’s reliability. Findings revealed that the better the match between the Holland code and a person’s job, the higher job satisfaction, achievement, performance, and persistence.
Holland’s occupational theory proposes that people tend to fit into six main personality types: Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional (RIASEC). However, you are not simply assigned a score or personality type when you take the test. Instead, you learn how strongly you relate to the six interest categories. In other words, you reveal which are your primary interests and which are viable alternatives.
You can learn more about how and why the RIASEC model was developed in our Holland Codes article.
If you want to understand your potential occupational interests, you can take the free short form of the test here.
And suppose you want to get a better prediction of career success and satisfaction. In that case, we also offer a more comprehensive version combined with the Big Five.
Myers Briggs Personality Test
The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is, without a doubt, among the most popular personality tests in the work context. You will likely come across it during recruitment or for team-building purposes. For this reason, we included it in our best personality tests list.
Carl Gustav Jung’s work partially inspired the theory at the basis of the MBTI. And the other part is its authors’ observations of people’s behavior.
When you take the MBTI, you will ponder your preferences in several areas. Namely — whether you seek company or solitude, how you gain information and make decisions, and how you deal with the world. Responses to questions about various situations assign you one of the 16 personality types.
The personality types in the MBTI are based on the combination of four dimensions: Extraversion (E) – Introversion (I), Sensing (S) – Intuition (N), Thinking (T) – Feeling (F), and Judging (J) – Perceiving (P).
If you want to learn more, our comprehensive article discusses the test and how you can use the results to improve in various areas of life and all your relationships—with others and with yourself.
If you want to determine your MBTI type, you can take the BrainManager 16 personality type test.
Enneagram Personality Test
The Enneagram personality test is on our best personality tests list because of its unique dynamic design. It can act as a blueprint for the journey of self-exploration.
When you explore the most popular personality tests, you will discover that the Enneagram personality test might have the most far-reaching history. It has roots in spiritual practices. Still, at its core, it speaks about the universal human search for self-understanding.
The Enneagram consists of nine types of personalities grouped into three triads: head, heart, and gut. These triads are associated with the primary emotions guiding their actions: fear, shame, and rage. This method of personality analysis highlights areas where one can improve and develop one's traits.
If this short description sparked your interest, there is more to read about the Enneagram personality test in our thorough article.
Use the Enneagram personality test to enhance your communication skills, understand your motivation, and help highlight your character strengths and weaknesses.
Languages of Love Assessment
Languages of love, based on Dr. Gary Chapman's book The 5 Love Languages, offers insights into an important aspect of personality—how you and your partner prefer to express and receive love. Understanding your primary love language—words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, or Physical Touch—can significantly enhance communication and strengthen your relationship. This test is valuable not just for couples but also for individuals seeking to improve their interactions and emotional connections with others.
To learn more about how this ties into personality and relationships, check out our article on the 5 Love Languages for a Happy Relationship.
If you want to learn your love languages, you can take the BrainManager Languages of Love test.
Word of Caution: Limitations of Personality Tests
Popular personality tests can be very informative and beneficial in revealing paths that align with your psychological makeup. However, remember that no psychological test is an exhaustive representation of who you are and can be.
There are limitations, or rather precautions, that you need to consider to utilize the results to the fullest.
Knowing your personality type cannot predict your future.
You could, for example, learn that working as a helping professional fits your personality type. And you could be drawn to such jobs. However, there is no telling whether you will succeed in that field. Why? Because personality does not determine everything. Other capabilities, external and internal circumstances, and other factors have a say in your success or where you end up.
If you take your personality profile too much to heart, you might miss opportunities to discover new things.
The same goes for appreciating the infinite intricacy of your and others’ personalities. Even though the best personality tests provide relevant information about your preferences and characteristics, remember what we said above about what the best is? It depends on what you are interested in learning. Similarly, your (or someone else’s) personality type represents only some aspects of a person. Interpreting people and experiences solely within the bounds of a specific personality type might cause you to eliminate other enriching events and opportunities.
Therefore, take the results from personality tests for what they are — a guide — a signpost to where you are at this moment.
Personality can change. Remember what we said earlier. Significant insights and life experiences can alter some of your traits.
This is why retaking tests occasionally and learning whether and how you have grown can be a good idea.
Leverage Science to Grow
Taking a popular personality test can be more than just fun. No, it should be more than just fun. Why?
Personality tests were developed to respond to an innate human need to realize our potential. They were created to make you appreciate your unique traits and interests. The best personality tests are a secret door to your ideal life.
That is why you should leverage the countless hours of work experts put into creating quality personality tests. Take the knowledge they give you and identify the areas of personal development. Find outlets for self-actualization that fit your personality. And live up to your ideals.
