Personality Assessments: What They Can and Cannot Tell You
Why Personality Assessments Are Popular
Tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Enneagram, and Big Five are widely used in corporate settings and personal development. They offer a common language for discussing individual differences and can prompt useful self-reflection. But they vary significantly in their scientific validity, and using them well requires understanding what they can and cannot tell you.
The Evidence Hierarchy
The Big Five (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) has the strongest empirical support -- it is stable over time, predicts outcomes including job performance and health behaviours, and replicates across cultures. MBTI has lower test-retest reliability and weaker predictive validity. The Enneagram lacks the empirical research base of either.
What Assessments Are Good For
- Prompting self-reflection on tendencies you may not have examined
- Creating shared vocabulary for team communication
- Identifying broad patterns worth investigating further through direct observation
What They Are Not Good For
- Predicting behaviour in specific situations with confidence
- Explaining or excusing fixed patterns ("I am an introvert, I can not do that")
- Serving as a substitute for direct, ongoing self-observation
Using Personality Assessments Well in Practice
Use assessment results as hypotheses, not conclusions. Test them against observed behaviour -- your own and others. Where they match experience, they can be a useful shorthand. Where they do not, trust the observation over the label.
