Your type is a rounded number
Every four-letter personality test takes a score that ran from 0 to 100, draws a line down the middle, and hands you back which side you fell on. That is one bit of information per letter — four bits, for a questionnaire you spent ten minutes on. This one keeps the numbers. A hundred and twenty questions, thirty separate scores, and for each of the five headline traits, how many points you were from flipping.
What a four-letter type throws away
The compression is the whole trick. A test asks you sixty or ninety questions, adds them into a handful of totals, and then throws away every total in favour of which side of the midpoint it landed on. Someone who scored 51 and someone who scored 94 walk away with the same letter and the same description of who they are.
| What you get back | A four-letter type | This one |
|---|---|---|
| Numbers | None. The score is discarded once the side is decided. | Thirty, printed on a scale, with the midpoint marked. |
| Resolution | One bit per letter. Four bits total. | Thirty scales, four questions behind each. |
| Near misses | Invisible. 51 and 94 print the same letter. | Printed. Each of the five says how far from flipping it was. |
| The instrument | Usually a copy of a proprietary one, reworded to avoid the trademark. | IPIP items, in the public domain, listed on a site you can go read. |
| Your answers | Emailed to you, which means they went to a server first. | Never leave the browser. There is nowhere for them to go. |
None of this makes the thirty numbers true. It makes them visible. A number you can see is a number you can argue with, and a type you cannot see inside is just a horoscope with a trademark.
The five things being measured
These five have been the working vocabulary of personality research for about forty years, not because anyone decided they should be, but because when researchers repeatedly factor-analysed large piles of trait words, five clusters kept falling out. Each one here splits into six narrower facets, and the facets are where the interesting disagreements live: two people can land on the same headline score for completely different reasons.
- Openness to Experience — how much pull the unfamiliar has on you. Splits into imagination, artistic interests, emotionality, adventurousness, intellect and liberalism. A high score is not creativity and a low score is not stupidity; the low end is the preference for the known, which is a perfectly good way to run a life.
- Conscientiousness — how much structure you impose before acting. Self-efficacy, orderliness, dutifulness, achievement-striving, self-discipline and cautiousness. This is the one that most reliably predicts boring outcomes like finishing things.
- Extraversion — where your attention points and how much stimulation it takes to hold it. Friendliness, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity level, excitement-seeking and cheerfulness. It is not shyness; shyness lives closer to self-consciousness, which is filed under the fifth trait.
- Agreeableness — the default assumption you make about the person across from you. Trust, morality, altruism, cooperation, modesty and sympathy. The low end is not cruelty. It is scepticism with the benefit of the doubt switched off.
- Neuroticism — how readily the threat response fires and how long it takes to switch off. Anxiety, anger, depression, self-consciousness, immoderation and vulnerability. This is the one people most want to score low on, and the one where the facets diverge most: plenty of people run high on anxiety and near the floor on anger.