Most people have taken personality tests to see which of their characteristics are most pronounced. A test meant to help you better understand yourself, layout your strengths and weaknesses or a test that gives you a pop culture reference and marks your kinship to a celebrity or animal. Though they vary in purpose they address a need to associate with an archetype or several.
Everyone plays a role while leafing through their own story to find the next line, wishing to view their life from the outside. Piecing together characteristics, tonalities and depictions to create an image of themselves. Gathering together a persona out of bits and pieces. Who am I and what am I like?
Society has moved beyond the adornment of clothes and jewellery. Beyond associations with groups and philosophies. This yearning gauged by a not so superficial curiosity in personality tests is to know who you are and how to connect to oneself. In the curriculum brought to you by school and culture, you discover the intricacies of life and are given some building blocks to piece together a self. This is where you start the journey of the self-image and surround yourself with like-minded individuals.
In school, you learn about technologies people have used to shape societies. In culture, you learn about the expression within groups of individuals and the history that formed them. Both influence your personality and conception of life. So does your family, friends and experiences shape you. In school and through culture you find your hobbies, interests, love and career. You learn to like and dislike.
Personality’s makeup consists of these likes and dislikes, but it doesn’t end there. It is a bundle of experiences, genetics, emotions, bonds and ties that shape a complex individual in nature, pursuits, understanding and action. It is important to test yourself and your environment to better understand where you fit within them. In defining and shaping your personality, a core part of yourself, you should emphasize your own commitment to the individual experience and reflect on it.
The true test is life. Here you falter, are victorious, give up, persevere, lose and discover relationships. You play a very large role in the creation of your own life and in the direction it evolves in, as well as how your personality is moulded through the experience of it. A test on paper might be able to point out suggestions of what you are like, what job you are suited for or what kinds of people you attract. But it isn’t the test results that bring forth action or inaction, your choice in hobbies, work or the people you surround yourself with. The results may influence your choices, but it’s up to the individual to shape the meaning of them and more importantly their life and their own personality. Experience the wisdom of life, shape your personality and gain an understanding of yourself.
Put your personality to the test to see what reflects back and you’ll find the result is your authentic self.
Notes and sources
Added in 2026. Nothing above needed correcting, but the central suspicion in it turns out to have research behind it, and it seems worth pointing at.
On not trusting the four-letter answer. The essay argues that a test on paper can suggest what you are like but cannot settle it. The best-known of those tests, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, has been criticised on exactly that ground: in a much-cited review, David Pittenger set out its psychometric problems and concluded that the confident four-letter type formula is not supported by the evidence offered for it (Cautionary Comments Regarding the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (opens in a new tab), Consulting Psychology Journal, 57(3), 2005, pp. 210-221). The specific complaint most relevant here is that a meaningful share of people who retake it are sorted into a different type, which is a problem for anything claiming to name a fixed self.
What the research does support is a trait model rather than a type model: the five-factor or “Big Five” description, which places people on continuous dimensions instead of assigning them to a category. That is a quieter claim than a personality type, and closer to what this essay was groping towards: a person is a position on several scales that experience moves, not a box.
One thing I would put differently now. I wrote that personality “is a bundle of experiences, genetics, emotions, bonds and ties”. That is right, but it undersells how much of it is genetic. Twin studies consistently attribute a substantial share of trait variation to heritability. It does not change the argument. It does mean the shaping I described happens to material you did not choose.