Comment by ryan-allen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryan-allen | Hacker News Reader

The only model of personality taken seriously by academics at present is the five factor model [1].

It's well researched, the traits were not 'designed', rather the traits popped out of linguistic analysis and statistics, and it's stable across different populations and over most of a person's lifetime.

There is an open test called the IPIP Neo which has either 120 or 300 questions, which you can take online [2].

If you're really interested in what is being taught these days about the theory, this is a good set of lectures take takes you from the early theory of personality through to what is considered science today [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

[2] http://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j/IPIP/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAhrMCQUa6s...

The interesting thing to me is that people say that the MBTI is junk pseudoscience, that the Big-5 (OCEAN) model is the only scientifically valid personality test...but then take a look at the correlation coefficients between the MBTI and 4 out of the 5 dimensions of the OCEAN model:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indic...

A correlation of 0.7+ is huge in the social sciences - it's significantly more than the correlation between say intelligence and genetics. If I look at the numbers, my interpretation is that the MBTI is largely measuring 4 out of the 5 dimensions of the OCEAN model, but leaves Neuroticism out of the model.

It's pretty hard to market a test that's going to call you neurotic, nor could you write nice positive analyses for it like all the other letters have.

Are there MBTI tests accurate enough to report numbers along each scale instead of just picking a letter at each end? The way it only gives extremes when most people are presumably normal really makes it look bad.

That's such a Virgo thing to say.

I bet you're an INTJ ;)

Nope, INFP according to MBTI.

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