You don't have to be either! You can embrace the middle and call yourself an ambivert.

However, hating people has less to do with extroversion and more to do with a trait called Agreeableness in the Big Five (roughly equivalent to the T/F preference in MBTI). If you're extroverted but not agreeable, you may want to be around people, but more in a way that creates competition or friction rather than cooperation—like starting a lot of bar fights.

On our site, we have about 30,000 people complete tests each day. We definitely saw changes over the pandemic! Our traffic went up when people were stuck at home and down when the restrictions were lifted.

Over time, as well, we're seeing a growth in traffic. Most of our visitor demographic is younger, so it seems that personality is a growing area of interest for people in their teens and twenties.

People always say I'm an extrovert because I like going to parties and stuff but I also really hate people and want people to leave me alone. So am I an introvert or an extrovert?

OMG, what a nightmare scenario! Well done, ha!

Putting aside my horror, I guess I'd pick the Big Five. I'd be looking for high-ish Openness, since there's some indication that partners who share a level of Openness are more compatible. I'd want higher Agreeableness, but not overly high, since I don't want everything to be a debate but also don't want nothing to be a debate. And finally, lower Neuroticism, because that's the trait most associated with relationship longevity and happiness.

How do you respond to the fact that MB tests were designed as a parlor trick by a pair of unqualified authors with a eugenicist streak and a firm misunderstanding of Jung? And before you respond with weasel words, Myers was never cagey about her inspiration being famed eugenic bastard William Grant Hague. "Multitudes of people are utterly worthless or worse than worthless, having no just claims whatsoever upon the civilization which they burden with the dead weight of their existence. This is a sound, incontrovertible judgment, which has to be shunned, because our feeling for the ‘underprivileged’ is so strong that such truths can hardly be mentioned."

So how do you, uh, reconcile the fact that your field is just eugenics laundered through a lens of "empower yourself!"

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How many people are taking these tests every day? And have you seen a big growth in popularity in recent years. If so, why is that...pandemic? Particular demographic?

Yes, that's true with any self-report instrument—they're only as good as the honesty of your responses. This is more of an issue where people are trying to achieve something other than insight with their responses (i.e. taking a personality test to get a job). Of course, sometimes people do lie to themselves as well!

Since our tests are really designed for personal exploration, we don't try to control for whether people are being truthful. As with so many things in life, you get out what you put in!

We actually communicated with the mods of the Enneagram sub to try and work on this issue a while back! We did make some changes, but always open to suggestions if you have thoughts on what is confusing people.

I'm an ENTP. When I discovered this, I was also in the process of starting my first business, so it was very affirming to learn about my type and how many fellow ENTPs are entrepreneurs!

In the long term, it's been helpful to remember that the way I think is not the way my colleagues (or even most people!) think, and to be aware of tailoring my communication to people with different perspectives.

I've often wondered about the accuracy of these tests, since they're based on people's responses. I'd think some people are self-aggrandizing. How do the tests account for that?

If you had to select a partner from a group of 100 candidates to spend the rest of your life with, isolated on an island, and the only thing you could know about them was a personality test result, which test would you use and what would you be looking for in the results?

We studied our Big Five data over the timeline of the pandemic and found that in fact, personality scores did change! There was a lot there, so maybe best to just link to the post we did covering our findings: https://www.truity.com/blog/have-our-personalities-changed-due-pandemic-new-research-says-yes

can you make the pie chart on your enneagram test easier to understand (not that it's hard to understand but some people act like it is) or like. list which types you scored highest on. because people are constantly posting their results in the enneagram sub asking "what does this mean?? what do my results mean?? how do I read this chart??"

That's a great question! The research I've seen (including our own) is skewed toward the US. There may be culture specific studies out there, but I don't know the data off the top of my head!

By a large margin, the Big Five. The Big Five model is used as the foundation of almost all academic research on personality, and accepted as the standard by the vast majority of research psychologists.

I don't think there's any tool that every organization should use. It really depends on the organization, its culture, and its needs at a given time. It can be really helpful, in general, to open up a conversation about individual differences and how to support different work styles in the workplace. Many personality assessments are great at doing just that.

However, the specific assessment you choose should be well matched to your team's culture and your bandwidth for actually putting your learning into practice. For instance, DISC is a really popular test that's easy to understand. It's great for organizations that want a straightforward way to get that conversation started.

On the other end of the spectrum, we've seen organizations do trainings on the Enneagram, which is a much more in-depth and even spiritually oriented system. This works best for orgs that already have a lot of language around personal development and have the time to dig deep into what the system can teach them.

Do events like mass trauma--or globally Covid, change personalities in measurable or meaningful ways?

That's super fascinating! Does that stat on Career & Agreeableness hold true internationally/ other cultures?

On average, women score as more Agreeable on personality assessments, and sometimes higher in Neuroticism (this doesn't necessarily mean women are more neurotic; generally, women are socialized to be more free with expressing emotion, both positive and negative, which is what Neuroticism is about). What to do with this information is less clear.

What personality test do you consider the most accurate and science-backed -- is it the Big Five? Or Myers Briggs?

Personality is traditionally understood as those aspects of yourself that don't change, but recent research has shown that this isn't strictly true. Although people don't generally undergo a complete personality change (apart from edge cases like major brain injury), people's personalities do shift over the lifetime. There are some predictable shifts, i.e. most people do become more introverted and more conscientious as they age. And then there are individual shifts that may have to do with changing careers and discovering a new side of yourself, or starting a family, or even adapting to a new culture.

This is a huge question with a lot of answers! Just a few things that personality has been shown to influence:

- Politics: people higher on the Big 5 dimension of Openness are more likely to be politically liberal

- Relationships: people higher in Neuroticism (Big 5) are more likely to get divorced

- Career: people higher in Agreeableness are less likely to hold executive management positions

If there's something more specific you're curious about, happy to comment on that!

We don't develop tests for hiring because we don't like them either and we do like to sleep.

are there in-built biases that might disproportionately categorize women in a specific way?