Personality type tests are hugely popular, though if you ask working psychologists, they’ll tell you the results are little better than astrological signs.
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[However] in a report published [September 17] in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois identify four personality types: reserved, role models, average and self-centered. The new approach was nothing like the basis for widely used personality tests such as the Myers-Briggs.…
Social psychologists dispute whether personality types exist. Traits are another matter. Personality traits “can be measured consistently across ages, across cultures,” said [Luís A. Nunes] Amaral, co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. The five best-established traits, or Big Five, are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
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So the scientists used a sophisticated machine learning algorithm to identify clusters of traits, or what [psychologist William] Revelle called “lumps in the batter,” in this 5-D population.
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“What is unique about the current study is their choice of the Big Five trait domains as a starting point,” [psychologist John] Johnson said, “rather than some theoretical types that sprang from the imagination of the theorist.”
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People who scored very high in extroversion but were below average in agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness were “self-centered.” Amaral put it in a “nontechnical way”: Some people are “jerks.”
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