Personality Type Quiz
Your everyday habits say more about your type than any label you would choose for yourself.
Planner, explorer, connector or thinker? This personality type quiz looks at ordinary situations, such as a free afternoon, a group task or a sudden change of plan, and matches your answers to one of four styles.
Did you know?
- The labels 'Type A' and 'Type B' came from two heart doctors, not from psychologists. In the 1950s Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman were told by an upholsterer that the chairs in their waiting room were worn only on the front edge, as if patients could not sit back and relax.
- The four temperaments of ancient medicine survive in everyday speech. Calling a calm person 'phlegmatic', a gloomy one 'melancholy' or a cheerful one 'sanguine' goes back to the belief that character depended on the balance of four fluids in the body, an idea that lasted well into the seventeenth century.
- The word 'personality' comes from the Latin persona, the mask worn by actors in Roman theatre. Each mask showed the audience at once what kind of character was on stage. The modern meaning, a person's own lasting pattern of behaviour, only developed many centuries later.
What personality types can and cannot tell you
People have sorted one another into types for a very long time. Around 319 BC the Greek writer Theophrastus described thirty recognisable characters, including the flatterer, the chatterbox and the penny-pincher, in short sketches that still feel familiar. Ancient physicians went further and tied character to the body, describing four temperaments that they called sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic.
Types versus traits
A type puts a person in a box: you are one thing or another. Most psychologists today prefer traits, qualities that everyone has to some degree and that can be measured on a scale, much as height can. On nearly every trait most people score somewhere near the middle rather than at either end. That is why type quizzes are best read as a description of your strongest tendency, not as a claim that you have none of the others.
Why results feel so accurate
In 1948 the psychologist Bertram Forer gave his students what he said was a personal analysis of each of them and asked them to rate its accuracy. The average score was above four out of five. In fact every student had received exactly the same text, assembled from general statements. The tendency to see ourselves in vague, flattering descriptions is now known as the Forer effect, and it is worth remembering whenever a result seems uncannily right.
Using a result well
A light-hearted quiz like this one cannot measure anyone, but it can start a useful conversation. Seeing that a colleague prefers a clear schedule while you would rather improvise explains a good deal of everyday friction. Results can also change: people answer differently at different ages and in different moods, and most of us switch styles between home and work. Treat the outcome as a mirror for today rather than a permanent label.