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Usually we don’t, but this time we did and we found it highly entertaining and even a bit educating. Personality tests are everywhere out there in the World Wide Web and generally a good sense of skepticism towards them isn’t a bad thing to have. Many of them either tend to tell you what you want to year, or what you already know. It’s a bit like with horoscopes (not that all of them are bad). Nonetheless knowing who you are and where your strengths and weaknesses lie can be an important skill, especially when facing a new environment, to adjust easily and these tests can help you with the process of getting to know yourself better.

It has been a desire for human kind to describe and categorize ourselves since the ancient times, describing tempers in sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic for example. As times went on, there were numerous descriptions of personalities, always struggling with the complexity of the human nature, shifting from situation to situation. Still we are in a pursuit models, which are general enough to apply as a category, while not lacking precision.That thought in mind it is safe to say, that there is no absolute and right model to describe a person with all aspects and therefore personality tests, like all psychological test should be taken too seriously, unless they are part of a professional treatment by licensed psychologists. Nonetheless they have a sense of entertainment to them and can help us understand ourselves a little bit better.

This particular one we took this morning at 16personalities.com offers free survey to categorize you in one of 16 well-defined models, with certain traits, in which you can or cannot find your own behavior. The different models are thoroughly described in work-, romantic-, family- and social relations.
NERIS Analytics Limited, hosts of 16personalities, describe their test as a brainchild of the theory of psychological type by C.G. Jung. His main theory was that people fall in mainly two categories, focusing either the inside (introverted) or the outside (extroverted) world. (In his case Introversion does not imply shyness, and Extraversion as good social skills, but rather where people tend to get their energy from.) Long story short, his theory was further developed my Katherine Cook Briggs, who came up with four pairs of possible personality traits, which were used in the 16personalities test.

• Introversion (I) or Extraversion (E)
• Intuition (N) or Sensing (S)
• Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)
• Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)

The combination of these traits gives us 16 options of possible classifications, which were then grouped in 4 main roles:

Analysts – intuitive and thinking (_NT_)
Diplomats – Intuitive and feeling (_NF_)
Sentinels – Observant and Judging (_S_J)
Explorers – Observant and Prospecting ( _S_P )

Personality tests like this one are a solid reminder who you are, but they can only point in a vague direction and should be perceived that way. When push comes to shove it is probably the best to trust your own instincts rather then what anybody tells you.