The Shape of the Trait Distributions
If the data from MyPersonality is going to mean anything, the distribution of trait scores needs to be somewhere close to a normal distribution. That is, a curve with most of the people in the middle and a few people on each side. The graphs below plot the number of people who have each trait score (from 0 – 100%). The good news is, they’re nice and smooth curves! You can click on the thumbnails to see the full graph, which also includes the mean and standard deviation scores.
Some features to point out:
- Unfortunately there are slight ceiling effects on the openness and extroversion distributions, since quite a lot of people have 100%, so it’s reasonable to assume that if it was possible some people would have 105% or even 110%.
- The extroversion trait score has the highest variability. The standard deviation is the highest at just over 19% – which means that it has the greatest average deviation from the mean. If you look at the frequency you’ll also notice that the highest peak in the extroversion trait does not reach 10,000 people – whereas the others are all higher than this. This is because less people are ‘average’.
Method & Results
Only MyPersonality users who have answered the full 100 question IPIP Big Five test are included in the distributions, this comprised 363,301 people. As noted above, the means and standard deviation scores are available by clicking on the thumbnails to view the full graphs.
David, you have too much time :)
I’m not surprised the ‘extroversion’ distribution is broad and truncated.
On all other personality tests (including Myers Briggs) I am an introvert. But here I came out as a serious extrovert for a lot of questions. Who is this person? I was thinking; I don’t recognise her at all. After 60 questions I still have a score (58%) that’s above the mean on the intro-extro scale.
Summat wrang ‘ere, lads.
Hi Alison, the trait scores included in these graphs are the raw scores, so they haven’t been normalised so that 50% is the mean. For extroversion, the mean is just above 63%, so your score of 58% is slightly below-average. On your Facebook personality profile, it tells you the percentile that your trait score falls into, so it should say something about how around 60% of people have a higher extroversion score than you.