About myPersonality
myPersonality began in 2007 and since then we’ve had over 3 million people taking our personality tests using our application on the Facebook platform.
We’re run by David Stillwell, an academic psychologist, and so have strong academic goals:
- To make real psychological tests, used in actual scientific research, available to as wide an audience as possible. To help people reflect on themselves using the most up to date tools available.
- To advance scientific personality research by both publishing our findings and making our data available to researchers.
- To engage non-scientists by making our research findings available in plain language.
We see ourselves as a mutually beneficial collaboration between scientists and users.
If you’d like to help with any of these goals, or have your own suggestions, we welcome your communication via: 
great study you have done, i am so impressed by your stats, thanks for sharing:)
i lyk 2 know ’bout my personality!!!
how to improve myself?
no thanks
how to improve myself
i have two wuestion
1 How to improve myself?
2 anyone knows how to improve your memory
Hi David,
Could you comment about any bias you see in the construction of the test? I found myself uncomfortable with many of the questions that seemed to relate to “conscientiousness” in that there didn’t seem to be a way to show both conscientiousness and flexibility. It felt like a false dichotomy, somewhat, and that in order to score high on conscientiousness one would have to be quite rigid in one’s approach to tasks. My experience is that life’s vicissitudes have moved me from high rigidity and judgmentalism in my youth to greater equanimity and acceptance of imperfection in myself and others – though I hope I’m not done yet! How exactly that makes me less conscientious I don’t know – for it is out of inner peace that I have been able to put aside narrow definitions of what is acceptable. When I look at your world maps, it would be easy to conclude that the East and West are incompatable, and I wonder if this doesn’t arise from a western bias in the nature of the questions. Have you any plans to recraft this to fit a global consciousness, or at least to translate it so that respondents in other countries can put their best feet forward?
@Laurel Batterham
Hi Laurel,
Thanks for your comment, very interesting.
First, I should say that there is no good or bad personality, so high or low conscientiousness both have their place, so it’s not really a case of anyone putting their best foot forward as such. People high in conscientiousness might be better at being organised, but people low in conscientiousness might be better when things don’t go as expected.
Second, this personality scale was constructed quite atheotically. What I mean is that they asked lots of questions, and then simply measured whether people who answered each question in a certain way also asked other questions in the same way. This allowed the questions to be grouped into the 5 traits that myPersonality measures. In other words, it’s not as if someone theorised that people who plan a lot are necessarily inflexible – this is just what the responses to the questions tend to show. Of course, this is based on the averages of lots of people – there are individual subtleties that the big 5 would gloss over:
- One of them is whether someone can change their personality to fit the situation they’re in – we actually literally just added a self-monitoring questionnaire today that measures this kind of thing ( http://apps.facebook.com/mypersonality/selfmon_intro.php ). High self-monitors seem to change their behaviour based on their situation.
- Another aspect is that each of the 5 traits can be broken up into 6 sub-traits. So although someone high on one sub-trait is ~likely~ to be high on another, this is not necessarily the case and it can be measured. Conscientiousness is broken down into:
* Self-Efficacy
* Orderliness
* Dutifulness
* Achievement-Striving
* Self-Discipline
* Cautiousness
People can take our Comprehensive test to get feedback on all 30 sub-traits (although there is a ~$4 cost to do this): http://apps.facebook.com/mypersonality/comprehensive.php
I thought mine was quite accurate. However, my husband’s was confusing, as his Extroversion and Conscientious scores were approx 40% and the corresponding Myers-Briggs approximation kept changing and alternating between E and I and J and P. I think he is in about middle for each of those, probably slightly more I and J. Does it not work on an above or below 50% basis? His result was ISFJ and I thought the J conflicted with his conscientious score of 40%. Sometimes the result is ESFJ.
I wonder if there are many other people with 100% Openness and 0% Neuroticism?
Hi I did the linkup with Surf Canyon and was wondering whether i can access my personal results or is just a study where all the results get aggregated together
i want to know my personality…………..but quick……!!!!!!!!!!!!
@Wendy Landau
Hi Wendy, thanks for helping our research. There is no personal feedback for this, which is why we give Credits to thank you for your participation. It’s certainly likely that at some point we’ll put up aggregate results though (assuming we find interesting things!), so keep watching the mypersonality research blog.
Hello,
I am not sure how you are bringing the emotions felt, in line with the strong moral judgments. Should you not have taken a pre-test? As I did not have strong feelings, but did have strong moral judgments (I did not need a test to tell me that), I do not see how the test result can be that I feel strong feelings when making strong judgments? Sorry, this test results did not make sense?
@christian
The best way to “improve” yourself is to marry someone of the opposite personality temperament – it will make you both more balanced and understanding of others (“As iron sharpens iron, so one’s personality sharpens another – paraphrase Pro 27:17)
To know my character
How confident i am
I just found out that when I took the original test I had a serious Vitamin D deficiency. Just thought you should know. I’m going to take the tests again in 7 days.
I was happy to take this test awhile ago, because I know that I am a very unique person. I have been told that I am now a very rare phenomenon – somebody who does things for others out of the goodness of their own heart. I smile because I know people read this and don’t believe it could be true, but yes I have a greater sense of compassion than almost anyone I have ever met, and it is both recognized by people and it confuses others.
But thats changing. Not me, but what is understood about me – 295.30 is now the ‘small but violent subsect’ of schizophrenia. Suggested also is that I am an angry person, and I have a 50/50 chance of being a drug abuser. That I am prone to sudden rage.
These are such horrible things to say, when in the same breath we are said to have false ideas of persecution and grandiose delusions about government or secret agencies after us and monitoring us. Nobody seems to have the understanding that we have been dehumanized and sensationalized by news and media because its ratings to see the worst sufferers of schizophrenia on their worst days, especially if they do not have their own systems in place to do what we are told we need to do – deny that our reality is real or should effect anyone else. That we must act as functional parts of a society in a world that exists but is not ours, and we shouldn’t tell anyone about our disease. We shouldn’t talk about it because people are afraid of us still. When we slip up, we can’t tell the truth we just have to try harder. This is our ‘compromise’ and we are now seeing education and knowledge getting rolled backwards, fear and ‘saftey’ on part of the family’s effected by ‘this horrible disease’ gives us a further unfair compromise that I bet we are going to be told to be quiet about and not tell anybody just as we have, only we’re going to hear that Mental Hygiene Arrests are not ‘arrests per se’ because ‘we aren’t being charged with a crime’ (little quote from north carolina health official on what the police should say to us). Its too bad we are gullible and agreeable in order to combat our paranoia. When a police officer has stripped you of the liberty to leave you are under arrest. You have lost your rights and your freedom, you are under the control of the opinions of the police officer. The other prong of that fork is that we aren’t being charged with a crime – anyone spent jail time before? I did for ‘arson’ which was a completley falsified charge and I had to get people outside of jail to take pictures of said arson site to show the judge there was no arson no damage and no manipulation of said property. Thankfully it was dropped to a misdemeanor crime against property. There are a lot of people in jail, waiting to either be charged or let free. I met a man myself who had been in for 18 months but they had yet to charge him with something they seized from him the day of his arrest. Apparently, evidence was missing and without evidence, its hard to hold a case up against a hired lawyer. So this gentleman had been in jail without a charge for more than a year.
I hope we don’t go the way of the prison state and the worlds largest incarceration company in the world. We don’t do well stacked 3 in a cell and forced to do labor for no money with a bunch of people, some who actually are violent. When police bully us, we can cave in and give up our rights out of fear and intimidation the police are trained to use. If the police and the people believe us to be violent, angry, and have random outbursts of rage, to be manipulative, have no emotions, what do you think will happen when we find ourselves in jail? Restraints, for we are diagnosed as dangerous? Solitary, because we are manipulative?
I guess we may find out, and if we can, we will tell you about it, but if we can successfully silence tens and thousands of peaceful protesters united in our prisons for better chances at rehabilitation and simple things like non-fatty/starchy foods with nutrition, a stop to inhumanly long solitary confinement sentences, and acknowledgment that the prison makes profit off of them while also punishing them for having the items that they sold them, and also taking it upon themselves to assist in further day to day punishment of incarcerated. If we can completely blind the people to the massive movement in prisons around the world up to and including our country, then we can certainly add a few more to the void, especially if it gets homeless off the streets and helps ‘protect families’ from our steriotype.
I think you should consider providing localized versions of the big five questionnaire. I think questions can be more accurately answered if they are asked in the user’s native language.
However, thanks for your work! :-)