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)