What can the internet really tell you about your personality?

Personalities are peculiar things. They say that the first five years of your life are crucial to the development of your personality. Or is it your star sign? Or who you were in your past life? Or is it about what you eat? Whatever the case, as with most things, the internet claims to have the answer. Or should that be multiple answers?

Just doing a quick search brings up millions of tests – some legit and fairly accurate, some just fun time wasters. If you have some time on your hands: why not give these few a go:

Personal DNA
A new kind of personality test developed by professional psychologists, unlike other personality tests in terms of innovative answering techniques, allowing quite successful and accurate measures of the multi-dimensionality of a person’s character.

iPersonic Typology
An award-winning personality test developed by Felicitas Heyne, a well-known psychologist and book-author. Its only takes 5 minutes to complete the test and gives you an overview of your personality, career and relationships.

Myers-Briggs Typology Tests
A psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions.

What is fundamental to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the theory that psychological types are based on various cognitive functions:

• The “rational” (judging) functions: thinking and feeling
• The “irrational” (perceiving) functions: sensing and intuition

This model recommends taking several different tests to get a more comprehensive and accurate result. Three good ones to try include Keirsey Temperament Sorter, Humanmetrics and 41 Questions.

On a lighter note, like the quizzes in the likes of COSMO, some of these tests are quite a laugh and surprisingly accurate at times.

Draw A Pig
As the name says, here you can draw a pig and find out what your drawing says about you and your personality – cute and fun with impressive accuracy. Um, maybe not one to use to base your career and future goals on.

Colorgenics Test
Created by The Paul Goldin Clinic, the Colorgenics test links colours that you are most drawn to and based on the results provides insights into how other people see you and how your inner subconscious mind is truly feeling about your life.

Musical Visual Intelligence
Created by Jake Mandell, MD, music and neuro-imaging researcher, AMVI (Associative Musical Visual Intelligence) is a logic test that attempts to measure a person’s ability to associate musical phrases with abstract shapes and symbols. The test is designed to be purposefully hard so that even trained musicians rarely achieve high scores, however one doesn’t need to have musical training to take the test.

The Animal in You
Based on the books The Animal in You and Animal Attraction by Roy Feinson, the test is designed to help determine your “animal personality”. There are almost fifty species in the database – each chosen to represent a common personality type. Interesting — it says I’m an Otter!

PersonaBubble
PersonaBubble.com is an online platform for exploring who you are. Aimed at letting you gauge who you are and how others see you as well as realize why you are the kind of person that you are. Integrated with Facebook you’re able to see your own traits and quirks and your friends’. For soul searchers and those “looking for themselves” maybe this is how to find it [you].

Having gone through a number of tests in the past I was recently sent a really interesting personality test.

This test helps categorise which personality type you are using quite a simple questionnaire format in fact. While answering the questions I didn’t expect the outcome to be as accurate as it turned out to be.

Like horoscopes (although I tend to agree with them) not everything they say are true. As such, some things that come up aren’t 100% correct but the majority of things that do, freakishly are.

According to this specific questionnaire there are four quadrants which are further subdivided another four times, providing 16 different personality types.

How it works is that it asks you a series of questions and based on your answers it puts you in one of the boxes. Like star signs, tests like this are always up for debate, but when you read your results, it’s amazing, and a little scary to see the amount of truth therein. Don’t take my word for it though – try the test for yourself.

This begs the question – is there a box for everyone? What if you don’t fit into a box? Or what if you fit into more than one? Does that mean that you have multiple personality disorder? What if none of the boxes apply to you? Does that mean you don’t have a personality? Are you actually just a robot?

An interesting challenge to pose to the likes of Facebook would be to create an app which will be able to ‘create a person’s personality type’ based on their Facebook Timelines.
Said app could then bring suitable products to the consumer’s attention. This could be by means of inviting favoured brands within categories to interact with consumers based on specific interests or needs, to customising the ads that appear on each persons profile based on the content they upload and the nature of their usage.

That could make for very interesting times and take consumerism, advertising and targeted marketing campaigns to a whole new level.