Announcing the Ultimate Personality Test 2.0!

We’ve got some exciting news: The Ultimate Personality Test just got a major upgrade! It will analyze your personality using all three of the most popular personality frameworks (the Big Five, Myers-Briggs-style, and Enneagram), teach you about yourself and these personality systems, show customized predictions about you, and let you compare your results with friends. Whether you took the first version or are new to the test, we think you'll really enjoy the Ultimate Personality Test 2.0. 

In this post, we'll also dive into an important question about personality: is it actually true that there are different "types" of people? Or is personality better thought of in terms of "factors"? Scroll down to learn more.

What’s New in Version 2.0 of The Ultimate Personality Test?

• 🌍 40X Bigger, More Diverse Data: We’ve gone from a study of 559 participants to insights from over 24,000 global users, making your personality results even more accurate and meaningful.

• 📈 More Impactful Questions: We’ve doubled the influence of each question to give you deeper insights into your personality traits. Previously, each answer you gave affected ~1.5 traits, but now they each affect ~3.

  
  

If you took the first version of our Ultimate Personality Test, we’d love for you to try the new and improved version! If you haven’t tried it yet, there’s no better time! 

In just 12 minutes, you’ll discover your Big Five traits, Enneagram type, and Jungian Type (inspired by MBTI). Plus, you’ll receive a data-driven prediction of your well-being, relationships, career, and more.

What You Get

• 🧩 Detailed personality profile with insights from (and about) three of the world’s most popular personality frameworks.

• 🧬Distinctive Traits: Discover your top three and bottom two traits — the adjectives that make you, you

• 👥 Compare with a friend: See how your results stack up against theirs, instantly!

• 📊 Personalized infographic about your traits, perfect for sharing with friends or on social media. Here’s an example:

Take the Ultimate Personality Test 2.0 now to unlock your most accurate personality insights yet.

Launch the Test!

We can’t wait to see what you think of the new version. And if you feel like sharing your results on social media, we’d be thrilled to see how you spread the word about Ultimate Personality Test 2.0!

Finally, we have a short article for you, exploring an interesting question about personality tests, which we’ve been thinking about.

Comparing Personality Tests, 

Empirically

We’ve spent a lot of time studying personality tests now, and part of this work has involved studying an important question that we want to share with you (along with our evidence-based answer): should you think of personality in terms of types or factors?

Types and Factors: What’s the Difference?

Let’s start with the basics. Some personality tests use types that categorize people into distinct, discrete groups. For example, the Enneagram test suggests that there are nine types of people (Type-1 to Type-9), while Myers-Briggs divides people into 16 different types (INFJ, ENTP, and so on). This means the Enneagram test uses a 9 type model of personality, while the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test uses a 16 type model of personality. In these models, each person is assigned to just one type, which is supposed to summarize their personality. There are lots of examples of these type models in popular culture, and a classic is the Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart which also uses 9 types (Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, and so on):

This chart is a model of personality that combines three types of relationship with rules, order, and authority (lawful, neutral, and chaotic) with three different types of approaches to morality (evil, neutral, and good), to produce 9 types of personality. Which one are you?

While the Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart is usually used as a type system, there is a sense in which it is based on two factors: where a character falls on the spectrum from Evil to Good, and where a character falls on the spectrum from Chaotic to Lawful. So one way to think about it is that it is a 2-factor system that is used to produce 9 distinct types. Myers-Briggs tests, while they frequently get used as a type system (based on the 16 combinations of four letter codes, like ENTJ, ISFP, etc.), produce that type system from four factors (or spectrums): Extraversion vs. Introversion, Sensing vs. Intuition, Thinking vs. Feeling, and Judging vs. Perceiving. The letter you get assigned for each factor is determined by whether your score on that factor is high or low.

On the other hand, there are personality tests that use factors as their fundamental basis, suggesting that people don’t fall neatly into types at all. Instead, they have different amounts of certain traits or factors that fall somewhere on a continuous scale. Someone might have a lot of extraversion, for example.  Or some-but-not-much conscientiousness. This is how academic psychology’s most popular personality framework (known as ‘the Big Five’) models personality. Rather than putting you in a single box (which is your type), factor models recognize that you can have different degrees of each trait, resulting in a more detailed profile. 

Examples of this sort of model in popular culture include the political compass quiz, which attempts to express people’s political personalities in terms of two factors (economically left vs right, and socially authoritarian vs libertarian). This is where politicalcompass.org claims different people fall within this two axis system (whether you agree with where it places people, or not, it shows a factor system in action): 

But when it comes to personality, which way of thinking is better: types or factors?

There are lots of ways you might try to answer that question. We initially approached this topic  thinking about it in terms of success at predicting important life outcomes — such as job satisfaction and well-being. Since this isn’t the main reason people use personality tests (you don't necessarily take personality tests to figure out what’s going to happen to you), it’s fair to ask: why is that a good indicator of the quality of a personality test’s categorization model?

Our answer is that if a personality test can reliably predict important life outcomes, that provides evidence that  the model is capturing something real and meaningful about how people think, feel, and behave. By measuring how well these tests predict life outcomes, we have a way of comparing different models without relying on their subjective appeal (e.g., how much you like your result) and without falling into circularity (e.g., the personality test can predict your personality) - instead, we see how well each test gives us a clear picture of a person’s history, choices, and experiences.

Ultimately, a successful personality test should do more than just categorize you — it should offer insights that could help guide your personal growth, career decisions, and even life satisfaction.

Our Study

We collected data from roughly 3,500 users across 30 questions about their life outcomes and 116 questions that covered all of the major personality tests. Then we tested how accurately each personality test framework could predict their answers to 30 life outcome questions. The Big Five emerged as the clear winner among personality frameworks, with twice the predictive accuracy of our Myers-Briggs-style test. Note that all of these results are based on the Ultimate Personality Test - the difference is simply which portions or subscales or type system within the test is being used to make the predictions. Here’s a graph of the results (showing how accurate predictions are using all 116 questions in the test directly, and comparing that to the Big Five's factor based system and three type based systems):

For the left-most column, we used participants’ answers to all 116 questions to predict their life outcomes. For the other columns, we used some subset of those 116 answers to give them a personality profile (either a type or a set of personality factor scores) and then used that profile to predict life outcomes.

Of course, using all 116 answers will give you the best chance to predict life outcomes, but imagine you took a 116-question personality test and the result was a 116-factor profile that just told you how you answered each question. You would (rightly!) think you hadn’t learned anything. Personality models attempt to teach you something about yourself by distilling your answers into information that helps you frame your understanding of who you are in a clearer, more insightful way. Instead of overwhelming you with raw data, these models aim to simplify the complexity of your personality into a narrative that you can relate to and use.

So, we found that the Big Five was the most predictive. But then we did something interesting: we converted all of the type personality models into factor models, and all of the factor models into type models. This gave us a type version and a factor version for each personality test. Here are the results showing how predictive they were:

The results are clear: models that use factors consistently outperform models that rely on types. For example, the Big Five scores (taller orange bar) predict life outcomes more accurately than the Enneagram Type (shorter purple bar) and MBTI-style types (shorter green bar). But if we treat the Enneagram as a factor system (giving people scores for each of the nine types instead of assigning them just one), we can improve its accuracy significantly (larger purple bar).

Among the type based systems, our own type system (Clearer Thinking Cluster Type), which uses 16 types, led to better predictive accuracy than the MBTI-style and Enneagram type systems. But still, our type system was outperformed by the Big Five scores.

Similarly, converting the Myers-Briggs-style test from a type system to a factor-based system boosts its accuracy (green bars), much like how converting the Big Five from a factor system to a binary (i.e., type system) hurts its accuracy (yellow bars). This pattern holds across multiple models, showing that treating personality as a set of continuous traits, rather than discrete types, leads to better predictions.

Type systems generally lose information, because they force people into buckets. While some people might nearly perfectly fit one category (and so the type system will work especially well for them, many people will be on the edge of a categories, or will lie between two categories, and so type systems may characterize those people poorly, or they might even end up with different types if they take the test on multiple days if they lie really close to a category boundary.

So, factor-based models offer more accurate predictions. Doesn’t that mean they’re better? 

Not so fast.

Type-based models offer one big advantage: simplicity. Brains love categories (even, apparently, mouse brains). They help us with abstract thought, with finding meaningful connections between phenomena, and with simplifying and reducing the amount of information we need to store in memory. Hence, it is perhaps no surprise that there’s something satisfying about knowing “I’m a Type 4” or “I’m an ENFJ.” and that type-based models — like the Enneagram and Myers-Briggs-style tests — are incredibly popular, even though their simplifications lead them to be less predictive.

Simplicity can be a good thing. If all we cared about was accuracy, we would simply report people's responses to every one of the 116 questions in the test. As we can see in the charts above, we get the most accurate predictions if we use every single one of the 116 responses to make those predictions rather than simplifying into a personality framework. But if we simply reported all your responses right back to you, that would not be useful for facilitating self-understanding, or helping people understand each other through our "share with a friend" feature. To gain insights, simplification will typically be needed, even though simplification will reduce prediction accuracy.

So that means that, depending on your goals, it might make sense to choose a type-based model. For instance, you might choose to use a simpler personality model with discrete types (even if it's less predictively accurate than a more complex factor-based model) if you value:

1. Ease of understanding and communication. Simpler models with distinct types are often easier for non-experts to grasp and discuss.

2. Practical application. For example, in workplace settings, simpler models may be easier to apply in team-building exercises, leadership training, or conflict resolution.

3. Memory and retention. People may find it easier to remember and apply a model with a few distinct types rather than multiple factors with varying scores. That being said, this isn't always true, as you may find it easier to remember the Big Five's five factors, and whether you're "low", "medium" or "high" on each than to remember which of 9 or 16 types you are or what the various types actually mean.

4. Broad strokes over nuanced detail. In some situations, a general understanding of personality differences may be sufficient, making the trade-off for accuracy worthwhile.

5. Accessibility. Simpler models may be more accessible to a wider range of people, including those without extensive psychological training.

   
   

Ultimately, the choice between personality types and factors comes down to a tradeoff between accuracy and simplicity. The more simplified a model is, the less accurate it tends to be. But that doesn’t mean simpler models are useless—they might still offer valuable insights, especially if your goal is to make personality easy to understand and discuss.

That's why we developed our own type system (the 16 Clearer Thinking clusters). It performs better than the other type systems in terms of prediction accuracy, but still provides you with a single type, for those that find a type more useful than a factor system.

In contrast, factor-based models, while more complex, usually give a much more accurate and detailed picture of who you are, making them better for predicting important outcomes in your life. That’s why we also provide factor-based information in the Ultimate Personality Test - so you get the benefits of both types and factors. 

In the end, personality tests aren’t just about labels — they’re tools to help you understand yourself better. So, if you’re choosing between different tests, we advise thinking about your goals: how much detail do you need? How much simplification can you tolerate? And if predictive accuracy is what you’re after, the data show that factors, not types, are better at unlocking those insights. With the Ultimate Personality Test we make it so that you don't have to choose - you get all of the systems within one quick test.

You can try our Ultimate Personality Test (2.0) right now, for free, by clicking the button below:

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