But I strongly disagree about the only 16 kinds of personalities. One of the weaknesses of the test and the entire concept behind it is that it's making a typology of people, as if there were only two kinds of people for each trait. Take for example the introversion-extraversion scale. If you have a big number of people filling that questionnaire, you would get a bell curve. Most people are in the middle inbetween extraversion and introversion. But a dichotomous typology (putting people into one of two posible groups) implies there's bimodal distribution with two peaks near the extremities of the scale (like there's many people on the extravert end, and also many people on the introvert end, and much less people "inbetween"). But that's just not the case. In truth you have a normal distribution (bell curve) and in order to put people into their types you would have to set some rather arbitrary cut off value. Now imagine, just for the sake of making the point, you can score between 0 and 20 points on the intro-extraversion scale when taking the test. Most people would be between 8 and 12. Now you define the cut off to be 10. So a person (A) scoring 10 will still be introvert, just like a person (B) that scored only 2. Another individual (C) may have scored 11 and will thus be put into the extravert category, like someone (D) that scored 19. But A and C are almost the same, while A and B or C and D have a much bigger distance between them. But the result will look as if A was like B and C like D.
Get what I mean?
A typology is fun, but doesn't really describe what human personality traits look like. The reality is more like there's a continuum for all sorts of variables in humans, and the majority of them follow a bell curve. That's why in personality psychology they prefere personality systems that are composed of a number of continuous scales. Take for example the Big Five model measuring personality in five dimensions (extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism), and if for example every person can score 0 - 20 points on each dimension you would have 20^5 = 3,200,000 different personalities. If every person could score between 0 an 100 points (if, for example, the questionnaire had a typical 5 level Likert rating scale) for each of the five dimensions you'd have 10 billion different possible outcomes, that's more than individual humans alive today.
Now in many cases psychometrics is done to somehow sort people into some kind of sub-populations, so a test that tells you "everyone is a unique snowflake" maybe idealistic, but not very usefull otherwise. The position of a person on each of the 5 scales can help describe and predict a person though.
Just wanted to make a point that "only 16 types of people overall" is due to the somewhat outdated method of making a typology instead of a contiuum for each dimension.
I mean, I'm crazy spiritual, I seek meaning and purpose in everything and I have trust in God, but I doubt christian doctrine a lot.
3 awesome!