How are personality traits distributed? Let’s take a deep dive into the distribution of personality traits on Myers-Briggs-style tests, Big Five personality tests, and Enneagram tests, based on data we collected on 23,000 people globally:
This bell-curve-like shape is a problem for MBTI-style tests because they want to classify each person as either Extraverted or Introverted, either Sensing or Intuitive, and so on (usually represented as a four letter code, like ENTJ or ISFP). But, for each such trait, most people are near the middle. This is why MBTI-style results often change when re-tested.
What about the Enneagram? While some treat it as more of a spiritual system, it is also often used as a personality typing system. When we use the theory to produce a score measuring how much each person is like each of the 9 Enneagram types, here is what we find:
As we can see, just like with the MBTI-style results, the distribution of scores on each Enneagram type is also pretty close to a bell curve (though the distributions are a bit right-leaning in some cases).
Your Enneagram “type” is simply whichever of these bell curves you’re the most extreme (positive) outlier on. If you’re an outlier on just one, you have a clear Enneagram type.
Depending on the specific Enneagram test I take, I typically get high scores on each of three or four different types, making the concept of an Enneagram type difficult to apply in my case. If you’re like me, you may not have a single coherent Enneagram type.
The gold standard personality framework in academia in the Big Five system. A big advantage it has over other systems is that it assigns you a score on each trait. Like the other systems, we see the traits are close to normally distributed, which for the Big Five is expected:
Regardless of which of these popular systems we use, personality traits are roughly normally distributed, with lots of people near the average and few far from it. MBTI-style tests force you onto one side or the other of each trait (which works best when not near the middle).
The Enneagram, on the other hand, focuses on the one trait in which you’re the greatest (positive) outlier. Finally, the Big Five simply assigns you a score for all five traits – without trying to categorize you.
This piece was first written on September 12, 2024, and first appeared on my website on September 16, 2024.
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