How are personality traits distributed in the most popular personality frameworks?

September 12, 2024

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 ...

Guessing the Probability Distribution

August 23, 2017

Tips for guessing what distribution a variable (or set of values) might have People often assume that the frequency with which a variable will take on different values (i.e., probability distribution) is likely to follow a bell curve (i.e., a normal distribution); this is often a mistake. Instead, consider these rules of thumb for deciding which probability distribution to use as a model in different situations: (1) Binomial - when flipping coins Number of occurrences out of a fixed nu...