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 ...

How heritable are human traits like personality, height, mental health, physical health, education, religiosity, and conservatism? (h^2 estimates)

June 12, 2024

Here's my attempt to compile the heritabilities (in the narrow sense of h^2) for many different interesting human traits. Before you read this, however, I recommend you read our piece on the Missing Heritability Problem which provides important context for interpreting this information. We'll first look at estimated heritabilities from five categories: body, mental health, physical health, cognitive/mind-related traits, and personality (including the Big Five personality traits). ...

Some Signs of Harmful or Untrustworthy Relationships

November 3, 2023

Image generated by Clearer Thinking team using Adobe Express

Coauthored with the Clearer Thinking team and cross-posted from the Clearer Thinking blog. We recently conducted qualitative research by crowd-sourcing over 100 open-ended responses to the question: "What signs do you look for that help you identify people who are likely to be untrustworthy or who are likely to hurt you if they become your close friend or partner?" We thought the answers contained some insights that may help you to identify people with whom it would be risky ...

The Relationship Between Personality and Life Satisfaction

November 16, 2018

What's the relationship between personality and life satisfaction? We took a stab at figuring it out! We conducted a study of 999 people in the United States; recruited through our study platform at Positly.com. We looked for a correlation between 18 different personality traits (each trait being assessed with two questions) and life satisfaction. We examined the association each trait had with scores on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (a 5 question scale by Diener, Emmons, Larsen, Griffi...

Psychological Gulfs

December 3, 2017

Here's my list common differences between people that are so large that those at the extreme opposite ends of the trait (say, the 5th percentile vs. 95th percentile) have a very hard time understanding and relating to each other. What would you add to the list, and what am I getting wrong? Note: each of these examples is supposed to illustrate a somewhat extreme form of each trait for clarity purposes. Most people who have or lack each trait don’t have a form that is as extreme as is shown i...