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). ...

An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Traits

September 13, 2020

The rules of evolution are simple: (1) if a trait makes survival or breeding more likely, then that trait will tend to survive in the long term by being passed down the generations. (2) Gene mutation and gene mixing create new traits, which naturally vary in how much they promote survival. Yet, the consequences of these simple rules are profound. Various facets of the world are hard to understand without taking evolution into account. Since our brains and bodies (as well as the natural world...

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...