What's your personality type?

​I am largely a sceptic of all personality trait profiling.  There are so many, all claiming to be 'scientifically robust'.  However, they tend to only tell you what you could've worked out yourself from a 5 minute conversation with the person.  Most of them have about as much validity as a horoscope, dripping with confirmation bias. ​

 They capture you "on the day" and make that result your personality locked in.  The act of labelling is generally pretty lazy - "Oh, you like reading?   You're an introvert? - case closed". 

Or they are contradictory, for example I am a both a cynic/sceptic and very open person at the same time, which annoys the people who do work for me - they usually want a clear answer and are often given either a range of answers or what's worse, a range of questions.

This article is however better than most.  It is still trying to name and reduce people to 5 dials of personality.  These traits are more general than most, they are not mutually exclusive and don't create a false dichotomy (eg introvert vs extrovert).  

Importantly, it is clear about two key aspects:

1. the influence of environment on these traits is usually overstated (e.g. no there is no such thing as 'second childness' they are just as likely to be introverts as their older siblings), and 
   
2. you can change.

I like to think of our way of being like an economy or culture.  It has inherent in it some pre-conditions that set-up the strategy or style.  For example, Australia's economy is heavily dependant on coal, iron ore and natural resources. This is not surprising given our national DNA - we've a land rich in these resources.  Japan, on the other hand doesn't have these resources and instead has an economy built around building things - often taking our coal and iron and turning them into cars and selling them back to us.

The point is, the conditions we exist in (DNA and environment) determine how we are likely to emerge.  What were likely to be good at.  The path of least resistance.

However, the Australian economy is much more complex than coal and iron, it is changing and diverse and innovating.  It needs to adapt the world moves to a low carbon future.

A personality profiler for Australian Economy might say it has a high score in the "Resource Extraction" trait.  But I hope you notice that this is an oversimplification that doesn't say anything about what our future could become.

As always, just like any profiling, stereotyping or grouping; personality measures can be useful and save time in aggregate, but what they say on average doesn't say much, if anything, about any individual.