Tests claim they’ll diagnose your symptoms and report whether you’ve got ADHD or are simply an ENTP. Are any of them good? Unfortunately, even the best frequently mistype – and it’s not just because they were made by “some rando.” In fact, many of these tests were developed by experts who’ve been in their field for decades.
In my experience, the accuracy of these tests can be eighty-percent or less, meaning that one in five takers walks away with the wrong result. Four out of five sounds pretty good, but I find it disturbing that these results are usually handed out as if they’re “the truth.” It’s more honest when the tests say, “We think this is true about you, but here are other possibilities . . .”
Before we discuss why tests often mistype people, let’s clarify what kind of tests I’m talking about.
Your Neurotype
Your neurotype has several key components, including your:
Cognitive function stack
Attachment style
Co-narc spectrum strategies
Brain structural type
Neurotransmitter variances
If you were to meet someone who matched you on all of the above characteristics – someone who shared your complete neurotype – you would be shocked at how much you have in common. The more archetypal traits you share with someone, the more likely you are to share moral ideals, body language, speech patterns, dietary needs, exercise needs, relationship preferences, lifestyle preferences, hobby types, and most of all: emotional patterns.
Your neurotype – your comprehensive pattern of archetypal traits – isn’t defined by your behaviors, just like your computer isn’t defined by which software you’ve installed. Your neurotype is your computer’s hardware as a whole, and any aspect of your neurotype (such as whether you have the brain variant ineptly named “dyslexia”), is like a crucial piece of hardware in your computer. Your behavioral patterns, however, are software that has been installed.
Tests almost never try to define more than one aspect of your personality or neurological function. Usually they’ll seek to identify one aspect of you, such as whether you have a type of neurotransmitter variance, such as a dopamine anomaly found in ADHD, or the low serotonin found in being an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person). These tests vary wildly – some being accurate for most who take them, and others offering a, “yes, you have it!” sort of response to almost anyone who takes them.
Many tests are based on the work of Carl Jung, Isabel Briggs Myers, and Isabel’s mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. While there is only one official test – which requires a certified practitioner to administer – there are many, many unofficial tests which offer “the same” sixteen personality results (such as INTP or ESFJ). These unofficial tests vary widely from one another and some of them are notoriously inaccurate.
There are six reasons why test accuracy isn’t great. First we’ll explore the reasons and define more concepts along the way, and then we’ll conclude with how you can uncover your archetypal traits despite these issues.
Language
“Do you like to go out with friends?” How do you define friends? Maybe you define friends very strictly, with high standards and thus you don’t feel like you have friends, and yet you’d very much like to go out with your hypothetical future friends – except, maybe you’d actually prefer to stay in with them. What does it mean to go out anyway?
“Do you prefer to be around others?” We can probably assume they mean other people – and not your dog – but does this count being one-on-one with a romantic partner, with whom you likely feel far more comfortable than you do around acquaintances?
“Does your mood change very quickly?” What exactly constitutes a shift in mood? Depending on how finely you define a “mood shift” virtually anyone can be defined as having slow or rapid mood shifts.
Language – especially about abstract concepts – is notoriously subjective. In Jung’s work he takes several pages to carefully explain precisely what he means by the word “feeling” and references the definitions of many other words in the process. Yet in a quick test you’ll encounter questions like, “Do you feel the pain of other people?” What exactly does it mean to feel the pain of other people? Whether you empathize through creating a mental model of what the person is going through, or by observing their body language and mirroring what that would feel like in yourself – you’re still empathizing. And the definition of the word “feel” is only one of the big problems with this question.
Broadly speaking, when we’re talking about someone’s neurological biases, we’re looking for how your mind perceives, represents, and responds to stimuli. We’re trying to assess your brain’s “hardware” – yet the questions have to guess about the hardware by asking about the software.
The question isn’t whether you can conceptualize emotions, but whether you represent them to yourself using kinesthetic sensations, visualizations, or through a series of interconnected memories – or all of the above.
The question isn’t whether you are a good artist, but whether you go about painting through careful observation, or through internal visualization.
The question isn’t whether you’re an honest person, but whether you believe in honesty due to a strong moral compass, or because you believe honesty helps promote social harmony.
The question isn’t whether you’re conflict avoidant, but whether that stems from shame and fear of rejection, or whether it stems from enmeshment trauma and the fear of feeling controlled.
Yet these aren’t the kinds of things most of us know about ourselves – as we’ll explore more when looking at the problems with self-evaluation.
When we try to ask people about their abstract inner-workings, we run into increasingly larger barriers in vocabulary. We can’t ask someone about a concept they haven’t been taught and aren’t used to thinking about. Thus, we can’t simply ask you directly what sorts of representational systems you use, or whether you struggle with procedural or semantic memory. If tests required reading a book on terminology first, we probably wouldn’t take them in the first place, and thus, the test has to attempt to formulate questions in terms as universal as possible. Yet, as we’ve already explored, even “common language” is open to much interpretation.
Human Traits
Let’s look at this question again: “Do you feel the pain of other people?” Even if you’re on the autism spectrum, the truthful answer is most likely, “Sometimes.” Whether you’re an ESTJ or INFP, the chances are, you experience empathy some of the time – and depending on the specifics, you might experience it quite strongly.
The difference between a T or F type isn’t whether or not you experience empathy – and it isn’t even how strongly you feel emotions. In fact, many T types express that their emotions are much larger than other people’s seem to be – because, on average, they have a harder time managing their emotions than their F counterparts.
Another problematic question you may encounter is: “Are you good at perceiving patterns?” Regardless of whether you’re an ESFP or an INTJ, your answer should be, “Yes.” Because humans are extremely good at perceiving patterns. The type of pattern at which you excel (relative to other humans) will vary based on your type, but we (probably) wouldn’t be able to write a test where you’d be able to self-evaluate the type of pattern at which you excel.
So, for the purposes of the test, should you say that you are good at perceiving patterns, or not? Should you say that you’re empathetic, or not? Why did they include these questions if having good pattern recognition and empathy are basic human traits? Obviously, they wanted you to compare yourself to others, and report accurately as to whether you were good at these things relative to other people – but there are additional problems with that, which we’ll explore later on.
There are many universal human needs: a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and feeling accepted for who we are.
There are common human experiences: empathy, anxiety, stress, and pattern recognition.
Everyone’s executive functioning (such as our ability to tune out distractions) and everyone’s memory is impaired by stress – especially chronic stress.
Nearly everyone taking these tests was impacted by chronic adverse childhood experiences such as being steam-rolled by an overbearing parent (enmeshment trauma), lack of emotional mirroring (which can lead to adulthood emotional dysregulation), and/or a parent using emotional withdrawal as punishment (abandonment trauma).
These grand, sweeping patterns exist on every continent and in every century, and thus, when a good description speaks to one of these experiences, we can probably relate to it. But relating is another relatively universal human skill: being able to draw a comparison between our own experience and someone else’s is yet another muscle we strengthen over time. Apophenia – the ability to draw meaningful connections between seemingly unrelated things – is something we most of us come to powerfully possess when relating things to ourselves. Humans are so generally good at seeing how something is relevant to themselves that you can hand people absolutely random personality descriptions – or horoscopes – and people will report that it applied to them.
Self Evaluation
“In respect of one’s own personality one’s judgment is as a rule extraordinarily clouded,” Carl Jung writes in the introduction to Psychological Types.
In countless studies we’ve seen the Dunning-Kruger effect: people who know almost nothing about something are the most confident in their knowledge. Furthermore, Don Clifton’s book Strength’s Finder 2.0 explains that most of us fail to recognize or develop our talents because they seem so natural, so obvious, that we don’t realize they’re talents. Thus, we fail to recognize both our strengths and our weaknesses.
We think of our talents as things like “music” or “writing” – but these are actually amalgamations of neurological skills. Music requires a plethora of perceptual skills including the discernment of timing and pitch, as well as a plethora of execution skills which may include complex finger coordination, breath control, and even emotional regulation. And each of these actually breaks down into more fundamental skills at the neurological level. Because of this, what makes one musician superb and what makes another superb will have some overlap, but they are likely to have very different underlying talents that make them each powerful performers. One may excel in immersion into the emotions conveyed by music, relying heavily on emotional intuition to bring the right sounds (Fi). Another may excel through keen awareness of other performers, learning to mimic specific techniques they’ve observed (Se).
Test creators know they can’t judge a person’s archetype by whether they excel at music or math or language. Nevertheless, they may throw in questions about these trying to gauge your proclivities – since, on average, there is some correlation between your chosen interests and your neurological skills. Yet all it takes for you to be typed incorrectly by a test is having a strong identification with a career or major which doesn’t exemplify your most fundamental talents.
Even if your career or chosen path in life is a perfect fit for your talents, you may still over-estimate areas where you’re a novice. Many people conflate a sense of closure with mastery. If you’ve learned enough to answer your initial questions about a subject, it may seem like you now have a good grasp of the whole. Or, if you’ve explored a puzzle from every angle that was obvious to you – it feels solved. You may confidently state that you’ve uncovered all there is about this puzzle, not realizing that someone else who has genuine mastery of the puzzle can interact with it in a dozen further ways, and that the master knows there are yet more possible interactions. This is one of the reasons typology ever entered the workplace: to help people understand areas where their coworkers have neurological hardware better equipped to the task at hand.
Self-evaluation is the most fascinating, useful, and problematic part of testing. The whole point of uncovering your archetypal traits is so that you can evaluate yourself better – and yet the tests require that you already have a certain level of self awareness upfront. It’s almost a paradox, except that test creators are well aware of this issue; the better ones do a surprisingly good job of asking meaningful questions to which you likely do know the correct answer.
Comparison
When you’re good or bad at something relative to other people, who exactly are you comparing yourself to? And how good are you at making that comparison? Tests rely on you reporting your strengths, weaknesses, and quirks relative to other people. You have to be able to assess whether or not you’re someone who is “prepared” or “organized” – but you might easily think that you aren’t very good at these things if you’re surrounded by people who seem to be far more organized and prepared than you. If you happen to have a family and friend group of people who use daily planners and are highly punctual – and have the wealth to afford cleaning service – then you might think that you aren’t a very prepared and organized person, even if you’re far above average.
When we are young, we don’t have enough experience with coming to deeply know a wide variety of people. Even if you’re very introspective and “know yourself” very well, you won’t have a very accurate notion of how your traits measure up to “the average” – especially if you haven’t traveled much. You know, for example, that you’re intimidated by promoting yourself and the notion of networking – and you’re shy about going on stage – but you may not realize that you’re far less afraid of these things than most. You may not realize that other people didn’t need to introspect about this for several weeks because they immediately wrote off the idea of a career including those elements.
Yet as you get older, your own unique quirks and typology will become increasingly masked – even to yourself – and you might report that you are someone who strikes up conversations, even though you were always socially anxious when you were younger. Or you may report that you’re deeply empathetic and comfortable with your emotions – even though you came off as robotic in your teens and twenties.
See my related article: Why is it harder to distinguish types in the elderly?
If you’re more socially extroverted and have experience with a broad range of people, you may have a broad grasp of what is “typical” and what is “unusual” in people, but you likely don’t have a deep understanding of yourself – or a deep understanding of the inner-workings of all these people you know. Thus, even if, during a test, you do a good job of mentally contrasting yourself to all the people you’ve ever known, you’re missing too much of the picture. When they ask that pesky question about patterns, are they talking about how quickly you can put together a jigsaw puzzle – which you know you do better than your friends?
And regardless of your age or proclivities, it’s hard to compensate for regionality. If you live in New York City, the people you know live a fast-paced life relative to people living on a ranch in Kansas. Whether you live in a place where the standard of punctuality is “five o’clock sharp,” or “sometime around dusk,” will affect how you feel about yourself and how you answer questions.
Regionality also ties back into the subjectivity of words. While it won’t matter much whether you use the word “ramada” or “arbor” – it will matter if your family, town, region, or culture has different “team-based activities,” or notions of “privacy,” “social status,” or “sensitivity.” One person’s “valuing privacy” might be more concerned with digital surveillance, and another might be thinking about having interruption-free work. “Team activity” might be playing board games over the holidays or it might be doing an ice-breaker at work, and yet another person might be recalling a traumatic childhood experience of dodgeball.
Of course, the test-makers do try to take these things into account. This is why they make a lot of “redundant” questions which are all trying to get at the same thing from different angles. But even this can fail, which we’ll explore next.
Self-Concept
Your selfhood is a conglomerate of every “yes” and “no” you’ve ever made in your life. You may have said yes to taking out a loan for college and repaying student debt, and decided you hated that, and then said no to taking out loans from then on. Being a person who doesn’t use credit then becomes a part of your identity – your self concept. But our self concept isn’t just built up of our innate proclivities – it is strongly influenced by our environment and the people around us.
If we carry within us a preference for consulting our emotions first, and letting our “gut” have the final say, that doesn’t mean our self-concept is aware of this. If we were raised in an environment that put logical, detached evaluation on a pedestal, then our life strategies likely include thinking things through. We may make lists of pros and cons. We may have dispassionate conversations with friends whose intelligence we admire. We may get a degree in science or math. Our ego may be entirely wrapped up in our ability to think, discern, plan, and pick apart concepts. Yet none of that definitively means that our neurological strengths aren’t more solidly placed in the department of emotion.
If we were raised in a home which emphasized compassion and kindness, we may have been prodigious in developing empathy and generosity. We may be able to argue effectively as to why social bonds are the most important experience in our lives. We may be superb at offering someone considerate guidance and validation. We may come across as a warm, caring person. We may even choose to work in a service which directly alleviates pain, such as massage. Yet none of that definitively rules out that our neurological bias isn’t thought-based responses.
What we personally identify with has the strongest influence over our test result. If our self-concept is wrong, then there is a good chance our test result will also be wrong. This is one of the biggest obstacles in typology of all kinds: people want validation for the labels and self-concepts they have already developed. Psychological experiments in the 1960s uncovered what was coined as “the confirmation bias” – our human proclivity for taking in new information in such a way that confirms what we already believed.
This ties back into the subjectivity of words: people latch onto a word for themselves, such as “being introverted” and then have trouble letting it go. They already have a story about what this means to them – and their story is undoubtedly full of truths they’ve uncovered about themselves. The story isn’t the problem – it’s that they’ve attached particular words to the story which have different meanings in different contexts.
Are you a big-picture person, or a detail-oriented person? You might easily identify with either, regardless of your neurological strengths and preferences. You might be “big picture” when it comes to outlining your goals for the next five years, and “detail oriented” when it comes to making sure to carefully measure all ingredients for baking a cake. How you answer that question may come down to whether you were thinking about the office or the kitchen, which in turn, may come down to whether you identify more with cooking or goal-setting. And your identification with either of these may come down to how you contrast yourself to someone you live with. Maybe you don’t think much of your cooking because your roommate is a chef who far outclasses your knowledge, and thus, you dismiss your own penchant for following recipes precisely.
Methodology
What is this test trying to evaluate, anyway? Some of the most popular online tests on the internet have conflated different systems together which make your results “non-transferable” to other systems. If you’ve just taken a test that mixed together the surface aspects of two systems, you’ll lose the deeper meanings of both systems. The results can feel highly applicable to you – almost eerie in their accurate inferences – and yet they still might not get to the heart (or neurons) of your archetypal qualities.
Almost all tests are seeking to evaluate your behavior. This is because only the tiniest minority of people see into the inner-workings of their own mind well enough to directly analyze their underpinning hierarchy of cognitive functions. Hence, we have to look at whether you’re someone who initiates interactions, prefers music to silence, and likes open floor plans. If all of these are true, maybe that means your dominant cognitive focus is external to yourself. It’s a good guess and may be true in well over half of cases, but for all the reasons outlined in this essay, it’s far from perfect.
Our behaviors are shaped most by the major and micro-traumas of our childhood. We developed our outward persona to cope as efficiently as possible with the stressors we faced. If it didn’t feel safe to be ourselves, we became more reclusive and now we likely identify as an introvert even if we’re a more cognitively external-focused individual. If experience taught us that academic skills were what counted in life, we may have learned to strengthen our abstract comprehension even though what we actually craved was a hands-on approach to life. If being spontaneous was equated with being irresponsible and worthless, we might have developed strict schedules and systems which we became very proud of – even if they feel stifling to us at a deeper (and overlooked) level.
Almost everyone has some behavioral quirks which don’t align with their neurological preferences and strengths – which means the data you give the tests won’t align with the expectations of the test-creator. Tests try to compensate for this with tremendous amounts of redundancy – which is why longer tests tend to be more accurate.
The worst part, however, is that the people whose behavior misaligned most with their neurotype are the people who would most benefit from being accurately typed. When your behaviors aren’t aligned with what feels natural to you, you’re living life at a harder level than you need to be. This can mean regretting many of your choices, being confused about what you actually want from life, feeling dissatisfied in your relationships, not feeling like you can forge meaningful friendships, and generally feeling overburdened with stress.
How To Find Your Neurotype
Uncovering your full neurotype on your own is a large task – although it is possible. For each aspect of your neurotype, such as your cognitive function stack (which will give you a four-letter code such as ISFP or ENTJ), you’ll want to take as many tests as you can find – but with certain things in mind:
Think back to who you were when you were a child as well as who you are or were in your late teens and early twenties.
Ask two people in your life to weigh-in on some of the questions with you. Choose the person in your life who is the most emotionally wise, and the person in your life who is the most intellectually wise. Arrange one-on-one hang-out time with each of them (separately), and then go through one or two tests with them. Tell them your reasoning for each answer and ask them if they have anything to add – any reason why your answer might be “off.”
If you receive different results anywhere in your process, learn everything you can about each result you received. Look for videos which explain why you might not be dyslexic or autistic or an INTJ afterall.
Check your work with good books on each subject. If you love reading and research, try to read at least two books from two different authors on each archetypal trait. If reading is a struggle or a chore for you, seek out audiobooks or video channels dedicated to the subject at hand – but always seek at least two different sources of information and check them against one another.
The above is a large task, but highly rewarding. After a year of research you’ll know yourself better than the vast majority of people know themselves. After three years, you’ll rival experts for your knowledge of how humans work – and how you fit into the grand scope of things.
Knowing yourself is a key tenet of personal growth. You can’t navigate to where you want to be without knowing where you are on a map. And knowing who you are is more than a coordinate location – it’s also knowing what sort of vehicles are available for transport, how much stamina you have for the journey, and how to ration your nutrition for optimal performance.
When you know yourself deeply, you can repair relationships by taking accountability for your pitfalls accurately. You can enter relationships knowing where the compatibilities truly reside, and where the difficulties will be. You can choose a morning routine that really energizes you, as well as a diet that fuels you best. Knowing yourself clarifies your optimal paths through life; it allows you to know what college major or career will really be sustainably gratifying for you.
The more common method for coming to know your archetypal traits is having an array of experts help you through diagnostics and diagnosis. One expert can help evaluate whether you’re an INFP or an INFJ, and a different expert can tell you whether or not you’re on the autism spectrum. Unfortunately, these experts are rarely trained in cross-archetypal examination, so you may become “over diagnosed” – especially if you were relying on those pesky online tests. If you have sensory sensitivities, it could come from multiple different neurotransmitter variances or from your brain structural type – but it is unlikely that you have all of them, which is exactly what the internet is liable to tell you. While that is less likely in a clinical setting, it does happen.
Consulting with a professional – or even a well-researched acquaintance – is generally more reliable than an online test. A conversation with a professional mitigates the six pitfalls of tests. It allows for clarifying questions – clearing up misunderstandings created by personal word associations or over-generalizations. The professional should be well aware of overlapping traits in archetypal facets and how to probe for key distinguishing factors. Furthermore, a conversation with a neutral party should be able to compensate for much of your own self-concept, helping you see yourself more objectively.
If you’d like a neurotype analysis by Raederle, you can book a session now.