Personality tests
 

The term "personality test" covers tools that differ enormously from one another — some are a century old, while others are built on more recent clinical research. Before choosing to take one, it is useful to understand where these tools come from, what they can genuinely tell you, and where their limitations begin.

A brief history of personality tests

Modern personality tests have their origins in early 20th-century psychology.

- In 1921, Carl Jung published his theory of psychological types, distinguishing, among other things, between introversion and extraversion — a framework that would later inspire the American MBTI® model.

- In 1928, William Marston developed the behavioral theory that would become the basis of the American DISC model. In the following decades, several clinical tools emerged, including the MMPI (1943), originally designed for psychiatric use.

- In the 1970s, Taibi Kahler formalized the American Process Communication Model® based on his research in Transactional Analysis.

- At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, the American academic Big Five model (or OCEAN) gradually became a major reference in personality psychology, supported by a broad scientific consensus around five measurable personality traits.

- More recently, advances in international clinical classifications — the ICD-11 of the World Health Organization and the DSM-5-TR of the American Psychiatric Association, both updated in 2022 — have opened the way to a new generation of tools: those based on a scientific understanding of psychological functioning, rather than solely on a typology that has remained fixed since its creation.

 

The two main families of tests

There are two fundamentally different ways to build a personality test.
 

Tests that use personality characteristics, traits or types
They use characteristics assumed to remain stable over time and throughout an individual's life.

- DISC®: American, a behavioral approach based on Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance.
- MBTI®: American, a fixed typology based on four dichotomies (including extraversion/introversion), dividing individuals into 16 profiles.
- Process Communication Model® (PCM): American, formalized in the 1970s and structured around a fixed typology of 6 hierarchical profiles.
- Big Five: American, an academic model built around 5 traits measured on a continuum — openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The central question for this family of tests is: are the traits being measured stable, or are they dynamic and updated?

Tests based on a clinical and scientific approach
They use a scientific and clinical approach to describe a person, drawing on regularly updated sources: the ICD-11 (World Health Organization), the DSM-5-TR (American Psychiatric Association), and the PDM-3 (the result of international work involving primarily clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and academic researchers specializing in personality and psychological functioning, led by Vittorio Lingiardi of Sapienza University of Rome and Nancy McWilliams of Rutgers University).

The ICD-11, DSM-5-TR and PDM-3 are contemporary reference frameworks that make it possible to describe personality through its traits, patterns of functioning, relationships with others and adaptation mechanisms.

ICD-11: describes personality according to dimensions and degrees of severity.
DSM-5-TR: identifies characteristic traits and patterns of functioning.
PDM-3: focuses more closely on the individual's internal, emotional and relational dynamics.
 

Their advantages: clinically documented data, consideration of neurobiological mechanisms and trauma, and ongoing updates as research progresses.
 

PERS6NɅ belongs exclusively to this second family — with one essential difference: it deliberately remains upstream from clinical diagnosis, describing functioning rather than pathology. The key benefit of this type of approach is the ability to provide a diagnostic that evolves with the person, just as their personality does.

How to choose a personality test?

A few simple questions can quickly help distinguish serious tools from more anecdotal ones:

What is it based on? A documented, dated scientific source, or an unverified theory?
Is it updated? A model that has remained unchanged since its creation — sometimes for more than 50 years — is more likely to be outdated than one aligned with current classifications.
Does it describe a dynamic, or put you in a box? A good tool should reflect how you evolve according to context, rather than simply assigning you to a fixed category.
Is the result actionable? A report that simply gives you a type without providing practical guidance has limited long-term value.
Is it debriefed by a professional? A result read alone, without context or interpretation, loses much of its practical value.

​
 

The limitations of personality tests

A model remains an imperfect representation of reality. No test, however rigorous, can claim to capture the entirety of a person. A few limitations are worth understanding before taking any personality test:

- No test can replace human support. Even a detailed report remains a basis for discussion — not a conclusion in itself.
- Personality evolves. A result obtained at a particular point in time also reflects your current context (workload, stage of life, level of stress).
- The non-clinical boundary must be respected. A personality test, including PERS6NɅ, does not diagnose any disorder and can never replace an assessment by a healthcare professional.
- Self-interpretation has its limits. Many misunderstandings arise when results are read alone, without a guided debrief to provide perspective and nuance.
 

You now have the criteria needed to evaluate a personality diagnostic: its scientific foundations, how regularly it is updated, its ability to reflect personality dynamics, and whether the results are accompanied by a professional debrief.