At Long Last, a Quicker Way to Measure Your Personality

A new personality test provides a clear and short way to understand yourself.

Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

Key points

• Many personality tests are long and cumbersome and may not even necessarily be valid.
• A new approach makes it easy to ask yourself about your most fundamental qualities.
• Quick measures of personality that meet scientific standards can provide important self-understanding.

Finding out why you are the way you are can sometimes be a challenging proposition. You can’t necessarily observe your behavior in an objective manner unless you’re remarkably unbiased (and most people aren’t). You may be drawn to websites, much like this one, that can provide you with insights into the inner workings of your mind. Even so, you wonder if all the self-tests and analyses that are both here and in other online sources can give you an honest measure of your strengths and weaknesses.

One of the problems facing everyone who studies personality, whether their own or that of others, centers around the types of measurement instruments available in the field. Quick self-tests may be fun, but not necessarily all that reliable. Even tests that are supposedly valid, such as the well-known Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory (MBPI) fail to stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Some of the tests that actually do meet necessary standards in the field are available only to professionals (and for a fee), such as those that assess personality according to the well-established Five-Factor Model (FFM). You might be able to find a version of these tests online, but they’re lengthy.

Out With the Jingle-Jangle, in With the Clear

One personality test that is widely used but also unavailable for consumer use is the Hogan Personality Test and its counterpart the Hogan Developmental Survey, instruments used in job settings. They have been administered more than 11 million times, but you may not have heard about them (even though you may have taken one or both) because they are intended as predictors of job performance, not as general personality measures. As with the FFM tests, you can’t take and score it on your own.

According to University of Alabama’s Dustin Wood and colleagues (2024), the Hogan instruments have unique contributions to make to the understanding of personality because, unlike other trait-based measures, they come from the socioanalytic theory tradition. In this view of personality, the traits that matter are the ones that allow you to “get along” and “get ahead” when you’re in social settings. When you think about it, knowledge about this aspect of your personality could indeed be very helpful, not just for job success but also for relationship success more generally.

The big problem with the Hogan scales is their length. They each consist of a staggering 374 self-ratings, organized around 74 basic dimensions. The reason for this massive number of questions is a statistical one, based on the assumption that longer is better when it comes to ensuring a scale’s quality. As the UA authors point out, though, why not just boil it all down to 74 single-item scales, or one for each dimension? This simpler approach would allow each item to “hit the nail on the head.” If you want to know if someone is empathetic, just ask them directly in one question. Hogan himself, part of the author team, clearly is on board with this more direct approach.

Another problem with multi-item scales, besides their length, is that they obscure the meaning of the items respondents are asked to answer, or what’s called “jingle.” They also create a “jangle” problem in that items supposedly measuring the same thing but with different wording create statistical confusion. You may say you like to talk to people in one item on an extraversion scale, but demur if asked whether you would go up to a stranger at a party and start to chat. Why not just ask the single-item question “Do you like people?”

74 Simple Questions

After creating their initial set of 74 items, Wood et al. administered them to an undergraduate sample across two test occasions, adding the wrinkle of having peers rate the participants on the same items as well. The second sample of more than 2,000 online participants, narrowed down to 407 who would go on to participate across a period of one year, completed the longer Hogan scales as well as the 74 single-item version. This sample also completed other validity measures and responded to additional questions about the items themselves (such as how easily observable they are). All of the data then became subjected to a variety of psychometric tests, focused primarily on determining whether it is legitimate to swap the 74 for the original 374 items.

The findings across both samples provided support for the utility of the short Hogan scale, known as the Hogan Personality Content Single-Items (HPCS) inventory. In addition to showing that the scale worked specifically in this instance, the authors also maintain that single items can, in fact, do as good of a job—and maybe better—than those lengthy, burdensome inventories.

You may by now be wondering what these items look like. The authors have made all their materials openly available, but to illustrate, here are some samples. The overall prompt for each is “I am someone who…” (anchored from strongly disagree to strongly agree). Here are samples along with the way they appear to respondents, which includes an explanatory label in parentheses:

is excitable (emotionally volatile)
is anxious (prone to anxiety or worry)
is irritable (easily irritated by interruptions, requests, or suggestions)
is hostile (is critical, harsh toward others)
is confident in public (comfortable being center of attention, prominent in social settings)
is introverted (values one’s private time; prefers to work alone)
likes people (enjoys social interaction)
is socially anxious (reserved/anxious in social situations)
is well-accomplished (knows how to reach desired goals)
is mastery-oriented (is hard-working and diligent)
has high standards (holds extremely high standards for performance of oneself and others)
is perfectionistic (exacting and obsessive about work quality)
is empathetic (concerned for others)
is guilt-prone (prone to feeling guilt/regret)
is sensitive (sees other people's point of view, tactful and considerate)
is caring (notices others' moods, appreciates others' needs)
feels uniquely gifted (believes they possess unique talents/gifts that set them apart from others)
has scientific ability (has interests and abilities in scientific subjects)
is risk-taking (tests limits; deliberately bends or breaks inconvenient rules)
feels uniquely creative (believes one is uniquely creative/imaginative)

It probably didn’t take you long to rate yourself on each of these items given how direct they are. These 20 items fall by groupings of four into the five major factors that the UA team identified in the second sample: volatile, sociable (reverse scored for introverted), diligent, sensitive, and creative. You might also have found the labels to be helpful, reducing some of the “jingle” that the terms may otherwise have fallen prey to. From the five dimension names, you can also see how the items connect to the FFM trait groupings of neuroticism, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness.

A Simpler Way to Think About Your Personality

From a technical point of view, the authors recommend that their approach be adapted in the context of other personality theories. Although there are brief forms of FFM scales and others, these lack the transparency of the items in the HPCS, particularly given that no other measures include explanatory labels.

This brief summary of the article’s massive amount of supporting detail also hints at the need for personality instruments to undergo comprehensive, if not grueling, validity tests. Be sure you take a look under the hood before you draw conclusions about your own personality from an untested test.

You can also see the value of just asking yourself some simple questions to figure out what’s going on under your own hood. In your search for self-understanding, perhaps you can trust your own judgment. It may be tough to sort through the emotions that accompany volatility, but knowing that you do tend to get excitable or anxious can give you some ideas for what to work on as you try to improve your well-being.

To sum up, seeking answers to questions about your personality may be much more straightforward than you realize. Putting questions in plain language can get you started on the path of greater self-knowledge that can lead to greater fulfillment.