As a senior struggling to determine how I want to spend the rest of my life, I turned to an interesting source to provide me with a path. 16Personalities is a website that features a quiz to determine your personality type. According to 16Personalities, they use Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of psychological types and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to provide a personality type to match your inputted traits. After completing the test, the website provides detailed information about your personality traits, strengths and weaknesses, relationships, etc. Using my personality type, INFP, I searched “careers for INFPs” to help guide my career exploration, and while I found some jobs matching my interests, others seemed unrealistic. This search led me to wonder about the accuracy of personality quizzes and to discover if they are useful in the real world.

After taking the quiz, junior Max Zhang received ENTP/ “The Debater” as his assigned personality type. However, this personality type might only represent some characteristics of Zhang. 

“I think it’s accurate to an extent because you can tell what type of person [someone] is from [a] personality test, but it’s also missing a lot of elements,” Zhang said. “I feel like experiences shape personality. So if you can talk to the person, you can understand their experience and understand their personality more.”

Since 16Personalities provides a list of traits that each type of personality has, I asked Zhang if each listed trait matched his own personality. Although Zhang’s answers did not align perfectly with 16Personalities’ traits for ENTPs, he thought “intuitive,” “thinking” and “prospecting” represented his personality accurately. Meanwhile, traits like “quick-thinker” and “argumentative” were less accurate.

After having Zhang see how accurate his supposed personality traits were, Zhang was able to see himself reflected in the characteristics.

“I can definitely see some of my personality traits [after] hearing those,” Zhang said. “But it’s also missing a lot of stuff because you can’t describe a person with ten words.”

 Junior Lana Zollars, who also took the same personality test, received the ISTJ/”Logistician” personality type. Zollars was able to use the test’s results to attribute qualities to her personality and recognize how it can contribute to her career.

“I know that the I [in ISTJ] stands for introvert, so if you’re trying to find a job, you probably want to be more independent than work with others,” Zollars said. “A lot of [my] recommended careers are logical. I want to go into accounting because I know that I’m a logical person.”

Zollars shared many similarities between her own characteristics and the ones that many ISTJs show according to 16Personalities. Zollars said she was “introverted,” and “observant” but only “stubborn” occasionally and “a little bit” “strong-willed.”

Although thought that you can use personality types to “ decide things about yourself,” she said that justifying an action by saying that it’s part of your personality type, is “just an excuse.”

When making life or career decisions, it could be useful to consider other elements along with personality traits.

“[Using your personality trait] is definitely a good start, but there should be other factors as well, other than personality,” Zhang said.