How accurate are PERSONALITY TESTS really?
Perhaps you were bored at work and killed some time doing a BuzzFeed quiz. (Okay, seven BuzzFeed quizzes: once you know which Game of Thrones character you are, it’s hard not to wonder in which city you should live based on your taste in cheese.) Maybe you signed up for career counselling.
Or perhaps it was part of a mandatory office workshop – some jobs require you to take a psychometric test as part of the interviewing process. Odds are at some point in your life you have taken a personality test.
People have been trying to sort one another into easy-to-understand boxes for thousands of years. According to the Greek physician Hippocrates, there were four basic temperaments: you were innately choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic or sanguine. (I’ll just go ahead and crack open a nice Chard in case I qualify as melancholic – white wine was prescribed to all the melancholy folks ‘to counteract the black bile’. Prevention is better than cure, as they say.)
Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach famously
