Popular test
16Personalities
NERIS Type Explorer
The free four-letter test almost everyone has actually taken. It is not the MBTI, it is built on Big Five machinery, and it is better than its reputation in one specific way.
Why that grade: The underlying five-dimension model is sound, but NERIS has published no peer-reviewed psychometric validation of this specific instrument, and it re-imposes the same dichotomy problem on top of continuous scores.
- Cost
- Free, with paid add-on reports
- Time
- 10-15 min
- Items
- 60
- Published
- 2011
Roughly 60 agree-disagree items on a seven-point scale, which is why it takes about a quarter of the time an MBTI Step I does.
Publisher
NERIS Analytics LimitedOrigin
NERIS Analytics Limited
What you get free: The full type result and a long, well-written profile, at no cost and without an account. Extended premium reports and workbooks are sold separately.
The verdict
The best free entry point to personality testing, provided you read the percentage bars rather than the four letters and remember it is not the MBTI. As a paid product it is harder to justify, since the free result is the good part.
Strengths
- Free, fast, no account, and no dark patterns before you see your result.
- The written profiles are the best consumer-facing personality writing available at any price.
- The Assertive/Turbulent axis quietly adds back the dimension the MBTI is missing, making it a more complete instrument than the thing it resembles.
- Percentage bars are shown alongside the letters, so an attentive reader can see how close to the middle they actually landed.
Limitations
- It is routinely mistaken for the official MBTI, including by employers. It is not affiliated with the Myers-Briggs Company in any way, and the publisher states it has deliberately not incorporated Jungian cognitive functions.
- No peer-reviewed validation has been published for the instrument itself, so its psychometric properties are asserted rather than demonstrated.
- Presenting Big Five scores as sixteen types reintroduces the boundary problem that the underlying model does not have.
- Type profiles are written to be flattering and broadly applicable, which makes them feel more accurate than they are.
What it actually is
The single most useful thing to know about 16Personalities is that it is not the MBTI. It is an independent instrument by a British company, using Jungian-style four-letter labels because those labels are familiar, over a model the publisher describes as five continuous trait dimensions in the Big Five tradition.
That is an unusual arrangement, and it cuts both ways. The underlying machinery is more defensible than the MBTI’s. The presentation layer inherits all of the MBTI’s problems and adds the confusion of looking like a product it has no relationship to.
Read the bars, not the letters
The result page gives you percentages for each axis. Those are the informative part. A profile reading 51 percent Introverted is telling you something quite different from one reading 88 percent, and the four-letter code flattens that distinction to nothing.
If your bars cluster near the middle, that is not a defect in the test or in you. It is the most common outcome, and it means the type label is a weak summary of a person who genuinely sits between the descriptions.
What it reports back
Results are expressed as discrete types.
- Mind
- Introverted or Extraverted.
- Energy
- Observant or Intuitive.
- Nature
- Thinking or Feeling.
- Tactics
- Judging or Prospecting.
- Identity
- Assertive or Turbulent. This fifth axis has no MBTI equivalent and is essentially Neuroticism, the trait the MBTI leaves out.
The evidence, with sources
Nothing in this section is stated without an attribution. Where a figure varies by version or sample, the range is given rather than the most flattering number.
Reliability
NERIS publishes no independent peer-reviewed reliability study for the Type Explorer. Any claim about its retest stability is therefore an inference from similar instruments rather than a measured property of this one.
publisherNERIS Analytics, 16Personalities (publisher materials)Because the letters are produced by cutting continuous scores at a midpoint, the same retest instability documented for the MBTI applies by construction to anyone scoring near a boundary.
peer reviewedPittenger (2005), Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 57(3), 210-221
Validity
The publisher states its model is built on five continuous trait dimensions in the Big Five tradition and that the Jungian type labels are presentational, adopted for familiarity rather than theory.
publisherNERIS Analytics, "Our Theory"Adding an Identity axis that corresponds to Neuroticism repairs the MBTI’s most conspicuous omission, since Neuroticism is the trait most consistently linked to wellbeing outcomes.
meta analysisRoberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi & Goldberg (2007), Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(4), 313-345Exactly one psychometric study of the NERIS Type Explorer scale is locatable, a confirmatory factor analysis on a convenience sample of managers. It appeared in a journal widely listed as predatory, which is not a basis for treating the instrument as validated.
peer reviewedMakwana & Dave (2020), International Journal of Management, 11(9), 257-265
Who it actually fits
- A first, free, painless introduction to personality assessment
- Readers who want the four-letter type everyone talks about without paying sixty dollars
- Anyone curious how close to the middle of each scale they actually sit
Not a diagnosis