The 5 Most Effective Techniques To Hack Your Habits - Spencer Greenburg

How useful are personality tests, in your opinion?

Ah, that is a great question. So we've just run a really big study on this that I'm super excited about. In fact, you're, this is the first time ever talking about it, so v- hot off the presses. Um, so the most popular personality test in the world seems to be the Myers-Briggs test, but the Myers-Briggs test, also called the MBTI, is a commercial test, right? So it's hard to study because it's, you know, it's owned by a company and so on. So what we did is we took the public information about the constructs that have been, you know, known, about what it's trying to measure, and we've designed our own test designed to measure those same constructs. I'll just call it a Jungian test 'cause it's, you know, it's not exactly precisely the same as the commercial one, but it's designed to measure similar ideas. And then, we actually put it to the test. And so way, the way that we did this is we also developed, uh, what's called a Big Five test. Are you familiar with the Big Five Personality Model?

Yes.

So the, so these are, so th- it's interesting because the Big Five Personality Model is the one used by academics. It's the one they call the gold standard, whereas the Myers-Briggs is the one that's, like, super popular for the laypeople, and often, you know, academics kinda poo-poo it and say, "Oh, that's not so great," right? And so it's, so we wanted to put them against each other, and so the way we did this is we took a whole bunch of facts about a person's life. It was about 42 different facts, so everything from how satisfied they are with their life to how many friends they have, you know, to things like, you know, have they been arrested and so on. And then, we had them take both of these tests, our Big Five test, gold standard academic one, and, uh, and this, uh, Jungian test designed after the Myers-Briggs and said, "Well, how well can each test predict what's true about people's lives as a measure of how good they are?" So do you wanna guess what happened when we did this? And I'll just, before I have you guess, I'll just throw in one third thing. We also used astrological sun signs as a control group. So we took people, you know, zodiac sign, are you a Pisces or an Aries or whatever, and that was our, our kind of control. So we tried to predict-

(laughs)

... things about your life using that, uh, using this Jungian idea, and then using the Big Five.

Why did you need the astrology thing?

Oh, it's a good way to calibrate, uh, the statistics of our system to see if we... (laughs) Uh, if, uh, if, uh, eh, whether we can, uh, predict with astrology, right?