16Personalities Alternatives: What to Take Instead, and When 16P Is Fine

What 16Personalities measures

16Personalities runs its own model, which it calls NERIS. It reports five scales, each as a percentage leaning one way or the other:

• Mind: Introverted or Extraverted
• Energy: Intuitive or Observant
• Nature: Thinking or Feeling
• Tactics: Judging or Prospecting
• Identity: Assertive or Turbulent

The first four produce a familiar four-letter code with a name, such as INTJ “Architect.” The fifth adds -A or -T. The company is not affiliated with The Myers-Briggs Company, and its test is not the MBTI.

What it does well

It is free, takes around ten minutes, and the writing is warm and readable. Millions of people know their four letters, which makes it easy to start a conversation with a friend or a team. It also shows a percentage on each scale, which is more information than a bare type.

The Identity scale works in its favor. Assertive versus Turbulent behaves much like the Big Five’s Neuroticism dimension, the one trait the original MBTI has no equivalent for. In that sense 16P sits closer to the Big Five than to the MBTI it borrows its letters from.

Why people look for an alternative

The type changed on retake

Each letter is a cut at the midpoint of a continuous score. Score 52% Introverted one week and 48% the next, and you become a different “type” even though almost nothing changed. David Pittenger’s reviews of MBTI research (1993, 2005) reported that a large share of people, up to half in some studies, landed on a different type when retested after only a few weeks.

The description fits everyone

In a study published in 1949, Bertram Forer gave his students what he said were individual personality descriptions. Everyone got the same text, and they rated its accuracy at about 4.3 out of 5. Type descriptions written for millions of readers are prone to the same effect, which is now called the Forer or Barnum effect.

You need it for a decision

Choosing a career, working out a relationship pattern, or tracking change over time needs scores that hold still on retest and that research has linked to outcomes. Type labels are weak on both counts.

Type-based tests versus trait-based tests

Robert McCrae and Paul Costa (1989) compared MBTI scores with the Big Five and found each MBTI scale lined up with one Big Five trait: Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. Nothing lined up with Neuroticism. So the letters measure real traits, and the problem is the cut-off. Studies looking for natural breaks in the scores, such as Bess and Harvey (2002) and Arnau and colleagues (2003), found the scores pile up in the middle rather than splitting into two camps.

Big Five scores avoid that problem by reporting where you fall on each scale. They also carry the stronger outcome record: Christopher Soto (2019) re-tested 78 published links between Big Five traits and life outcomes and replicated 87% of them. The Big Five vs MBTI guide covers the studies in more depth.

Five credible alternatives

1. A Big Five test built on the IPIP

Lewis Goldberg’s International Personality Item Pool is public domain, so several free sites run IPIP versions such as John A. Johnson’s 120-item IPIP-NEO or the 50-item IPIP Big-Five markers. They give research-grade trait scores, and the IPIP-NEO adds 30 facets. The feedback is usually dry and generic, with little help interpreting combinations.

2. Depth Profile

Our own option, so weigh this accordingly. The free Big Five test uses 48 IPIP-style items and gives five 0 to 100 scores. You can add an attachment style test and a RIASEC career test. The optional $19 report is written by AI from your specific scores and answers, with blind spots, stress patterns and growth experiments. Weak spots: it takes longer than 16P, reports five traits rather than 30 facets, and the full report costs money.

3. The HEXACO-PI-R

Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton’s six-factor model adds Honesty-Humility to the Big Five set, which captures sincerity, fairness and modesty better than Agreeableness does. A free self-report version is available on the authors’ HEXACO site. It is less familiar and comes with little interpretation.

4. The official MBTI

If you like type language, the official instrument from The Myers-Briggs Company, taken online or through a certified practitioner, is the real version, and a trained debrief helps you treat letters as preferences rather than boxes. Its Step II version adds facet scores. It costs money and keeps the cut-off problem described above.

5. A test built for your specific question

If you want career direction, an interest inventory beats any personality test: the free O*NET Interest Profiler from the US Department of Labor and our RIASEC test both give a Holland code. For relationships, an attachment measure based on the ECR-R tells you more than a type does.

Which one to pick

Translating your 16Personalities result into Big Five terms

When 16Personalities is fine

For a conversation starter, a team icebreaker, or curiosity, 16P is fine, and nothing here says you should stop using it. Switch when the stakes go up: choosing between job offers, working on a recurring relationship problem, or coaching someone. For those, use trait scores, and read the couples guide or the guide for coaches for how to apply them. If you feel stuck on something specific, the free Why You’re Stuck exercise is a better starting point than any type test.