The PT/Berkeley Personality Test

Is your self-image in sync with other people's take on you? This exclusive test will tell you.

By K. Harary, E. Harary, published on May 01, 1992 - last reviewed on October 01, 2009

Your personality is the essence of who you are and how you appear to other people. It lends continuity to your identity over time, tying together your early childhood experiences, your unique approach to the people and events around you, and your aspirations and apprehensions about how you may develop in the future. It affects, and is affected by, how other people perceive and respond to you. In short, the more you understand about your personality, the better you can understand your actions, feelings, and relationships with other people.

One of the most direct ways to find out about your personality is for a psychologist to ask you a series of carefully selected questions that have been shown in research to be related to important life outcomes, such as job satisfaction or susceptibility to depression. Self-report questionnaires are one of the most commonly used techniques in the scientific study of personality. For example, you may have heard of, or even taken, tests such as the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), the NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI), or the recently revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2).

Each of these tests provides you with scores on several dimensions, such as extroversion and neuroticism, that together form an overall portrait, or profile, of your personality. In the hands of a qualified professional, these tests can provide very useful information about an individual's personality and psychological functioning. These tests tend to be quite long, however, and are complicated to score and interpret. Therefore, PSYCHOLOGY TODAY will present the PT/Berkeley Personality Profile -- a three-part series of tests based on cutting-edge research in the field of personality assessment. Each is designed to be scientifically valid while allowing you to take, score, and interpret the tests yourself by simply following the instructions provided.

Developed by psychologists Keith Harary, Ph.D., of the Institute for Advanced Psychology, in San Francisco, and Eileen Donahue, Ph.D., of the department of psychology and the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research at the University of California at Berkeley, the PT/Berkeley Personality Profile will help you actively explore the ways in which you perceive your behavior, as well as the ways you are perceived by those around you. By participating in this ongoing series of tests, and also by taking part in our Personality Survey (page 76) and sharing your results with us, you will be contributing to and helping advance the scientific study of personality. Your scores will be interpreted and the results will be published in subsequent issues of PSYCHOLOGY TODAY.

Part One of the test focuses on the relationship between the way you perceive your personality, the ideals you hold out for yourself, and your fears about the sort of person you could become in the future. Parts Two and Three will give you a chance to focus on the ways you express your personality in a variety of social roles, and the way your personality is perceived by the people around you. Each part provides a complete assessment of your personality from a particular intrapersonal or social perspective, and may be taken and interpreted entirely on its own. Combining the results of all three parts, however, will allow you to achieve an even broader and more penetrating examination of your personality.

In mapping the elements that come together to form our personalities, psychologists have identified five broad factors that jointly describe -- or perhaps even determine--who we are. These factors, originally called the "Big Five" by psychologist Lewis Goldberg, of the University of Oregon, each represent a particular aspect of the way in which your style of relating to the world may differ from that of others.

Your Expressive Style, for example, may range from being quiet and reserved to being enthusiastic and outgoing. Your Interpersonal Style, on the other hand, may range from being stubborn and aloof in your dealings with others to being warm, considerate, and even selfless. The third factor, Work Style, concerns the manner in which you tend to focus on tasks and meet your responsibilities. The fourth, Emotional Style, concerns your temperament and the manner in which you typically deal with stress. Finally, Intellectual Style involves the degree to which you prefer tradition and simplicity as opposed to complexity and change. Whether you are evaluating the way in which you perceive yourself or the way you believe others perceive you, these five factors allow your personality to be described comprehensively from each perspective.

In Part One of the PT/Berkeley Personality Profile, you'll use the Big Five to explore the way you see yourself from four essential perspectives. You'll then examine the similarities and differences between these points of view to achieve deeper insight into your personality as a whole. You'll begin by describing your "Inner Self," or the way you actually view the five dimensions of your personality. You'll then proceed to describe your "Outer Self," or the way in which you believe others perceive these same dimensions of your personality. Later, you'll explore two possible selves: your "Ideal Self" -- or the person you would most like to become; and your "Feared Self" -- or your worst-case scenario for the kind of person you could become should your life not take the course you desire.