Thankfully, not all personality tests are gimmicks. Understanding what shapes people’s behaviours, thoughts and feelings is an endeavour many philosophers and psychologists have pursued rigorously and scientifically. But why do these tests exist, how do they work, and are we using them correctly?
Let’s start with what personality is. According to the American Psychological Association, personality is defined as the pattern of features and behaviours that characterise an individual’s adjustment to life. Whether this is characterised by a type, like the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types, or a trait, such as scores on a scale of extraversion vs introversion in the Big Five personality traits, these models claim to be predictive of a person’s behaviour.
Regardless of these differences, most personality models assume that understanding someone’s personality helps predict their future actions in the same environment. For example, if you love parties, I might think “you are an extrovert” and assume you will say yes to future invites. This example can also extend to mental health. For instance, research suggests how emotional and introverted someone is can be a predictor of developing depression later in life.
So, how do we measure personality? Psychological measurement, or psychometrics, started with questionnaires where participants rate their agreement with statements like “I enjoy going to parties”. Algorithms then generate labels, such as “40% introvert” or “ENTP” (the Myers Briggs ‘Debater’ personality type). But while these tests are consistent, they are flawed: people know they are taking a test, which influences their choices (a Gryffindor at heart wouldn’t want to be told they’re a Slytherin).
To circumvent this problem, researchers came up with fun ways to ensure people are telling the truth: games. Imagine you’re playing a fantasy game and your goal is to complete it. Little do you know an algorithm is measuring how fast you escape peril to estimate your levels of neuroticism or conscientiousness.
That’s exactly what McCord and colleagues did; they took a personality questionnaire and translated the items into game activities, finding strong correlations between player personality and related in-game behaviours. For example, those who selected to introduce themselves to the dark figure in the tunnel ahead in-game were assessed as more extroverted. Whereas those who selected to form an escape plan before approaching were assessed as more conscientious. Even if you know you’re being assessed, it’s nearly impossible to trick the system when you don’t know what’s being measured. Because of this, gamified personality assessments have been adopted by many companies for hiring.
A recent article suggests that as many as 80 per cent of Fortune 500 companies use personality assessments at some point in their hiring process, making psychometric assessment a multi-billion-dollar industry. And that’s all fine, except that while no clinician would diagnose depression just because you’re introverted, a HR rep may not hire you because your gameplay indicated you are a risk-averse team player (for example). With so much riding on these tests, we should make sure we’re doing them right.
Enter Minecraft
Before we continue, there are two key assumptions: personality exists, and it’s our mind’s theory for understanding people (ourselves included). For my PhD research, I want to understand how people build these theories about others. To start off, I interviewed six Minecraft players to get a preliminary idea about how real people interpret behaviour and categorise others.
Even if you haven’t played the game, you’ve probably heard of it – or of the fact that Jason Momoa stars in the movie. As the trailer insists, Minecraft is a world of “infinite possibilities” – as long as those possibilities are block-shaped. People build an “alternative” self in-game and act however they want, from constructing a replica of the world, to fighting monsters, to ruining someone else’s replica of the world.
It turns out Minecraft players tend to form distinct ideas about different player types, often shaped by behavioural traits. Take the “builders” – in the interviews, my participants estimated they would be more organised, detail-oriented and driven by aesthetics. So now we have a personality-like model with a much more constrained pool of behaviours due to game mechanics. My next goal was to identify which in-game behaviours truly reveal the type of player someone is – the Minecraft equivalent of psychometric markers.