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Four personality types may be neither robust nor exhaustive

Nature Human Behaviour volume 3, pages 1045–1046 (2019)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 16 September 2019

The Original Article was published on 17 September 2018

arising from M. Gerlach, B. Farb, W. Revelle & L. A. N. Amaral Nature Human Behaviour https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0419-z (2018).

It was recently suggested that at least four meaningful and robust types of personality exist1. As a notable improvement to previous approaches, the authors applied Gaussian mixture models to very large datasets with various questionnaires. While we concur that the authors’ analyses reveal four meaningful clusters in the Johnson-300 data, we also found that only 42% of the sample was associated with those four personality types. That is, the vast majority of individuals could not be classified within a distinct, meaningful cluster. Against the background of these findings, Gerlach et al.’s suggestion that this typology might potentially be useful in personality assessment seems premature1.

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Data availability

Data are available from https://osf.io/tbmh5/ (Johnson-300 and Johnson-120) and https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-7656-1 (BBC-44).

Code accessibility

The code necessary to conduct the reported analysis is available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/f8qes/).

References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Jan-Philipp Freudenstein & Patrick Mussel

  2. Ulm University, Ulm, Germany

    Christoph Strauch

  3. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Matthias Ziegler

Authors
  1. Jan-Philipp Freudenstein
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  2. Christoph Strauch
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  3. Patrick Mussel
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  4. Matthias Ziegler
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Contributions

J.-P.F. and C.S. analysed the data. J.-P.F., C.S., P.M. and M.Z. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Jan-Philipp Freudenstein.

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Freudenstein, JP., Strauch, C., Mussel, P. et al. Four personality types may be neither robust nor exhaustive. Nat Hum Behav 3, 1045–1046 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0721-4

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