From the Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram to the “Golden Retriever Energy” TikTok Trend, there is no shortage of ways to measure and think about personality. Whether it's a personality tests administered by professionals or one of the many pop culture-inspired quizzes found on the Internet, they all have one thing in common. The ability to “measure” or type our personality gives us a story to tell about our favorite subject: Ourselves.

Even the most frivolous BuzzFeed quiz taps into something deeper: Our desire to be known, to find clarity in chaos, and to share something meaningful about ourselves to further our sense of connection and belonging. Finding out our “type” paints a picture in our minds of who we are and how we interact with the world. Even a Disney Princess can give us a moment of pause and introspection. As we think about her core characteristics, we can’t help but compare them to our own. Even if fleeting, we have a moment of “why Arial and not Moana?” Introspection enhances self-awareness, which is central to identifying personal values and strengths (Carden et al., 2022).

The human desire to define personality dates back through recorded history. The ancient Greeks developed a system based on four humors to explain how temperament was linked to specific bodily fluids and used to guide moral and medical decisions. By the 20th century, personality theories had largely evolved, although many still retain interesting connections to the four dimensions. New theories led to the development of new models to assess traits and diagnose disorders with increasing scientific rigor. Conceptualizations of personality evolved from

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