Personality test to explore rules of attraction

Personality test to explore rules of attraction

A major new investigation which aims to solve two of the biggest unanswered questions in psychology is being launched by researchers at the University of Cambridge in partnership with the BBC.

The project, which will form the next phase of the BBC’s successful online experiment, the "Big Personality Test", will attempt to explain whether people with similar tastes have more successful relationships, or if opposites attract?

It will also examine how far personality problems should be blamed on the parents, by testing whether our traits are inherited, or shaped by other influences, like childhood experiences and the environment in which we live.

The Big Personality Test is an online survey which was created in 2009 and has already become the largest ever scientific study of personality in Britain.

Its new phase involves a referral system, which will enable users to pass the survey on to family and friends. The results could prove groundbreaking, enabling social scientists to cross-refer the results and accumulate an unprecedented set of data on two of psychology’s biggest unknowns.

"At the moment, we don’t have much information about how far people form relationships on the strength of similar personalities," Dr. Jason Rentfrow, one of two Cambridge researchers who will study the results of the survey, said.

"One of the reasons for this is that many studies of personality have focused on young, middle class and white people. We don’t know if their results apply to people of all ages, class or ethnic backgrounds. We hope that this survey will give us information from a more diverse cross-section of the British population, so that we can answer these questions."

The research will be carried out by Dr. Rentfrow and Professor Michael Lamb, who helped to design the original personality test and are based at Cambridge’s Department of Social and Developmental Psychology.

The Big Personality Test measures how far each participant expresses each of the "Big Five" personality traits, which psychologists use widely to describe different aspects of human personality.

These are: Extraversion (traits like sociability, talkativeness and optimism); Agreeableness (friendliness, kindness, generosity); Conscientiousness (reliability, organisation, efficiency); Neuroticism (anxiety, stress, irritability) and Openness (creativity, curiosity and imagination).