Here's how it works:
To start, here’s a quick insight into personality: it begins in the brain. In fact, your unique ‘personality’ is really just a series of differences in how your brain functions compared to others.
The one thing that links your brain activity, your personality and our assessment are what we call ‘cognitive mechanisms’. These include the likes of focusing, or information processing, and are effectively what underpins your personality. Such mechanisms can be both activated and measured with certain behavioural tasks.
These tasks are taken from decades of neuroscientific research – we simply replicate them in an engaging, intuitive online format. By choosing tasks that are proven to activate the behaviours that indicate your unique personality and cognitive traits, we can measure your personality without ever asking you a question. Here’s an example:
In one task, we ask you to quickly sort tickets according to the number or shape displayed. Highly-organised people are less likely to make certain kinds of error, and will remain engaged as the task increases in difficulty. We know this because these observable behaviours activate regions of your brain that are closely associated with the trait we’re measuring*.
*In this case, organisation activates the anterior cingulate cortex. Obviously.
It’s worth noting that, when it comes to actively measuring your natural traits, we adhere to the industry-standard psychometric assessment criteria that’s been set out by the:
- International Test Commission (ITC)
- British Psychological Society (BPS)
- American Psychological Association (APA)
Now, that’s a lot of acronyms. But what it means is that validity and reliability are at the heart of how we build our assessments. Here’s a quick refresher on what these mean in the context of your assessment:
Validity – Measuring behaviours that legitimately speak to your wider psychological traits
Reliability – Measuring behaviours precisely, reproducibly and consistently
So, hopefully that gives you a clearer idea of the science underpinning our assessment, and explains how we see more in you than traditional tests.