These Personality Types Make the Most Money, According to New Psychometrics Data

Your personality type could determine whether you make $30K or $80K.

It would be nice to believe that everyone has the same chance of landing a job, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, appearance, etc., but unfortunately that’s not the case — and now “personality type” can be added to the list of potentially deciding factors.

Psychometrics is the science of measuring mental capacities and processes, and new data from Truity Psychometrics suggests that an individual’s Myers-Briggs personality type correlates with how much money he or she can earn.

In particular, ESTJ personality types came out on top for the highest-earning personality type, with traits of extroversion, sensing, thinking, and judging predicting a salary of $77,000/year. The difference between the highest-earning personality type and the lowest-earning one was remarkable — individuals who embodied traits of introversion, sensing, and perceiving (ISPs) made an average of $32,000/year.

You can check out the chart below that lays out the personality type/salary data:

^{Credit: Truity Psychometrics}

The study authors suggest that these discrepancies in personality type and salary could be largely influenced by the different likelihoods of holding managerial roles. The higher earners — extroverts, sensors, thinkers, and judgers — managed more people on average and made more money than the lower earners: introverts, intuitives, feelers, and perceivers, respectively.

Additionally, the authors found that about two-thirds of the highest earning group (ESTJs) are men, so they argue that gender may be causing this gap in salary in addition to personality types. However, similar correlations between personality type and salary held true when men and women were considered separately, so gender alone cannot be held accountable.

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Among men, there was even a larger variation than women, with an average of $30,000/year for INTPs versus $95,000/year for ESTJs. The women’s salaries ranged from $39,000/year for INFPs to $80,000/year for ENTJs.

Previous research has shown that men are four times more likely to ask for a raise than women, so this could be linked with more introverted personality qualities.

In future studies, it would be interesting to investigate how the traits that are typically seen as “masculine” or “feminine” can either benefit or disadvantage the men and women who exert them.

As Bustle’s Suzannah Weiss says, “We as a culture cultivate more extrovert-like qualities, such as assertiveness and competitiveness, in men than women and then privilege these "masculine" traits when we seek people to fill leadership roles.”

So perhaps there’s more to the wage gaps than gender and personality types — there could be a larger cultural interplay as well.

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