The Future of Personality & Medical Assessments
Multiple choice questions are great for math tests, but fail to capture the nuance of human minds, bodies, and souls. Thankfully, a new, powerful assessment technique has emerged.
Imagine building a life around the wrong label.
I almost did (twice).
In high school and college, I believed in a strict extrovert/introvert categorization of people. Since I wasn't the life of the party social butterfly, I assumed I was an introvert.
That was mistake #1.
Maybe I’m… both?
It wasn’t until my mid-30s that someone pointed out this scale is more like a bellcurve than a binary. Because of this, I avoided or shied away (pun intended) from situations that didn’t play to my strong suit.
This was a big a-ha moment for me!
From then on, I believed I was an ambivert, sometimes acting as an introvert or extrovert (depending on the context).
This was better, but mistake #2.
Wait, You’re Telling Me I’m Actually…
A few weeks ago, I took a new type of assessment. Instead of multiple choice questions with a single answer, I could answer whatever I wanted with ChatGPT.
Suddenly, everything changed again.
I'd say, "The answer is A and B in my professional life, but C with my wife and kids." Then I could give a verbal brain dump of multiple stories from my past for context.
After reviewing these answers (with all the nuance and context), the test converged on me being 65% extrovert, 35% introvert.
This was news to me! But the summary revealed key patterns in my professional life where I displayed strong extroversion tendencies. However, there were contexts and situations where I acted like a complete introvert.
The result? I’m somewhere between an ambivert and extrovert, but I can sometimes go all-in on each extreme, confusing outside observers.
This Is Great. Why Should I care?
Let’s get serious.
Do you know how easy it is to misdiagnose someone with depression?
It’s trivial.
Famously, WebMD had a 10-question survey on its website that, regardless of your answers, responded with “you may be depressed.”
Imagine how many people latched onto this, believing something was wrong with them when it was a flawed survey!
Let’s examine a more typical misdiagnosis pattern.
Doctor X asks a few simple multiple choice questions, spends 5 minutes reviewing the answers, and says “Welp, you’re depressed. Let me prescribe you Y.”
The problem with such tests is the myriad of ways that influence how people rate their emotions on a scale of 1 to 5. Sex, culture, and age differences matter. You may have caught them on a bad day, or maybe they're in a hurry, or maybe they have a bad memory and can't adequately assess where they are in this moment.
Whatever the case, they're sitting in a waiting room with five minutes to answer 10 questions that may alter their life forever.
How Does AI Change This?
In the best case of a personality or medical assessment, the multiple-choice part gives a starting point for a professional to further interview and find the nuance and context.
From there, and based on a long-term relationship with you, a trained professional can make the best assessment.
That's where LLMs come in. They can grasp nuance and access any historical context you wish to provide.
And because you have access to your phone right in your pocket, you can take your time and go through as much detail as possible, without being constrained to a quarterly or annual checkup where a doctor may be an hour late and spend a grand total of five minutes with you.
But What Are The Downsides?
Many!
This is a situation where you can know just enough to be dangerous.
We’re still in the early days of these assessments. However, there are products on the market(a medical AI tech startup I’m advising and an AI personality assessment tool I’m using) that have a lot of time and care put into them. They have people stress testing and benchmarking them to ensure they achieve the intended outcomes.
It will still take some time before these get into the mass market, but when they do, it will be a game changer for people to better understand themselves at the body, mind, and soul level.