Psychiatric tests for 'personality disorders' are almost entirely just measuring how poorly you get along with others rather than your actual personality.
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
Measures of ‘Maladaptive Personality’ Primarily Reflect ‘Maladaptive Ways of Relating’
SSRN · 6463726
The Takeaway
By analyzing major clinical diagnostic tools, researchers found a massive bias: while healthy personality measures look at thinking and feeling, 'maladaptive' measures focus almost exclusively on social friction. This suggests that what we call 'personality pathology' might just be a lack of social skills rather than a deep-rooted character flaw.
From the abstract
Since its conceptual origins, the idea of ‘personality’ has been used to denote broad ways of being like ways of thinking, feeling, behaving, and relating. Accordingly, the idea of ‘personality pathology’ has been used to denote impairments in all of these aspects of personality. In this study, we put these assumptions to test by examining whether measures of adaptive versus maladaptive personality reflect all aspects of personality to a relatively equal degree. To examine this hypothesis, we co