Animal Instincts® FAQs
Everything you need to know about Animal Instincts®, the playful personality assessment from Growth Animals — how it works, the science behind it, and what your animal says about you.
Animal Instincts® is the accessible, relatable and playful personality assessment tool, designed to help people to be the best version of themselves and to help organisations unlock their people’s performance potential.
Animal Instincts® takes just a couple of minutes to complete. Make sure to answer the questions as instinctively as possible for the most accurate results.
Yes. We want everyone to be able to enjoy the insights and to feel the benefits of ‘knowing your animal’. For those who want further information around our range of people programmes, workshops, accreditations and train the trainer options, get in touch via our Contact page.
Yes, it is based on Carl Jung’s established personality model that has been refined by psychologists and researchers for over 70 years. While psychology is a complex field, more like economics than physics, this approach uses empirical research to enhance career guidance, communication and personal development.
The Animal Instincts personality assessment was co-created by David Hodgson and the team at Growth Animals. It is based on David’s original ‘Buzz Quiz’ ©, which has been used for decades in education circles and completed by hundreds of thousands of people across the globe. Animal Instincts is a registered trademark owned by Growth Animals Limited.
David Hodgson is a successful author, speaker, and personality type researcher with forty years of experience in careers guidance and psychometric assessment. As a British Psychological Society-accredited practitioner, he has created interactive resources for major educational organisations globally and authored seven books, including The Buzz ©. David brings his deep expertise to our team as a Senior Adviser and Product Developer.
Growth Animals is a business growth consultancy that uses personality science to help leaders, teams and organisations unlock their potential. Founded by Chris Thornhill and Jen Melbert, Growth Animals works with clients across multiple sectors and markets. Both Chris and Jen are regular speakers at industry conferences and business events nationwide.
The Animal Instincts personality assessment has been repeatedly described as being more accessible, relatable, memorable and playful than other personality assessments on the market. This, in turn, ensures better engagement with our model, resulting in greater retained learning and improved performance.
Using animals in the assessment helps move away from rigid “boxes” and makes the concepts more accessible, memorable and playful. Think of your personality type as your “favourite room” in a house. You can visit every room, but your animal represents where you feel most at home.
Animals that are generally culturally positive and popular were chosen. This is why there are no snakes, rats or earwigs.
The four groups overlap with David Keirsey’s Temperament model. This allows enthusiasts to quickly incorporate the rich depth of research in the field of personality type.
These are based on data gathered from the original Buzz Quiz © over a period of five years with over 500,000 users and in-person events delivered by David Hodgson to thousands of young people across the UK. The figures are reasonably consistent with research conducted using other personality quizzes across the world.
While your core underlying preferences, like a natural preference for using your left or right hand, tend to remain stable, your skills and behaviours constantly grow and adapt to your environment. If you’re right-handed as a child, you are likely to stay right-handed your whole life. This doesn’t mean you don’t learn to use both hands more skillfully throughout life. However, understanding your preference is very useful. Cricketers have learned to switch batting from left to right or vice versa to gain an advantage over bowlers who aren’t allowed to switch during their run-up. In work and other areas of life, the advantage is with people who know their preference (their default ‘best’ option) but can switch when required.
The model predicts your overall personality “climate” rather than your daily “weather”. It is designed to increase self-awareness and help you identify likely strengths for different scenarios, rather than acting as a rigid rulebook for your behaviour. The mistake made by detractors of the model is that they focus on predicting behaviour using personality traits, the type model asks different questions, such as what are your natural strengths? Are you using these fully at work and in life? How can you develop your skills and behavioural flexibility to be a more effective person?
Starting with your natural strengths is a powerful way to build confidence and self-belief. Once you understand your positive preferences, you can more easily identify and work on your “shadow strengths” for personal growth.
The Superpowers are based on Dr Martin Seligman’s pioneering work in positive psychology, in which he explores the idea that the highest form of happiness is a meaningful life and that anyone can tap into this by knowing, embracing and utilising their superpowers on a day-to-day basis. Seligman describes these as values or signature strengths.
The strongest, most distinctive and authentic brands are ingrained in the people and the culture of a business. Using Animal Instincts to understand the people behind the business first can lead us to richer, more compelling and more trustworthy brands.
Unlike some online sites that harvest information, Animal Instincts® is intended to be a confidential tool used within a supportive environment to help you explore yourself. If you’d like further insights or to explore our range of people programmes and workshops, you can sign up to our newsletter or reach us via our Contact page.
