Color Personality Tests Compared: Which Model Is Which?

Don Lowry created True Colors in 1978 to make David Keirsey’s four temperaments easy to remember. Those temperaments, which Keirsey later named Artisan, Guardian, Rational and Idealist, became Orange, Gold, Green and Blue. The assessment usually combines ranking word clusters with sorting cards, and your result lists all four colors from most to least like you. True Colors International owns the trademark and runs the official assessment and facilitator training. Our guide to what True Colors is and where it came from goes deeper.

Real Colors comes from the National Curriculum and Training Institute (NCTI). It uses the same Orange, Gold, Green and Blue scheme and the same temperament roots as True Colors, so the color meanings line up closely: a Real Colors Gold and a True Colors Gold describe much the same person. The two programs differ in their questions, materials and training, which each organization develops on its own. Real Colors is especially common in university extension programs and campus workshops, with versions for adults and for youth.

Taylor Hartman introduced the Color Code in his book The Color Code, later republished as The People Code. His model is built around one question: what motivates you? Hartman holds that each person is born with one core motive. Reds are driven by power, Blues by intimacy, Whites by peace and Yellows by fun. You get a primary color and often a secondary one, and the publisher offers a free short test alongside paid, more detailed reports.

DISC traces back to psychologist William Moulton Marston, who described four basic patterns of behavior in his 1928 book Emotions of Normal People. Marston, who also created the comic book hero Wonder Woman, didn’t build a test himself; later developers turned his ideas into questionnaires. Today the letters usually stand for Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness. No single company owns the model, so many publishers sell their own versions, with Wiley’s Everything DiSC among the best known.

Many DISC tools color-code the four styles, most often Dominance red, Influence yellow, Steadiness green and Conscientiousness blue. Those colors are a design choice, not part of Marston’s theory, and some publishers use others. Most versions place the styles on two lines: outgoing versus reserved, and task-focused versus people-focused.

Insights Discovery comes from Insights, a company Andi Lothian founded with his son Andy in Dundee, Scotland. It draws on the psychological types Carl Jung described in Psychological Types and turns two of Jung’s contrasts, introversion versus extraversion and thinking versus feeling, into four “color energies.” Fiery Red combines extraversion and thinking, Sunshine Yellow extraversion and feeling, Earth Green introversion and feeling, and Cool Blue introversion and thinking. A core idea is that everyone has all four energies in a personal mix, and your profile shows which ones you lean on most.

The Lüscher Color Test does a different job. Swiss psychotherapist Max Lüscher first presented it in 1947. In the short version you see eight colors (blue, green, red, yellow, violet, brown, gray and black) and put them in order from the one you like most to the one you like least. The order is read as a sign of your current emotional state and needs, not as a personality type. It’s a projective test, the same broad family as inkblot tests.