Is the Enneagram Scientifically Valid? The Research Says Yes

It is no secret that the Enneagram is having a moment. From boardrooms to church halls, the popularity of this personality is spreading like wild fire. The Enneagram is considered richer than frameworks like DISC and Myers-Briggs because the Enneagram doesn’t just focus on what you do, it focuses on why you do it. The Enneagram uncovers your motivation and personality blind spots, offering you a roadmap for how to be the best version of yourself.

But despite its widespread popularity, the Enneagram faces many skeptics. Its biggest hurdle remains the persistent question: “But is it real? Is the Enneagram scientifically valid?”

To answer this question once and for all, I spoke with Dr. Anna Sutton, a senior researcher at the University of Waikato whose findings about the scientific validity of the Enneagram were the basis for her PhD dissertation. 

When I asked Sutton what inspired her research, she said, “I’ve always been interested in personality, but when I came to the Enneagram I was facing this issue of knowing that it worked for me and seemed to work for some other people but not seeing any good scientific evidence. I wondered ‘could it just be anecdotal, and it just happened that I fitted myself into this category? Could I maybe even be fooling myself in some way?’” 

This healthy skepticism became the driving force behind Sutton’s investigation into just how scientifically valid the Enneagram is. 

Two Comprehensive Studies: One Conclusion

To put the Enneagram through its paces, Sutton did two comprehensive studies – the first to examine if the Enneagram types reflect real, consistent personality patterns and the second to determine if learning the Enneagram had measurable benefit in the workplace.

Study 1: Do Enneagram Types Show Real, Consistent Personality Patterns?

“In the first study, I was trying to test if the Enneagram types correlate to other established personality system types. For example, my theory was that Enneagram type Ones would consistently score high in the Big Five trait of Conscientiousness. We had a list of hypotheses like this that we tested.”

In the study, over 400 people familiar with the Enneagram, with a minimum of 30 people per type, filled out surveys measuring their personality, values, motivation and work-related attitudes. The surveys were linked to well-established psychological models including the Big Five traits (e.g. Extraversion), Schwartz’s values (a set of 10 universal human values such as Security and Self-direction), and implicit motives (e.g. the need for power). The results were impressive.

“This may sound silly because I was doing the study to test my own theories, but I was surprised at how many of the hypotheses were supported. It was way more than I expected!” Sutton says.

The vast majority of the hypothesised relationships between the Enneagram and other personality models proved to be true. This consistency illustrates that the Enneagram types are coherent, reliable patterns of conscious and unconscious personality and that the types can be described in terms of established personality models of traits, values and motives. “We were able to predict someone’s Enneagram type based on their response to the other models. This helped to prove these types are distinct from each other.”

The study also found that knowing someone’s Enneagram type could help predict job-related attitudes like motivation, job satisfaction and stress almost as effectively as other established personality and motivation models, though the Big Five was slightly better.

Study 2: Does the Enneagram Actually Help People?

Sutton’s second study involved putting the Enneagram into action by trying to answer the question: Is the Enneagram useful? It looked at how the Enneagram could measurably help people in the workplace by improving their self-awareness. In this study, 80 participants took part in workshops. Some received general self-awareness training while others received Enneagram training tailored to their personality type. 

The study showed that participants in the Enneagram workshops reported benefits both at work and in their personal lives, including improved understanding of themselves and others, increased confidence, better communication and ongoing motivation for self-development. These advantages were not seen as much in the general self-awareness group.

“People see the Enneagram as a short-cut because they can hear about the nine types and see if they can recognize those patterns in themselves. That’s when it becomes really useful,” explains Sutton.

Why the Validity Debate Continues

These studies aren’t new – they were done in 2007 and have been publicly available since 2012. The results were written up in the European Management Journal and The European Journal of Training and Development. 

And Sutton’s studies aren’t the only ones out there. In addition to her own work, Sutton wrote a paper titled “But is it real?” A review of research on the Enneagram.” Here she reviewed dozens of studies to compare the results. While lots of the studies have flaws, they generally support the idea that Enneagram types reflect distinct, measurable personality patterns and can make testable predictions about traits, values and motives. 

So if numerous studies exist that show the Enneagram is scientifically valid, why is there still so much confusion and resistance to it?

A Complicated Origin Story Creates Doubt

“The scientific psychology community hasn’t historically been excited about the Enneagram because of its background. Because it comes from a more spiritual or self-development tradition, there is quite a lot of suspicion around it,” says Sutton. 

It is true that the Enneagram’s origin story is murky. Unlike the 16 type system developed by the mother-daughter pair Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, or the DISC model developed by industrial psychologists, the Enneagram’s past is confusing. It taps into sacred geometry, using a symbol that dates back from thousands of years. Mystics, spiritual teachers and Jesuit priests have had their influences in the personality system. Because the picture is so colorful, it can be easy to discount the system as woo-woo or lacking in credibility. 

But people often forget that the “mother” of the Enneagram, Claudio Naranjo, was a trained psychiatrist. And that the Enneagram has been taught by Dr. David Daniels, MD at Stanford University. Even if its origin story is colorful, its family tree is impressive.

Measurement Isn’t Straightforward

Another hurdle is that because the Enneagram goes beyond a series of personality traits, it is hard to measure. Whereas in the Big Five, the most scientifically accepted of all the personality systems, puts five personality traits on a continuum, the Enneagram puts people into categories based on their habit of attention. This is inherently harder to measure. 

“The scientific community might be perfectly happy with the traits of introversion and extraversion used in the Big Five model, because these traits can exist in a range. But in personality type models, like the Enneagram, people are put into groups based on sometimes unconscious processes. This makes it more difficult to scientifically validate,” explains Sutton.

What’s Still Missing in the Research

To win skeptics over by showing how the Enneagram is both scientifically valid and measurably useful, more peer-reviewed research is essential. That means studies published in well-established, indexed journals such as the Journal of Personality or The Journal of Applied Psychology, where findings are visible to the wider scientific and professional community. When research appears in these rigorous, widely accessed outlets, it can be scrutinized, replicated and expanded upon, allowing the field to build a stronger, evidence-based foundation for the Enneagram’s value.

A promising recent development in establishing the Enneagram’s scientific credibility comes from the work of Dr. Dan Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and one of the leading voices in interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB), a field that explores how the mind, brain and relationships shape each other. Siegel has integrated the Enneagram into his research on personality, motivation and brain development, reframing the nine types as measurable developmental pathways shaped by temperament, attachment and early relational patterns. 

To understand how Siegel became interested in the Enneagram, I spoke with Rosemary Cowan, founder of Enneagram Training UK & Ireland, a Narrative Tradition Enneagram Professional Training program for English speakers in Europe. She has been working with and teaching the Enneagram for over two decades.

“Dan was first introduced to the Enneagram during a six-day training in 2004. He arrived as a skeptic, but after sitting on a panel with people who seemed to describe his inner world with uncanny accuracy, he became intrigued,” explains Cowan.

Over lunch during that training he met with a group of scientists including Dr. David Daniels, Dr. Jack Killen, Laura Baker, PhD and Denise Daniels, PhD.  They began discussing how to bring scientific credibility to the Enneagram.

Together, this group formed the Patterns of Developmental Pathways (PDP) Group, linking the Enneagram with validated research across multiple disciplines including attachment theory, interpersonal neurobiology, psychotherapy and brain science. They also drew on thousands of hours of recorded interviews from more than 30 years of Narrative Tradition training programs. Their work eventually became the book Personality and Wholeness in Therapy: Integrating 9 Patterns of Developmental Pathways in Clinical Practice.

“Dan has said this book was the hardest thing he’s ever written because every claim had to meet rigorous scientific scrutiny. After Dr. David Daniels passed away in 2017, the team became even more determined to finish the work in his honor,” says Cowan.

By translating the Enneagram into the language of neuroscience and psychology, this work provides a framework that can be empirically tested. The Enneagram has been having a moment with its fans, but soon it might be having a moment by winning over its skeptics too.

Final Thoughts: When Evidence Catches Up to Experience

Long before penicillin was isolated and identified as a game-changing drug, people noticed that certain moldy bread or cheese could help treat infections. When the need was great enough, they didn’t wait for scientific explanation. Instead, they paid attention to what worked and reaped the benefits without fully understanding why. The Enneagram follows a similar pattern. For many, it has been a practical tool for growth, self-awareness and better relationships long before research caught up.

But for those who need scientific validation before trusting a system, the landscape is changing. We are beginning to see data that confirms what practitioners and students of the Enneagram have observed for decades: the Enneagram helps explain human behavior and provides a framework for greater awareness. And that’s good news not just for the credibility of the system but for what it unlocks. Because at its core, the Enneagram is a tool for deeper understanding and compassion. And there is no question the world could use more of both.