Social Style Test: Find Your Style Among Driver, Expressive, Amiable and Analytical

How the scoring works

The test has 24 original statements, six written for each style. Each statement describes an observable behavior that sits at one intersection of the two axes: a Driver item describes telling while keeping feelings contained, an Expressive item describes telling while showing feeling, an Amiable item describes asking while showing feeling, and an Analytical item describes asking while keeping feelings contained. You rate each statement on a five-point agreement scale. The engine sums your agreement for each style, converts each sum to a percentage of its maximum, and shows all four as bars. The tallest bar is your leading style and gets the full reading.

Because the four styles are quadrants of two axes rather than four separate traits, your bars usually come in a recognizable shape. A tall Driver bar with a reasonably tall Expressive bar means the tell side of the assertiveness axis is doing most of the work; a tall Driver bar with a tall Analytical bar means the control side of the responsiveness axis is. Read the second bar as the direction you lean inside your style. When two bars tie, the result says so instead of picking one, and you get both readings.

These are educational bars, not norms. The commercial SOCIAL STYLE instruments from TRACOM use ratings from several people who know you, which is a materially different and more reliable method than self-report. A self-rating captures how you believe you come across; it cannot show you the gap between that belief and what colleagues actually see. Treat the result as a hypothesis to test against feedback, not a verdict.

What social style is, and what it is not

Social style describes surface behavior that other people can observe: how fast you talk, whether you lead with questions or statements, how much feeling shows on your face, whether you focus on the task or the people in the room. David Merrill and Roger Reid built the model in the 1960s and 1970s from ratings of how people were seen by others, and published it in Personal Styles and Effective Performance in 1981. The two axes they kept, assertiveness and responsiveness, were the two that observers agreed on most reliably. SOCIAL STYLE is a registered trademark of the TRACOM Corporation, which continues to develop and license the commercial version of the model. This test is an independent educational self-assessment built on the published model and is not affiliated with TRACOM.

The model does not describe your values, intelligence, emotional depth, or how good you are at your job. An Analytical is not colder inside than an Expressive; the difference is how much feeling is displayed, not how much is felt. A Driver is not more capable than an Amiable; the difference is whether they tend to tell or ask. Every style has people who are brilliant at their work and people who are not. The model also says nothing about mental health, and it should never be used to explain away behavior that is hurting someone: a Driver who is rude is being rude, not being a Driver.

Style is also fairly stable but not fixed. Merrill and Reid's own position was that your style is how others consistently see you across situations, which means a single stressful week or a new role can make you look different for a while without changing the underlying pattern. If your bars look nothing like how you think colleagues would describe you, that gap is itself useful information, and asking two or three people where they would place you is the quickest way to close it.

Social style, DISC and the other four-box models

If the four styles look familiar, that is because several workplace models carve behavior along similar lines. DISC, which comes from William Marston's 1928 work, also uses two axes and four quadrants, and its Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientiousness map loosely onto Driver, Expressive, Amiable and Analytical. The models were developed separately, use different axes in theory, and are owned by different companies, so the match is approximate rather than exact. If you have a DISC profile already, expect your social style to rhyme with it rather than copy it. Our DISC Personality Test page and the Communication Style Quiz look at the same territory from their own angles.

What social style adds that the other models often skip is backup behavior and versatility. Backup behavior is the model's name for what each style does when tension gets too high: the Driver becomes autocratic, the Expressive attacks, the Amiable acquiesces, the Analytical avoids. Versatility is the model's name for the learnable skill of adjusting to other people's styles, and it is the part of the model that TRACOM's research has linked most consistently to being rated effective by colleagues. A versatile Amiable who learns to be direct with Drivers will usually get further than a Driver who never learns to slow down for anyone.

None of these four-box models has the research standing of trait measures like the Big Five, and this test has not been validated against anything. It is useful the way a shared vocabulary is useful: it gives a team a quick, non-judgmental way to say I need the summary first, or I need time to think before I answer. For how you handle disagreement specifically, the Conflict Style Quiz is the closer fit; for how you lead, see Leadership Style Quiz; for how you like to structure your work, Work Style Test.

What to do with your result

Start with the gap check. Show your bars to two people who work with you often and ask where they would have placed you. If they agree with the result, you have a reliable starting point. If they do not, their view is the one the model was built on, so weigh it heavily. Either way, you now have language for a conversation that is usually hard to start.

Then pick one flex. Each style reading below names the adjustment that costs that style the most and pays the most: the Driver who asks one more question, the Expressive who sends the summary in writing, the Amiable who states a position out loud, the Analytical who decides with 80 percent of the data. Choose the single person you most need to work better with, identify their likely style, and practice one flex toward them for a month. Versatility is built one relationship at a time, not by trying to become all four styles at once.

Finally, learn your backup signature well enough to catch it early. The model's most practical gift is that your under-pressure move is predictable, which means you can name it the moment it starts: I notice I am about to push, or I notice I am about to go quiet. Naming it, to yourself or out loud, is usually enough to choose something else. If pressure at work has stopped feeling like a style problem and started feeling like exhaustion or dread, the Psychology.com therapist directory lists people who work with career stress and burnout specifically.

Methodology & sources

The social style model was developed by David W. Merrill and Roger H. Reid and published in Personal Styles and Effective Performance (1981). It describes observable behavior along two axes: assertiveness, the degree to which a person tends to ask or tell, and responsiveness, the degree to which a person tends to control or display feeling. The four quadrants are the Driving (Driver), Expressive, Amiable and Analytical styles. SOCIAL STYLE is a registered trademark of the TRACOM Corporation, which owns and licenses the commercial assessments built on the model. This page does not reproduce any TRACOM instrument or item. We wrote 24 original statements about everyday observable behavior, six for each style, each placed at one intersection of the two axes, answered on a five-point agreement scale. The engine scores all four styles and shows them as bars; the tallest is your leading style.

The test is educational, has not been validated, and uses self-report, whereas the commercial model is built on ratings from people who know you. The bars are percentages of each style's maximum, not population norms, and there are no cutoffs. Backup behaviors (autocratic, attacking, acquiescing, avoiding) and the concept of versatility are described as the published model describes them; our item wording, readings and flex suggestions are our own. The references give the model's source books and TRACOM's published technical material; they are not validation studies of these questions. Treat your result as a prompt for feedback and reflection, not a measurement of your personality or a basis for hiring, promotion or team selection.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the original items for balance across the ask-tell and control-emote axes, and the stress-behavior readings for a non-judgmental tone. Last reviewed October 5, 2026.

References

1. Merrill DW, Reid RH. Personal Styles and Effective Performance: Make Your Style Work for You. Radnor, PA: Chilton Book Company; 1981. ISBN 9780801968983.
2. Bolton R, Bolton DG. People Styles at Work... and Beyond: Making Bad Relationships Good and Good Relationships Better. 2nd ed. New York: AMACOM; 2009. ISBN 9780814413425.
3. The TRACOM Corporation. SOCIAL STYLE and Versatility Facilitator Handbook, version 1.1. Centennial, CO: TRACOM. No publication year stated in the document. tracom.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Facilitator-Handbook_v1.1_DGT.pdf
4. Marston WM. Emotions of Normal People. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co; 1928. Cited from the Routledge reissue of the 1928 work, which is the record linked here: routledge.com/Emotions-Of-Normal-People/MarstonWilliamMoulton/p/book/9781138882577

Social Style Test: Driver, Expressive, Amiable or Analytical FAQ