The 16 personality factors were developed by British psychologist Raymond Cattell who was a pioneer in the use of empirical and mathematical techniques to study personality. He worked with the mathematical technique of factor analysis that aims to reduce a large number of variables down to a smaller number that can still explain most of the variation. He started this work first with intelligence tests and then personality surveys back before there were computers and doing all the data reduction for large surveys by hand was a remarkable achievement. In the data he was working with, he decided that the best fitting number of factors was 16 and he published his first personality test using the model in 1949. He would continue to revise it and publish work supporting the instrument for the next couple decades, and the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) would become one of the most widely used tests. Modern personality psychologists consider the 16 factor solution to not have generalized well and prefer the "Big Five" factor model. The 16 personality factors is considered an outdated theory, however practical use of the 16PF continues by some practitioners.

In the 1990s, Lewis Goldberg created the International Personality Item Pool, a bank of test questions that anyone could use, out of concerns the copyright restrictions were holding the field of personality psychology back. With costs and limits on using tests, and generally no freedom to adapt or revise them. As part of building the IPIP, he keyed a set of items from the IPIP to the sixteen personality factors based on their correlation to the scales of the 16PF in a community sample. This test uses those public domain scales, and should produce scores broadly similar to the 16PF, but is not a perfect substitute and lacks some of the features of the commercial instrument (such as validity scales).

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