personality tests

[brasssun]

I just took a personality test, as assigned by one of my classes and am now reading up on the different personality types. Now I'm caught between thinking that this is (a) pretty interesting stuff and a helpful way to understand more about people, or (b) these are a lot of very extreme versions and all the descriptions read kind of like horoscopes

Comments

[sildra]

I am also INTJ. On this particular test, I was strongly T, somewhat I and J, and actually only 50% N. On most such tests I've taken, I'm a lot more strongly I and J (and always T, of course), but 50/50 N and S is pretty typical for me. After having talked to other people about it a lot, I've decided it isn't that I'm somewhere between N and S, it's that I'm actually pretty strongly both of them (seeing the big picture and being detail-oriented, respectively), which is probably good for me as a scientist. This has occasionally put me in the position of having to explain the merits of the S type to N types. (For example, I was at a party once where the host's girlfriend was really into talking about this stuff, and she was an S while everyone else in the room was an N. She was a med student and all the other guests were PhD students, so it made some sense, but she was having a lot of trouble explaining how S wasn't a mental deficiency.) Back in college, among our SWIL friends, pretty much everyone was either INTJ or INTP--actually

[brasssun]

The idea of this test introducing a common language with which to discuss personality differences is the best explanation I've heard regarding why this is a useful test to have. The more I've been reading about the different personality types and matching them up with people I know, the more irritated I've been with the fact that they're descriptive rather than prescriptive. It's not really telling me anything that I don't already know.

But the system of personality types as a whole does act to validate multiple types of personalities and introduce useful language with which to discuss personality conflicts without being too aggressive. And I suppose the tests can act as a useful introduction to someone new, although I think that might be problematic for people who are more evenly balanced on certain continuum, like you are between N and S or like my sister is between T and F.

I hadn't realized that the terms "introversion" and "extraversion" had their origins in this test, but those are definitely useful terms to have.

[aryky]

I love personality quizzes, ranging from stupid Internet quizzes to supposedly serious things like MBTI, but. . . I know people really do take them extremely seriously, and that workplaces give out the MBTI, and there is a brand of therapy based on them, and all that, but I think all that is totally orthogonal to my interest in them. I definitely think that you're right to say, "it's not really telling me anything that I don't already know," but I also think that such tests can be an interesting way of reframing the way you think about yourself or the ways you think about similarities and differences between people, and that that can be thought-provoking. sildra's point that the tests "can even occasionally help people explain their differences to each other in a common language that everyone is familiar with" seems clear to me; when my father took one of these tests for the first time, he ran across a question like the one on your test, "Often you prefer to read a book than go to a party," - or something like that, something which

[sildra]

Yeah, now that you mention it I probably did say at some point that how you answer depends on the people around you. Let's use the example of "You like to be engaged in an active and fast-paced job." I'm low-energy but ambitious and need a lot of intellectual stimulation. So the jobs I like are going to be active and fast-paced compared to a lot of people--say, data-entry--but given who I am and the people I know, chances are I know people who are otherwise like me but also high-energy types. If I compare my job to theirs, mine might seem relatively easy and sedate. (Also my job goes through periods of being relatively easy and sedate.) As it is, I do have enough perspective to know how to label my job, but one could imagine that if I were going through a sedate patch, and all of my friends were jet-setting around the world on high-powered business conferences, I would say "I wouldn't want to be them" and therefore claim I don't want an active and fast-paced job. And there are a lot of other questions that take much smaller

[brasssun]

Admittedly it is a really self-indulgent pleasure for me, too, to take personality tests and hear them respond with information about me, even if I already know it. I like reading my horoscope, for instance. It's fun

[sildra]

carnap always liked to make unfoundedly sweeping generalizations about people, but the two I remember most were his claim that 1) everyone at Swarthmore had an IQ of at least 150, and 2) everyone at Swarthmore was an N and just about everyone at Swarthmore--and certainly everyone in SWIL--was an NT, mostly INT.