Last night in the pub, the conversation to the topic of personality profiles. About 16 years ago, I did a Myers Briggs personality test. I just did it again online, and the results are much the same.
I’m described as INFP – Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling, and Perceptive. In essence, I prefer my inner world to the outer world, the big picture over the details, I empathise deeply with other people and I prefer natural order over any imposed order. Apparently, people like me are idealists, gentle in nature, who avoid conflict and seek harmony. They are often inner-conflicted themselves and they never seem to lose their sense of wonder about things. According to this site ” Some INFPs have a gift for taking technical information and putting it into layman’s terms.” Yes, there are definitely aspects of me here. The assessment here is quite accurate.
So, what profile do you have? Does the suit fit? Take the test!
Passive Impressions 
My Type is ISFJ, which is apparently introverted, sensing, feeling, judging. Some parts of this analysis sound accurate 9http://typelogic.com/isfj.html), but some bits are pretty far off, I think. Of course, I don’t expect a short internet quiz to be spot on… I just wonder sometimes, if we take these tests in another mood, how different the result would be?
Darn it! My shift key is sticking so I loused up that link. it’s http://typelogic.com/isfj.html.
My personality profile hasn’t changed much in 16 years, although I will grant that I’m probably not answering these questions totally blind. Perhaps, just perhaps, I’m resorting to type when answering some of these questions, i.e. answering the questions because that is the way I answered them in the past.
It’s a crude enough guide, but I can see the importance of understanding personalities with my kids. My eldest can be quite confrontational and competitive, whereas my daughter is much more sensitive, much more in need of encouragement. The thing I wonder about is how much of this should be taken seriously, how much variance there is within any personality type (quite a lot, I would imagine) and how your personality relates to choices you make in your career.
I’m INFJ … which kinda sounds about right. And now I’m going to lift this quiz and put it on my blog as well. 🙂
I did the test twice with a break in between. I still came out INFJ both times, but with different percentages.
I’m ISTJ, with the I very strongly expressed (89%), and S and J weakly expressed.
There must be variation within personality types to account for strength of expression of the elements.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought – Az might like this! 😀
I wonder, is there a dominant personality type amongst the blogging community?
I was a strong “I” and a strong “P”, with moderate “N” and “F”. This is interesting because I seem to recall being somewhat conflicted originally about “P” and “J”. Maturity (and kids) have made me more tolerant of messes and disorder!
I’m another ISFj – with the first three being moderately expressed and the fourth weakly expressed.
I recognised a lot of my traits in the description.
I suppose one of the things about personality types is the recognition that different people need to be treated differently. What works for the ESTJ doesn’t work so well as for the INFP etc., and ways can be developed to get them motivated and involved.
But personality typing possibly also has a role in helping people to understand what careers or interests might suit them best too. I’m kind of interested in this: what does your personality type say, if anything, about the choices you should make in life?
I reckon these personality tests are a load of old cobblers. That’s not because they’re not consistent in the way that they classify you, but because they are measuring your response to the test and not your personality – the same problem as IQ testing. If they’re to be useful and meaningful, it must be possible to reduce us into the 16 categories which the test defines. Worse than that, the four elements are supposedly independent so it factors our personality into 4 binary states. I think this is an insult to human dignity and diversity. The site woodpigeon linked to describes the rationale behind the four factors. Let’s look at these in turn.
First off, “energy expression”? What’s that supposed to mean? There is so much confusion of meaning here, how can anything useful be extracted? Take me – most people would probably describe me as introverted. I’m quite quiet when there are lots of people around, I don’t go partying every night, etc. On the other hand, when I talk to people online I’m quite bolshy and forthright in my opinions. Like most people I suspect, I get depressed when deprived of human contact. So you could say my ‘energy’ comes from the external world. etc. Instead, the test creates a meaning for the distinction between introvert and extrovert but there’s no particular reason to think that it couples strongly (or even weakly) with our normal usages of these terms. It also ignores the fact that we can be more or less introverted or extroverted depending on the social context.
This one is even worse – it’s quite mad. I completely believe information I receive from the external world. I also strongly rely on my intuition. My intuition tells me about things that my senses can’t.
Again, these two are not mutually exclusive. It is true that emotional responses sometimes trump logical responses, but I suggest that typically both are present. They’re not antagonistic – you could be an extreme ‘thinking’ type and an extreme ‘feeling’ type.
Getting kind of bored of this now, because it’s the same problem for every one. Everyone makes plans. Everyone improvises and revises their plans too.
Despite myself, I started doing the test, but I actually couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make myself give an answer to a question whose basis I reject. For example,
Gibberish. I’m extremely interested in general ideas, I’m an academic after all. On the other hand, I’m very interested in their realisations. Ultimately I think that all abstract ideas are meaningful because they are grounded by what happens in the real world.
I think the point of these tests is that answers to some questions are correlated with answers to other questions, and you can statistically extract these 4 key factors which together explain some of these correlations. The problem is, I suspect they don’t explain much of the correlations and even more than that I strongly suspect they have very little to do with anything other than the questions.
I would be very upset if any aspect of my life was determined by such pseudo-scientific nonsense as these tests.
Having said that, I’m not at all averse to thinking about what woodpigeon describes in his comment 8. I think we’d do better to think about particular situations and how people deal with them though, rather than constructing an absurdly simplified model like this and then using that in an unstudied way to make decisions about how people should interact with each other.
I’m rambling, I’ll shut up…
I agree that some of the questions were, well, strange, and sometimes I found them repetitive, too.
However, the INTJ I got was, especially the analysis by Marina Margaret Heiss, quite extraordinary. Kind of like looking into the mirror. Having simillar opinion about these tests (re: pseudo-scientific nonsense), I found this one suprisingly accurate.
Than again – the company I’m in with makes me a bit uneasy. I mean being in the same crowd with Augustus Caesar and Rudy Giuliani, fine…
But at the same time with Phil Donahue, Charles Rangel and Richard Gere?? That quite doesn’t seem to work, does it 🙂
Joe – if we hear about you walking around in a toga with a laurel band over your head I’ll know it’s time to depart for the German forests…
Dan – I agree with you that it is pseudo-scientific – for instance, I have a problem with the “thinking / feeling” one particularly as they do not seem mutually exclusive to me. However, I guess if we accept that different people have different personalities and enthusiasms, then the way we answer questions like these tends to tell us something about us. People who respond in a similar way to the tests probably have something in common in the way they relate to the world. As Joe says, it’s a kind of mirror. Maybe not a great one, but one that reflects back to us certain things about ourselves. So, no matter what kind of personal survey is taken by a lot of people there will be a tendency for self-selection, and probably certain broad conclusions are possible.
A very valid criticism of the Myers Briggs indicator is it’s not purely either / or – you are one type or another and that’s it. People can, and often do, fall in the middle. I have heard some people say that this is something the person needs to resolve for themselves, but it is more likely that this is more a weakness of the indicator itself. It’s not asking questions that are relevant to that individual.
I was particularly amused that my assessment indicated I should be particularly sensitive to “psychic phenomena”. How seriously can I take a personality assessment done by someone who believes in that kind of nonsense?
If I remember correctly, I’m INFP too. At least whatever I was, they called me idealist.
Great blog!
I’ve taken it three times in the past ten years and continue to remain INTJ. I am labeled a ‘Mastermind Rational’ and considered rare; comprising no more than one percent of the population. Interesting, isn’t it?
Yes, I think the 1% applies to INFP’s as well, and hopefully we each comprise 1/6 billionth of the population, and what it’s all about is trying to find those things that make us really different.
INFJ, by the way. Highly expressed intuition, moderately judgemental, moderately feeling, slightly introverted (had I done test ten years ago prob wold have said highly-introverted). Sure I did this test elsewhere a couple of weeks back and came out extroverted, and perceptive. Would have though I was more emotional…well, at least it tallies with my profile! Might just get blog off the ground over next few days…..
Second thoughts, agree with some of what Dan says. I am both interested in general ideas (very good lateral thinker) AND in the deatils of their realisation. Otherwise I would be bugger-all use as an architect. Ponder that….
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