Thursday, April 4, 2013

Myers-Briggs Personality Test, What is your personality type?


I was very pleased to take the Myers-Briggs personality inventory in class.  My personality type happens to be the rarest of the 16 possible personality types in the human population. I am an INFJ (Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling and Judging) personality type.

While I am not a staunch advocate (haha) of personality tests rendered by astrology (Forer effect, anyone?), I think tests provided by the psychological sciences such as Myers-Briggs, are AMAZINGLY accurate. Once you take the test, go to Wikipedia for your personality type (e.g. type in INFJ or whatever your four letters are) then, you can read about who you are! It’s actually a little scary how accurate the description is.

 I was further impressed by a depiction of my personality type on another random site:

“INFJs can often be found holding down jobs as AM radio talk-show hosts. They can also be found driving taxis in the greater Washington, DC area. Other common jobs often held by INFJs include vagrant, loony, whacko, and writer/director/producer of the television show "Seinfeld." INFJs can also be found feeding that crucial bit of information to determined FBI agents just before they are brutally murdered.”    Okay, just kidding….(I hope)

A great site to read about your personality and how it matches up with someone else’s personality is provided below. Are the two of you compatible? Which personality types pose problems in a relationship? Remember, you can’t alter your personality a great deal, so you’ll have to accept it and find someone else who happens to work for you and/or accepts you for who you are. Also, if you are one of those people who keeps giving everyone else advice on "how they should act" stop, because it won't work. Personality seems to be very ingrained.


Also, what about least common and most common personality types? See site below:

I know there is plenty of information about personality types and relationships but I wonder, what about friendships (and social experience, in general?)? Are some personality types more naturally “loners”? Are some “more accepting of everyone” while others are more gregarious, cliquey and group-thinky? Are there certain personality types who are naturally more popular with people or certain personality types who are naturally smarter?  Also, I noticed that Wikipedia focused heavily on the more positive traits when discussing the various Myers-Briggs personality categories. What about the more negative side? Are some personality types more prone to overconfidence, road-rage or being a clown at the circus?


6 comments:

  1. Interesting. I can apprciate this more than any astrology website. However, when I tried to use the tools to figure out my personality, I hit a bump on the sensors/intuitive options. On this I see parts of both sides that I do like knowledge of the past on the sensor side and possibilities for the future on the intuitive side. What then? I can't judge what if "best" since I know I do any of these options depending on the situation I'm in.

    The four result I get are ISTJ, ISFJ, INTJ, and INFJ. I see part of all of these I have but not all in one personality. Ihate to pick one for any bias I may have in making the decision (I may pick out what I want instead of how I am).

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  2. Thank you for sharing this with me John. I always thought you were an introvert based on your posts and your videos. I also think you are a little mix of a couple of those--then again, since we've only interacted online, I couldn't really say.

    Hahaha!:) Well, yes, read about the various types and see which one of them fits you the best. I know that I do really well with INTJ's. When doing the test, I made sure to be extremely, extremely honest in my answers (I wanted to be a thinker and not a feeler) but the results showed that I was, in fact, a feeler. One of the things that I found really interesting was the fact that sensers tend to relate well with other sensers and intuiters tend to relate well with other intuiters. One of the articles made it sound like this was one of the major determinants of good relationships (being with someone of your type in the sensing/intuiting category.) Sorry for how rash this response was...

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  3. I uderstand were you are going with this. Yes I'm a introverted. But that is general. Specifics is what concern me on such things. We are both feelers and thinkers. The question is how much of one compared to the other. Some people are more one than the other but it would be an easy mistake for people to think that they are only one (which, I think, many people don't realise). James Randi says that stage magic teach two lessons. 1)How to fool others and 2)how to fool youself. The second is much more important. You can be completly honest with youself on which type you are. Then you can show someone else your results and they can point out something about you that is the opposite. You are both thinker and feeler. You are probably more of a feeler based on your upbringing but the the thinker part of you is still growing when you started reading and learning the opposite side and thought about it. I think that this test is a good way to understand the general side of your personality. Specifics on the other hand would need to be done more more questions in each basic catagory.

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  4. Interesting; I did the MBTI years ago and discovered I was an INTJ but haven't thought about it much since. Renee, do you think there is any correlation between any of these dichotomies - e.g. extraversion/intraversion (E/I) or thinking/feeling (T/F) - and religiosity?

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  5. Forer effect... there's a name for it!

    As I discovered today when comparing MBTI to Keirsey's Temperament Sorter the essential classification system extends as far back as 590 BC. Perhaps you've come across some of these:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keirsey_Temperament_Sorter#Historical_development

    While those are useful questions Suva raises, I suspect human behaviour is governed by far more than personality. It's interesting to note the difference between Keirseys and Myers sytstems for example:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keirsey_Temperament_Sorter#Myers-Briggs_types_versus_Keirsey.27s_temperaments

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  6. Thanks, Suva, for this posting, it was good to be reminded of this and to re-assess my personality type.

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