Thoughts on Personality Psychology
I was just thinking about the abundance of personality tests out there, some with scientific credentials, and others intended just for fun. I find the Myers-Briggs personality types interesting. But I find the descriptions of the different Myers-Briggs traits based on Jungian psychology (Intuitive, Perceiving, etc) to be somewhat vague. I've heard many different definitions, and it seems that there's no really clear definition of what it means to be intuitive or sensing or what have you. Which means that people will tend to take the terms to mean whatever they want them to mean, and, as a result, might not learn much about themselves that they didn't know before.
I'm also coming to realize, especially after taking a course in personality psychology, that ways of studying personality that are based on organizing people into types based on traits are limited in their usefulness, since the categories don't apply helpfully to everyone. Human nature tends toward bell-curves, so there will be more people in the middle of the spectrum when it comes to any given trait, and fewer people who tend toward the extremes. And for people who tend toward the middle of a given trait, being put into one category or another doesn't tell them much. As my personality psychology textbook points out, trait theory is limited in its usefulness because people's behaviour isn't nearly as consistent across situations as we tend to think.
I think that a more helpful way to think of personality is to describe people according to their unique pattern of responding to different situations. As it explains in my personality psychology textbook, although people's behaviour isn't very consistent across different situations, it is consistent between similar situations, and we seem to intuitively realize this. Studies have shown that people are likely to consider someone's behavior more coherent if it shows consistency between similar situations than if it stays the same across a wide variety of situations.
So, instead of thinking of someone as inherently shy or outgoing, we might learn more about the person from looking at the kinds of situations in which they're shy and in which they're outgoing, and analyzing the pattern. For example, maybe the person seems shy in a crowd, but is more outgoing in a small group. In which case, the apparent shyness might come from the overload of sensory stimulation in a certain situation, rather than shyness per se. I think that looking at personality in terms of a pattern of responses might make it more clear exactly what is behind the traits that we see in people. I've been thinking lately that I might want to go into psychological research. I'm really interested in understanding differences between people, and in coming up with better ways to understand people.
Edit: Just to be clear, 99% of the tests available on the internet do not fall into the category of tests with scientific credentials, because they're almost all written by laypeople.
I'm also coming to realize, especially after taking a course in personality psychology, that ways of studying personality that are based on organizing people into types based on traits are limited in their usefulness, since the categories don't apply helpfully to everyone. Human nature tends toward bell-curves, so there will be more people in the middle of the spectrum when it comes to any given trait, and fewer people who tend toward the extremes. And for people who tend toward the middle of a given trait, being put into one category or another doesn't tell them much. As my personality psychology textbook points out, trait theory is limited in its usefulness because people's behaviour isn't nearly as consistent across situations as we tend to think.
I think that a more helpful way to think of personality is to describe people according to their unique pattern of responding to different situations. As it explains in my personality psychology textbook, although people's behaviour isn't very consistent across different situations, it is consistent between similar situations, and we seem to intuitively realize this. Studies have shown that people are likely to consider someone's behavior more coherent if it shows consistency between similar situations than if it stays the same across a wide variety of situations.
So, instead of thinking of someone as inherently shy or outgoing, we might learn more about the person from looking at the kinds of situations in which they're shy and in which they're outgoing, and analyzing the pattern. For example, maybe the person seems shy in a crowd, but is more outgoing in a small group. In which case, the apparent shyness might come from the overload of sensory stimulation in a certain situation, rather than shyness per se. I think that looking at personality in terms of a pattern of responses might make it more clear exactly what is behind the traits that we see in people. I've been thinking lately that I might want to go into psychological research. I'm really interested in understanding differences between people, and in coming up with better ways to understand people.
Edit: Just to be clear, 99% of the tests available on the internet do not fall into the category of tests with scientific credentials, because they're almost all written by laypeople.