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, I was typically the only one anywhere close to S--so discussion was always about the difference between J and P.

I had the same reaction as you when I first took a Myers-Briggs/Jung test in high school. I thought it was no better than horoscopes, and went back and forth between thinking it described me in only very obvious, superficial, pointless ways, or it didn't describe me at all. After having talked to a lot of people about it, my view has softened somewhat. The descriptions of all the letters combined--INTJ, say--tend to be kind of dumb, but the descriptions of each axis separately make some sense. And then having those descriptions can be an interesting start to a conversation, and can even occasionally help people explain their differences to each other in a common language that everyone is familiar with. These sorts of tests are also basically the origin of the terms "introversion" and "extraversion" which are definitely useful.

[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.