Five-factor personality test results
"Which Muppet character are you?" is not my idea of a personality test. Geoffrey Miller's book Spent got me interested in psychology's Big Five Personality Traits, which are supposed to be all independent of each other so you can really describe someone with them. (I'd heard of them before I read Spent, but I didn't really believe in them or see the usefulness of being able to evaluate people with them.) So here are my results from the test at learnmyself.com:
One thing this cleared up for me was whether the amount of hard work I put into special projects (the rules for Civilization, my little troubleshooting notebook at work) makes me conscientious despite all the classes I skipped and commitments I avoided. I actually am conscientious in just that one way: I'm cautious, I don't like making decisions without complete information (too neurotic), and with my level of openness that manifests as creating big data-gathering projects.
If I had known I was so low in conscientiousness at a younger age, I could have made very different career choices, and not gone to college with all those long-term research projects I would never complete. On the other hand, I ended up at a liberal arts college (good for high Openness) and a clock-punching job that gets me working much harder than I would on my own.
On outofservice.com, I was a O41-C21-E15-A50-N66 Big Five, compared to this test's O35-C10-E1-A31-N85. I averaged 9 points higher on everything else but 19 points lower on Neuroticism, so the tests disagree about whether I really rank an 85. I'm willing to believe it, though -- I constantly find myself making lifestyle and entertainment choices that only 1% of the population agrees with, so there must be something unusual about me besides intelligence.
Hope I can get somebody else to take the test -- after you take it the first time, you start looking at all the actions it asks about going, "Oh! Is that something I wouldn't have done if I were extraverted?"
One thing this cleared up for me was whether the amount of hard work I put into special projects (the rules for Civilization, my little troubleshooting notebook at work) makes me conscientious despite all the classes I skipped and commitments I avoided. I actually am conscientious in just that one way: I'm cautious, I don't like making decisions without complete information (too neurotic), and with my level of openness that manifests as creating big data-gathering projects.
If I had known I was so low in conscientiousness at a younger age, I could have made very different career choices, and not gone to college with all those long-term research projects I would never complete. On the other hand, I ended up at a liberal arts college (good for high Openness) and a clock-punching job that gets me working much harder than I would on my own.
On outofservice.com, I was a O41-C21-E15-A50-N66 Big Five, compared to this test's O35-C10-E1-A31-N85. I averaged 9 points higher on everything else but 19 points lower on Neuroticism, so the tests disagree about whether I really rank an 85. I'm willing to believe it, though -- I constantly find myself making lifestyle and entertainment choices that only 1% of the population agrees with, so there must be something unusual about me besides intelligence.
Hope I can get somebody else to take the test -- after you take it the first time, you start looking at all the actions it asks about going, "Oh! Is that something I wouldn't have done if I were extraverted?"