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While I'm thinking of it
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urbeatle posted earlier that he took one of those online Myers-Briggs tests, which reminded me that a few years back my employer paid for me to take an 'official' personality test from the Frank Whyte Education Services people and later to take a training class where we learned about the different kinds of personalities and what-not.I'm deeply suspicious of the whole thing because, first, it's not really clear to me how falsefiable it is (I believe the instructor said at one point that the test was incredibly accurate and at another that your results might vary depending on what was going on the day you took the test, etc.) and also how meaningful it is (the choice of the four dualities seems pretty arbitrary; I bet there are others that could have been chosen that would be as measurable or more so). But, you know, the whole thing was sort of interesting.
Anyway, while I was cleaning my room the other day I happened to find the report they sent me, so let it be recorded that I am an INFP! Now if someone asks me while I'm online I might actually be able to find this information.
They also gave me a little bar graph showing that my test results showed that my preferences had the following level of 'clarity':
Introversion: Moderate [opposed to Extraversion]
iNtuition: Clear [opposed to Sensing]
Feeling: Clear [opposed to Thinking]
Perceiving Moderate [opposed to Judging]
These are along a scale that goes: [no label], Slight, Moderate, Clear, and Very Clear. [Insert Scientology joke here if desired.]
My recollection is that the majority of people are I, N, F, and P as opposed to their opposites, making me a super-freak! Phear me!
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I think the four axis are more or less ok. Introvert and Extrovert are pretty obvious and definitely important -- and, I think, completely ignored in social interactions, to everyone's detriment. iNtuitive and Sensing are second in line in accuracy and importance, but they could probably think about this a little bit more and make it a little more rigorous in definition.
same goes for Perceiving/Judging, only more so; I think they "got something" there, but the definitions are pretty flakey and tainted by our assumptions about what the words mean; for a long time, I thought Js would be more judgemental than Ps, but apparently the only thing this is supposed to mean is whether you make decisions based more on immediate circumstances (J) or on long-term plans and memories (P). it's kind of a "temporal focus" scale; extreme Js will maintain a tight focus on what they are doing right now and will have strict schedules, while extreme Ps will daydream a lot and keep vague plans on what to do next. but on the other hand, this definition is so fuzzy that there's a competitor to the official MBTI test (socionics) that swaps J and P if you are an I -- so I would come out an INTJ on their test, and you would be an INFJ. (at least, this does provide a bit of falsifiability; there may be some Barnum Effect in the personality descriptions, but if you take the MBTI and then read the Socionics personality description without taking their test, it sounds completely wrong.)
T/F would probably be a more rigorous scale if they called it Objects/People, since that's what it's really supposed to mean; do you focus more on things/ideas when making decisions, or on people's feelings? it's really supposed to be an objective vs. subjective scale, but by calling it Thinking/Feeling, it confused people, because it suggests that Feeling people can't be logical or rational, or can't apply logic to their decisions about people. and, on the flip side, I don't think all Ts are necessarily logical in their T-ness.
add to all of this the rather weird wording on a number of the questions. some of them seem very ambiguous to me, or could be true in specific narrow circumstances but false in others. I think that's the main reason why how you feel at the time you take the test affects how you score; you interpret the more ambiguous questions one way when you're in one mood, a different way when you're in another.
so, to summarize: I think they're measuring something that's really there, but they probably have no idea what it really is. like the blindmen and the elephant.
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