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Personality Types (Myer-Briggs)

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I 66.67%

N 52.17%

T 70.27%

P 83.87%

Seems like a fairly common result :)

I'd be interested to see if female Objectivists also score INTJ. I think they would more than the general female population. Not to sound like a mysogynist, but I've read that women's personalities are generally more inclined to follow emotions and feelings more than men. Objectivist women, though, would most likely score INTJ at the same rate than men - the Dagny type :P

Well, I can't claim to be a true Objectivist, because I don't agree with Miss Rand's idea that women ought to be chained to their men, but I agree with most of the philosophy. Fairly strong on that P point rather than J tho.

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That being said I would like to see a double blind study conducted to test the validity of this test.
Well, before we start blinding people for such a study, we need to figure out what is being tested. Is there some independent fact that this test tests for, or is this just a way of classifying people. Here's another test: the chore is to pick one number for question:

Q1: 1; 20; 32

Q2: 7; 13; 91

Q3; 32; 1; 64

We could run a quadruple-blind test for all I care, the question is, would the resulting taxonomy of 9 "types" refer to anything significant about minds? How do we determine that the test is really measuring that thing?

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That's correct. If, in a double-blind study, I rate as an INTJ but am unknowingly given the results for an ESTJ and find them just as accurate, then human resources-types are probably mistaken in believing that this test tells them much about anyone's personality.

I am an ENTP, but I found ISFJ to be a reasonable description of my personality too. I had a long discussion with a proponent of MBTI, and he was unable to defend its merits. According to Wikipedia and the Skeptic's Dictionary, it's bogus. And it's based on the work of Jung. I can't really see a whole lot of reason to give it any credence at this point.

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Question: Why are you all interested in this personality test? What value do you get by someone else telling you who you are?

To me this seems like astrology: people go to the crystal ball (I mean newspaper) <--[stole this joke from the thread about volition] to tell them who they are, what they like, what is going to happen in their life, who is the perfect lover for them etc'.

So I figure that this must be the same type of appeal for people here: The need to be told who they are.

?Thoughts, anyone

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  • 3 weeks later...

Apparently I am an ISTJ on the Jung test. I took the test on the Advisor Team website and it labeled me as a Guardian but I don't know which type - Supervisors (ESTJ) | Protectors (ISFJ) | Inspectors (ISTJ) | Providers (ESFJ) - because I don't want to pay $14.95 for the rest. What I read for Guardian only fits me a little so I don't think it is very accurate. A lot of the questions were ridiculous, as others have pointed out, since neither answer is logical. I'm going to guess it would end up being the ISTJ on there as well since I don't ever score very high on the touchy-feely scale and I am definitely NOT an extrovert.

I don't know why I take tests like this anyway, their explanations generally don't fit me.

Edited by kuuipo
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  • 3 weeks later...

I just finished reading Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types by David Keirsey. I think there are still a lot of differences not accounted for within each type but nonetheless, as a general guide (Can one trully expect more than that?), it was fairly informative. The type which describes me the closest is INTJ.

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INTP as well. In fact the test that I paid for returned a score of 65% Introversion, 78% Intuition, 100% Thinking, 78% Perceiving.

The single-word test I took at SimilarMinds.com this afternoon returned a score of Introverted (I) 58.82%, Intuitive (N) 64.52%, Thinking (T) 82.14%, Perceiving (P) 56.67%.

I have taken MBTI online tests 4 times in the last day, in addition to the paid one three months ago. INTP every time, very heavily T. So it seems sometimes I allow a little bit of Feeling tendencies to come through.

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I have taken this type of test a few times, and each one scores me as "INTJ," though I can't remember the percentages for each. I tried reading the "horoscope-like" summaries for INTJ dispassionately, and I have to say that they summed me up reasonably well. The false dichotomies in many of the test questions were a little irritating.

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I took the mini Keirsey Temperament Sorter personality test. Well, it tells me that I'm Rational. But I wasn't rationally able to purchase the report.

I thought the test was saturated with the reason/emotion, introspection/extrospection, principles/experience dichotomies. For instance:

60. Do you prize in yourself

a vivid imagination

a strong hold on reality

The author does not seem to understand that a person can hold both values equally, as I do. For instance, the only way I can keep a firm hold on reality is by identifying the facts of a situation as objectively (and contextually) as I am able, and in determining how to act, I must use my imagination to problem-solve. A vivid imagination really helps with this. What is most important is thinking contextually, and this test doesn't seem to recognize that.

As was mostly the case for the questions, I'm both in certain contexts:

11. Is it your way to

pick and choose at some length

make up your mind quickly

It depends on the situation -- how much time I have, how familiar I am with the choices, how important the outcome is, if there are a thousand right answers or only one, etc. There are plenty of times I choose quickly. It doesn't take but a second to know that I can justify my choice with good reasons.

Now, as far as learning how to liven-up your personality, I would recommend a lecture from a man with TONS of personality -- Dr. Andrew Bernstein and his CD "How to Be an Impassioned Valuer."

Also, personality is one subject where I find it helps to compare myself with others. For instance, does my personality resonate more with Andrew Bernstein or Harry Binswanger (both wonderful people, by the way)? With Dagny or Cheryl? And why? What kind of traits do each have? What traits do I have that match? Are these traits good or bad? And why? How to these traits relate to the Objectivist virtues? Etc.

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I find these kinds of personality tests hardly more useful than astrological profiles. For starters, they are full of false dichotomies and very vague identifications (as pointed out in an earlier post ) But more telling is that virtually no characteristic has a 'negative' interpretation.

As Pony Girl summarized in the post linked above

E - Extraversion - tend to focus on people and things

I - Introversion - tend to focus on ideas and impressions

Why are both of these universally presented as positive, while both certainly have fully negative degrees, e.g.

E - Extraversion - so fundamentally innately boring you are that you feel compelled to perpetually distract yourself from having to be bothered coming up with your own purpose in life, this you achieve by constantly being on the phone, updating social networking sites, going to parties as often as possible, and generally feeling uncomfortable alone

I - Introversion - so cynical and jaded you are that you despise the presence of other human beings, feeling either so morally superior to them that you can not be bothered to acknowledge their existence or so morally inferior to them that you feel by recognizing your existence you are inconveniencing them, so you take great pains to avoid at all costs interactions with other human beings.

And then, of course, neither of these personality types make any qualitative assessments which can be used to refine one's personality into something they might find more conducive to a more fulfilling life, like a doctor asking only how much you weigh but not discussing the health benefits that come from proper diet and exercise. These tests do nothing but inaccurately capture a dynamic personality in one static moment and give you no direction and I find often serve (like astrology does for most people) to promulgate a self fulfilling 'prophecy' e.g. - I am this type of person, therefore I should be expected to behave in this way, therefore I have no problem behaving this way and disregard any consideration of how I ought to behave. Lastly, they ignore the complex interaction between chance, nature, social indoctrinated habit, and fully informed volitional choices have on one's behavior. Where some genetic predispositions might be unhealthy, introspection would reveal this an enable a person to refine their behavior through personal choice to avoid such reactions where inappropriate, but 'personality profiles' like these merely identify and classify, and implicitly suggest that is 'how you are'. All of them seem to be implicitly materialistically deterministic through omission.

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  • 1 month later...

I just took the test.

I am an INTJ.

Introverted-89

Intuitive-50

Thinking-100

Judging-44

very expressed introvert

moderately expressed intuitive personality

very expressed thinking personality

moderately expressed judging personality

I have never taken a personality test before, but I doubt they are very valid. Since they are being measured on someone elses scale instead of your own.

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INTJ.

Strength of the preferences %

I: 11

N: 75

T: 75

J: 67

Prior to getting into Objectivism, I was an ESTP.

That's a pretty big change. If I'm not mistaken, ESTP is the "I am charming, witty, popular, and want to experience all things!" type. I can see changing one letter or two, but if people can go almost completely the opposite direction this may not be a "type" at all but rather a chosen form of expression which can be changed fairly easily with a level of self-awareness. I've taken this test a few times and in a few different forms, and the strength of my preferences does change on occasion but I'm pretty much always near 100% of the N part of the scale. Meyers-Briggs folks say that 85% of the population has some form of S personality type, i.e., most of the world is made up of *S*J or *S*P people. This can be very frustrating for us conceptual folks. Certainly people of any personality type can be great achievers but the other day when I was thinking about it and about why I always seem to be butting heads with S types a phrase from Rand popped into my head - "concrete bound". Is a strong S preference any indication of being concrete-bound in the way Rand described? And if these personality types are in fact fairly malleable, would we see more people leaning toward the N side of the scale if they had to be more conceptual to get by? Just my random musings.

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