$me =~ m/INT[PJ]/i;
Wednesday, April 5, 2006
Keywords: Me
A friend took the Myers-Briggs personality test and was scored as an INTJ. I read the description for INTJ, and I thought to myself, "gee, that sounds almost exactly like me". I had taken one of these tests a long time ago, back in junior year of high school. As I recall, I was an INTP back then. Well, it has been quite a number of years and I have discovered more about myself since then, so I decided to take the test again (it only took seven minutes). Well, as it turns out, I'm still an INTP; darn, I really liked the INTJ description. What is interesting, however, is that the descriptions for both INTP and INTJ fit me quite well. For one, they talk about different things: the INTP description page talked about a tendency towards analysis and the INTJ page talked about perfectionism. These two description pages were not describing a common set of variables, and thus without the constraints of a sort of mutual exclusiveness, it can accomplish what I call the "fortune-cookie effect". Call me a skeptic, but most of these sorts of personality test results seem to cast a fairly wide net so that people will be more likely to say "oh right, that is me" even if the test results did not really mean that much.
Or it could be that this particular set of descriptions was poorly written. There are a gazillion pages out there with different descriptions of what an INTP is and what an INTJ is, and I didn't really feel like Googling and comparing...
This entry was edited on 2006/04/05 at 23:01:21 GMT -0400.
Posted by Ruthan
Woohoo! Rationals 1, Guardians 0.
Some time ago I found a few very helpful resources that encouraged me to think about MBTI results not so much as a set of Boolean-style switches (one is introverted or extroverted, one is a thinker or a feeler, etc., which seems to be what a lot of typological descriptors revolve around) but as an indicator of what kind of tools one might expect to find in one's mental kit: http://www.geocities.com/lifexplore/jft.htm and http://www.bestfittype.com/cognitiveprocesses.html.
My search was prompted by my realization that I increasingly valued kindness and consideration in human interactions, and that didn't seem like a very T-oriented, shadow-function-F thing to do. But then I realized that with my two middle functions being Ne (which is concerned almost exclusively with the future) and Si (which focuses on the past) and dominant Ti (which I find yields long periods of staring out into space with a look on my face which apparently resembles some kind of consternation), the only function I really had left that dealt with other people in the here-and-now was extroverted Feeling. The lengthy INTP description, as I recall, refers to Fe as the "shadow function", and primarily addresses emotion. But that's an oversimplification of Fe, which is really more about being socially interactive than about any particular emotional state or lack thereof. I wasn't convinced that I really related to the Fe description on that site until I realized how much I beat myself up over failing to write messages, recognize birthdays, or ascertain that other members of a party are satisfied before I make a decision.
Obviously the point of a preference ranking is to indicate that (for instance) my Ti will almost invariably overbalance my Fe when it comes to things like decision-making. But there are some things that Ti just can't do, and then Fe always makes an appearance - which doesn't mean that Fe is any less a function that I can use naturally, but only that there are others to which I default more readily.
And then there is the comparison of the first four preferences (Ti Ne Si Fe, which I use in varying degrees, but all with minimal effort) to the last four (Te Ni Se Fi). Unlike the primary group, functions in the second group are hard or impossible to understand, and I've found I manage those things only with a lot of concentration and/or effort. Other than Te (I'm pretty good at charts and graphs), the rest of them are lost on me. Extraverted Sensing? That's when you realize halfway through the day that your neck itches (and then Si chimes in to tell you it's because you never took the tag off your shirt when you bought it), right?
Anyway, hopefully that'll save you some Googling.