Personality Test

[mrissa]

I'm going to tell you the main thing you can find out from giving a Mrissa a personality test -- any personality test at all, really. If the test itself doesn't give you this information, it's probably pretty worthless, so here goes:

Mrissas hate false dichotomies.

Some personality tests account for this with a "no preference" or "no opinion" option. This is not the same thing. Having no opinion is not the same thing as holding both opinions strongly because the question was phrased stupidly in a way that utterly contradicts one's method of approaching the world.

steve_dash_o was talking about the Myers-Briggs, so it's the one that's immediately coming to mind as frustrating this way, but really the other tests I've seen are bad with it, too. The people who are enthusiastic about these tests tend to say, "Well, pick the one that fits best," or "Go with your first impulse." My first impulse is to stop taking the test, because the options it's asking me to choose between are not real options at all. My second impulse is usually either "Yes, both," or "No, neither." This whole "first impulse" thing assumes that I "really" agree with the premise of the question and am suppressing knowledge of my answer. I don't think that's the case. I think sometimes the question is just wrong.

What I said in Steve's comments was that they end up sounding to me like, "Would you rather have soup or a backrub?" Soup and a backrub are not the same category of thing, and I can't think of any sensible reason why I should ever have to say, "You know, soup on the whole really is better than backrubs are on the whole." And I don't think that the information one gets from trying to force that choice is particularly valuable.

Even among things that are the same kind of thing, I often dig my heels in when asked to pick one. I can decide on a meal at a restaurant faster than most people I know, but I have no delusions that it's the meal, and if the waitbeing was to say, "Surprise! You never get to eat anything else!", I would kick the waitbeing in the shins and run away and make my own food.

I realize that this makes me a totally typical #17, or PDQR, or Late Winter With the Thaw Just Started, or whatever else you use to categorize people. But really, isn't Nitpicky Crank enough of a personality type? Can't I just tell you that's what I am and then we can go on with things?

Comments

[steve-dash-o.livejournal.com]

You certainly make some valid points. Any personality categorization scheme is going to have its flaws, some more than others. People are way too complicated for any single scheme to adequately describe everybody.

From what I've read, a lot of these sorts of tests are intentionally written to force a choice, without an "I don't know". It's sort of a question of testing philosophy, really. We deal with the same sort of thing when designing physics diagnostics. The idea is, basically, even if the preference for one over the other is very small, we still want to measure it. Two people could give identical answers all along until they get to the question where the two answers are almost the same as each other, or seem to go in different directions. Then those two people pick different answers on that "hard" question, and that gives you a way to discriminate between them.

Of course, for that discrimination to be useful, the question itself has to be valid and well-formed. And also, of course, there's no way to account for every way somebody might read a question.

Personally, on your example, I would much rather have a backrub than soup (or even food I like way better than soup). I don't find that hard a hard choice at all. That could conceivably mean that I am more wont for human intamacy than I am for tasty food. Or it could mean nothing. But it would be just one question out of 70 on this test, and I've been told the "real" MBTI is much longer. But that may be what they're going for on the questions that frustrate you -- trying to see if you value one sort of thing more than another sort of thing, even though they're apples and oranges.

There's one specific thing you wrote in my comments that I disagree with, though: "They don't seem to cover people who are naturally introverted but feel obligated to sometimes behave in extroverted ways." I would say that description fits me, yet I've always felt that my MBTI type describes me quite well, and I don't have a big problem with many of the questions. Introversion -- at least in the MBTI sense -- isn't the same thing as shyness, or a fear of being around people, or anything of that sort. It's just a question of what "recharges" and "drains" you. You can be an introvert and still be sociable and outgoing at times, just as you can be an extrovert and still enjoy spending an evening alone with a book. So to be "naturally introverted" but sometimes "act" extroverted is, I think, totally natural and not outside the bounds of the MBTI scheme.

Veering a bit off-topic into apples and oranges territory: Ever played around with What's Better? (http://www.whatsbetter.com/) It's sort of like a "Hot or Not" site, except you just pick which you like better out of completely random things. Comparisons like Kant vs. Powerpuff Girls, or A Pile of Money vs Summer. Lots of fun. (Although it seems to be down at the moment I write this comment.)

[pameladean]

The thing is, those questions are not hard. They are meaningless.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, what Pamela said. The idea that the question is valid and well-formed is usually the problem in the first place. And it doesn't sound like you're getting what I'm saying: it's not that my preference is small, it's that I object to the very concept of preferring one or the other.

I think some people see ranking things as a much more valid way of dealing with them than others. I think almost all people who write personality tests see these rankings as valid and reasonable. I don't.

I've looked at What's Better, but I got bored quickly, because not only was it a shallow way to see the world -- some of those are fun -- but because I don't believe it's harmless. I believe that the insistence on imposing hierarchies for no reason limits people's worlds and damages our society as a whole.

I think people asking "hard" questions like, "Would you rather kill your mother or your oldest friend?" are saying a good deal about their worldview, and if your first impulse is not, "NO, neither!" then I think there's something wrong with at least one of the people involved (that is, you, your mother, or your oldest friend).

[steve-dash-o.livejournal.com]

I think almost all people who write personality tests see these rankings as valid and reasonable. I don't.

I don't really understand that. I understand that ranking things can be hard or impossible if they are different sorts of things, but I don't see what is bad about ranking things in principle.

I believe that the insistence on imposing hierarchies for no reason limits people's worlds and damages our society as a whole.

This seems like a very strong reaction to me, especially as a reaction to something like What's Better? which is not trying to a "serious" ranking of things. Can you give an example of a type of this damage that you see? I think that, in general at least, categorizing things into hierarchies is a valid and valuable exercise. It's sort of the first step we always take in science when we want to study something new.

I think people asking "hard" questions like, "Would you rather kill your mother or your oldest friend?" are saying a good deal about their worldview, and if your first impulse is not, "NO, neither!" then I think there's something wrong with at least one of the people involved.

What, then, *are* they saying about their worldview? With your example, it's clearly not a lack of respect for life -- it's just a question, not a command. I think questions like that can be an interesting intellectual exercise, prompting people to think about various attributes of things and the relative "weights" that they assign to them. Below, Pamela speculates as to whether the testmakers have an unnuanced view of the world, but to me it seems just the opposite -- I feel like an *inability* to make these sorts of comparisons points to thinking about things too rigidly.

(More realistically, it's probably neither. It's probably a preference that has nothing to do with intellectual sophistication.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If you can't see why having a total ordering in which the PowerPuff Girls are better than Kant but worse than your grandmother's chocolate chip cookies and so on through the entire contents of our culture is more needlessly rigid than not doing so, I'm really not sure what I can do to further explain the concept to you.

You're reducing a multivariant world to a single dimension: better or worse. Yes or no. Up or down. Sometimes the answer is different, maybe, sideways. Sometimes the answer is not yes or no but "little green fishies." But serious and silly tests alike reinforce the idea that the answer is never, ever fishies, or even sideways, because you have to choose one.

Don't think that has no social impact. People are so used to answering either/or questions that when they get asked, "Do you want freedom or safety?", many of them don't bother to think about it and say, "Yes, both, please; how can we best arrange it to get both?" Or on a smaller scale, "Do you want your kids to learn music or visual arts or sex ed or phys ed? You can only have one. Do you want to educate the smart kids or the slow kids? You can only have one. Do you want to educate the deaf kids, the blind kids, the autistic kids, or the kids who don't speak any English? YOU CAN ONLY HAVE ONE." And people are left scrambling and mumbling, "Well, I suppose we have to help the slow kids...so maybe the school doesn't need an orchestra after all..." instead of thinking creatively and demanding more and figuring out how to get it.

It means that our society demands of people, "Do you want to date men or women? Pick one now. You're either on our team or their team. Figure it out RIGHT NOW because THERE IS NO MIDDLE GROUND." (And you know what? There isn't. Because bisexual people aren't in the middle -- that's what we've been saying all along -- they're on both 'sides.') That makes some people feel very comfortable and very safe, but it denies whole great swaths of reality.

(And scientists don't always rank things. Matrices and wave equations are not ranked as better and worse ways to solve QM problems in general. They're just different. Scientific taxonomies are more often grouped than ranked, and when they are ranked, it's often been shown to be entirely wrong-headed and unscientific. (This is not the time and place for the "more highly evolved" rant, but it fits in here.) If you insisted that the point (1, 0) absolutely had to have a different absolute value than the point (0, 1), you would be wrong. Just plain flat-out wrong. And unscientific to boot.)

So what benefit is there to thinking about the death of your mother and your oldest friend comparatively? What does it do except to encourge you to rank things in life, to make sure that you know whose pain counts more, to make sure that you accept the notion that everything comes down to hierarchies and binary choices? What do you find out about your feelings about your mother and your oldest friend that you wouldn't find out from a question like, "Tell me one of your favorite memories of your mom?"

It's not that we're unable to make these comparisons. It's that we're unwilling to force a binary, hierarchical answer on them when we've made the comparisons and decided that mu, the question has no answer as posed.

I would not have the life I have if I had continued to accept the questions as posed. And almost every facet of my life would be the poorer for it.

[steve-dash-o.livejournal.com]

If you can't see why having a total ordering [...] is more needlessly rigid than not doing so

I'm not sure I would call whatsbetter.com "rigid". It's ridiculous and highly arbitrary, based on the whims and tastes of the people who vote. That's why I enjoy it. It is not a legitimate or "real" attempt to rank everything in the universe in order of "goodness" (whatever that is).

Yes, it reducesa multivariant world to one dimension. That's what allows the strange comparisons to come up in the first place. And I stand by my statement that such things can be an intellectual game: figure out what the various differences are, decide which ones are relevant, try to accomodate those that are with a set of roughly orthogonal axes, assign scales based on how you value the concepts embodied by those axes, and pick the vector with the largest magnitude. The party game "Apples to Apples" is pretty much the same idea.

Sometimes the answer is different, maybe, sideways.

*Of course* the answer is sometimes "sideways". I would say it's almost *always* some degree of sideways rather than exactly "up" or "down". To give a *full* answer you need a continuum. State the direction in whatever units of angle you prefer. But none of that means that simplification is inherently flawed. It sounds to me like you are objecting to the whole principle of simplifying complex problems into more manageable ones. This started as an objection to the particular simplifications made by personality tests, but your arguments make your objection sound much broader than that.

Simplying things, ignoring certain variables, etc., can be either helpful or detrimental. All such reductions (especially when taken down to a single dimension) are inherently artificial, but that doesn't mean all of them are all bad. I would never insist on narrowing down a social or political point like your examples to a binary decision, and I think most people are smart enough to know the world isn't that simple. If people are not aware of the constraints on the questions posed to them, then they need to be shown those constraints so they can understand them better. But we can't just throw away the whole idea of constraints, lest every decision become an inpenetrable infinite-dimensional morass.


Regarding science: I didn't actually say that scientists "rank" everything. I said they categorize things into hierarchies, which doesn't neccesarily mean there is a directionality (which "rank" implies). I absolutely agree -- scientists group things more than rank things. I made that comment about categorizing only because you mentioned "imposing hierarchies for no reason". To me, "hierarchies" means groups and subgroups, and that's all. I don't see anything wrong with scientific ranking, though, as long as you are ordering things by a rigidly defined parameter. "More evolved" is not a meaningful or well defined parameter, but "information content", "mass", and "strength of hydrogen absorption lines" are, and there's nothing wrong with using them to see if they tell you anything or not.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't think you'll find a dictionary to support even a denotative definition of hierarchy as "groups and subgroups." The connotations certainly aren't limited to that.

I think we're covering some stuff on e-mail by now, so I'll leave the rest of it except this: no, I don't think people are smart enough to know the world isn't that simple when their society tries to drill into their heads that it is that simple at every turn, and that everybody fits into a ranking, the last one standing, the one very best winner. How nuanced is the political discussion in this nation? Not very. And nuance, lately, has been losing to soundbite, and to exactly the kind of binary opposition we're talking about here. "Give me a simple answer: do you oppose the war or not?" The answers are not allowed not to be that simple and that reductive, and that's a loss for all of us.

[pameladean]

Yes yes yes! We hates those damnable tests, precious, we hates them forever. Nasssty wicked false dichotomies. I always end up yelling at the test, and then I go away and spend a pleasurable hour deciding whether their language skills are inadequate or whether they really have such a stupid unnuanced stereotypical view of the world, and which is to be pitied more if so. If they would even just have an "N/A" category rather than that stupid No opinion when one is bursting with opinions, THANK YOU. There is nothing irritating in quite the same way as a process intended to discover your personality that only demonstrates that the people putting you through it don't know you exist.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do you know why we love you, here at this house? It is because you are such a Pamela. That is why.

[toolittletime.livejournal.com]

Yes! You've explained it much better than I ever could or did. But so many people just don't get it - some of those tests seem about as useful as astrology in describing me & my reality.

I just may steal that personality type from you - NitPicky Crank suits me. Or maybe Nitpicky Crank with a side of Trivia Storage Facility.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We Leos are often insightful that way.

Er.

When I was in college, I was in a bookstore with an acquaintance who was into astrology. So I read her out a description of a Zodiac sign and said, "Who does that sound like?" "Lars!" she exclaimed. "I know, totally. When's his birthday?" I said. "[month]!" she said. (I forget which.) "NO WAY!" "REALLY?" "Yeah, it's not him. He's something else entirely." She was not pleased.

Actually, I'm willing to go with the idea that, especially in pre-industrial societies, babies who hit crucial developmental milestones in, say, cold and deprivation vs. warmth and plenty might well have some personality traits emerging in common. Doesn't have anything to do with stars, but I could see that the rough time of year when one was born might well have an impact.

[greykev.livejournal.com]

in pre-industrial societies

Yes!! But then you'd have to factor in latitude, altitude, average rainfall, living conditions... September in England might be equivalent to November in greece/rome.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

True, although comparative behaviors might matter as much as absolute facts in terms of how kids reacted. If the parents weren't fussing about the temperature in September in England because it was normal and they were well-prepared for it, but in November they were starting to feel damn cold, it might come out the same as September/November in the Mediterranean as far as the kids were concerned. Or it might not.

[greykev.livejournal.com]

I think infant environmental stimuli are significant and independant of people: ambient temperature, light levels, length of day/night, relative humidity, etc. Also depending on the time of year the moms would be eating different foods so basic nutrition/trace elements would fluxuate and affect development as well.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Loathsome stupid tests! "Soup or backrub?" Well, you didn't ask if I am hungry or not, what my physical mood is, if Mr. Torture Fingers is offering or my good buddy Ms Makes-me-feel-great. So, no, don't ask 'what's my first impulse' because my first impulse is to consider these other questions.

[raecarson.livejournal.com]

This whole "first impulse" thing assumes that I "really" agree with the premise of the question and am suppressing knowledge of my answer.

Psychology is fatally flawed in that it assumes the human mind can be neatly packaged. And it's arrogant in that it assumes such packaging is a better indicator of one's identity than the person him/herself.

Which is why psychological tests are so easily manipulated.

*takes Myers-Briggs*
*decides to be ENTJ mood today*

Anyone who really wanted to explore the labyrinth of the human mind should write fiction.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't go so far as anyone. But it works for some people, certainly.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

One set of prevalent memes asks a person to describe him/herself in one word. I always answer that one with my name, which is the one word intended to indicate the whole complicated person I am.

personality tests

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

What I find interesting about things like the Meyers-Briggs (and I've only taken the web versions), is that even when I go back and change my answers on those questions where I couldn't decide, I get pretty much the same results.

Re: personality tests

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That probably means that either it's a good fit for you or it's consistent in the ways it's a poor fit for you.

Re: personality tests

[dendrophilous.livejournal.com]

I think it means I have the sort of personality that likes taking personality tests. (I do get decent results from the MBTI.)

[oursin.livejournal.com]

What I dislike about these tests is the lack of place for context or circumstance, because my answer would so often be in X circumstance yes, in Y circumstance no, not at all. And as for ranking things, I spit. But the whole thing about rating communities - even on the vaguely surrealist level cited above - creeps me out.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes. After a friend of mine found her picture on one of the "wow aren't these people ugly" sites, they've all left a foul taste in my mouth.

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

My first impulse is to stop taking the test, because the options it's asking me to choose between are not real options at all.

If I can't, I am afraid that I usually go with my first impulse which is to fudge the heck out of the test. We just did DiSC assessments at work. They lost me right at gender.

Could be worse

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

My father once took a vocational aptitude test which included a question on whether you would rather repair a barbed wire fence or visit an art museum. He thought that the first choice was intended to indicate suitability to farming. I suspect he was right.

I've encountered one person familiar with barbed wire who had any affection for it. He was a sado-masochist. Aside from him, anyone who'd had any experience with barbed wire fences would have to really hate art to make that choice.

I took a vocational aptitude test which showed that I would do really well as a streetcar conductor. In the 1970s, there weren't any such job openings in Los Angeles.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Some of those Myers-Briggs questions are pretty weird. I think I sometimes end up answering some of the "Do you prefer X or Y?" questions based on which of the two words is "prettier", which is surely not what the designers of the test intended. Nevertheless, I consistently come out INFP, which seems to be accurate as far as it goes.

I have mixed feelings about the Myers-Briggs. Because, on the one hand, it's obvious that any categorization of personality that only has 16 flavors is not even going to come close to capturing everything that's significant about human personality. And I know a fair number of people, who, like you, just don't seem to fit in any of the boxes the test is trying to put them in. And it does seem to tempt people to shallow psychobabble sometimes: "Oh, you're just saying that because you're an INTJ," or whatever.

On the other hand, a few years back, I went to a UC Berkeley career counsellor to get some help figuring out why I was so miserable in grad school* and what I was going to do with myself after I left without my Ph.D. The counsellor put me through a half day's worth of tests, the MBTI included, and when we were discussing the results, she said to me, somewhat jocularly, "You know, it really seems like your problem is that you're an INFP working for an ESTJ." And based on that, we were actually able to come up with some strategies for dealing with things like meetings with my advisor that actually made my remaining months in grad school noticeably more pleasant and productive. Since then, I've occasionally used my knowledge of my personality type or my guesses at my coworkers personality types to deal with particular situations at work.**

Of course, what has been important in these situations has not been the ability to label everyone involved with four-letter combinations. The key insights have generally been as simple as, "If you are the kind of person who strongly favors big-picture abstract thinking, and you are being supervised by the kind of person who is a very detail-oriented, nitty-gritty type of person, at least one of you is going to need to modify your communication style if you are going to avoid provoking each other to screaming fits." Or, "If you are dealing with someone who is making a decision on a gut emotional level, you can make rational arguments for why they should do what you want until you're blue in the face, but you're likely to get faster cooperation if you can come up with a line of argument that appeals to their emotions."

Sorry, this got long. I suppose the short version is, "I don't believe in magic, but a flying spell got me out of a real jam one time."

*In retrospect, it's a bit of a marvel that I needed any help figuring that out, but at the time I needed a serious dose of perspective.

**Actually, I prefer to think of the Myers-Briggs types as modes that describe types of behavior or states of mind, rather than types that describe people. Because even strong T types have feelings, and strong P types do not spontaneously combust when forced to plan things more than 15 minutes in advance.

[landofnowhere]

What is it about INFP? As I recall, when I was 13-ish, a bunch of my online friends took the Myers-Briggs and all came out INFP, which seems a bit odd, even if we were a sort of self-selected group. I know when I discovered MBTI (at age 11 or so, in my parents' bookshelf) I got sorted as INFP, but I'm actually not sure if I'm a "feeler" or a "thinker", if either. My dad (also INTP) seemed to think I saw things in entirely rational terms, but I'm not entirely sure. The questions are sufficently removed from reality that the test seems to measure whether I think I'm supposed to be a thinker or a feeler at the time.

[landofnowhere]

(And yes, I did mean that my dad is also a T: I'm used to thinking of myself as INTP, perhaps since my self-image switched from "poet" to "nerd".)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Self-selected groups often come out similarly. This happened to my college friends, too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And I would hope that a good counselor would be able to talk to someone and determine whether a test was a good expression of that person's worldview and personality before using it to make recommendations. Then again, I'm not at all convinced that a good counselor couldn't have found out similar information in less time and without resorting to psychobabble, so.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

I agree. Three things that I should note here:
1. The counselor talked with me about the various tests beforehand, and asked me if I felt comfortable taking them in a way that made it absolutely clear that saying no would not be a big deal or make it impossible to continue with the counselling sessions.
2. The first step in discussing any test result was always to establish whether it actually seemed to be describing something real, or whether it was totally off-base. The counselor said, more or less in so many words, "If there's a mismatch between you and the test, the problem is with the test, not you, okay?"
3. The tests were only a small part of the counselling process (we spent 1 session out of 6 on them), and while they were interesting and somewhat helpful, they were neither the most interesting nor the most helpful part.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I want to answer every such test question with, 'It's more complicated than that.'

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think you may be on the friendslist too recently to have heard this before, but scottjames has nicknamed me The Great ComplicaTOR.

I really don't think I complicate things. I prefer to think I see complexity that's already there.

It's amazing how well you can predict what's going to make someone snicker up their sleeve at you once you've been friends more than half your lives.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

It's the difference betwen seeing things as they are and trying to fit reality into some simplified frame of reference. People who are going for what's real and true are going to be seen as complicators and troublemakers by those who want it to all fit in the simple boxes. (And some of them are going to think we're the crazy ones.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's always what's real and true in general. I think that some people's lives are really, truly much simpler (and note that this is not the same thing as easier!) than mine, and they're talking about the truth of the parts of the world they've seen as well.

I also think it's good for me to have scottjames roll his eyes at me from time to time.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

But everybody is living in this world; the world itself is complex, so to the extent that our lives interconnect with it and each other we are all a lot more complicated than some of us may realize. There are a lot of people who see themselves in more simplified terms, but they aren't really seeing themselves. If you've read 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain' it shows clear examples of images created by people who are drawing them according to some pre-existing schema and drawings by people who are actually looking at their subjects. It's like that.