What's your personality type?
October 24th, 2009 · personality, psychology
I’ve been obsessed with personality types lately. You gain such a greater understanding of yourself and others when you realize what forms the basis of those personalities. In college, my friends and I were required to take something called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). This psychological assessment gave us a little more insight into how we tick. Want to know more?
According to wiki, the MBTI was originally created by Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers (hence the name), and it was founded on the theories of Carl Jung. I can only speak for my college, but I would imagine that this is a very popular test that is widely used. Some companies pay attention to this too, especially for supervisors, who need to learn how to deal with a variety of personalities. The test was first published in the 1960s, and it’s still in wide use today, meaning that the MBTI should be pretty effective to have lasted for so long. It’s probably not the most accurate thing in the world in terms of defining your specific personality, but it can give people a general idea of what possible drives and motivations form their personalities—and at least it’s more accurate than a horoscope.
So here’s how it works: The MBTI personality types are broken down into four pairs. The assessment determines which of each pair is dominant, and the end result is a four-letter acronym summing up your personality. Here are the pairings, with a crude description of each:
- Extraversion (E)/Introversion (I). Do you feed off social situations, or do you need alone time to recharge?
- Sensing (S)/Intution (N). Do you think in concrete facts or abstract concepts?
- Thinking (T)/Feeling (F). Are you a logical or an emotional thinker?
- Juding (J)/Perceiving (P). Do you spend more time perceiving the world (with sensing/intuition) or judging it (with thinking/feeling)?
This handy chart summarizes the different combinations.
Myers-Briggs Table
The percentages represent roughly how much of the population has that personality type. For example, I’m an INFJ, which is apparently the rarest personality type (woohoo for being special).
Interested in reading more about each personality type? Here are some of my favorite resources:
- The Personality Type Portraits
- TypeLogic
- The Sixteen Myers-Briggs Types (Yes, I know; it’s a GeoCities page, but the site still has some good information on it.)
Maybe it’d help if I actually gave you some links to some personality tests:
There are plenty of MBTI-based tests online to take to determine your personality type, but none of them are as good as the official test, so if you REALLY want to determine your MBTI personality type, I suggest you either take the official test, or take a few different online tests and see which result comes up consistently.
I learned a lot about my friends using this test. For instance, many of my techie friends are INTJs, aka “The Scientist.” Apparently INTJs aren’t so easy to talk to, so much so that there’s a website dedicated to how to talk to them.
This has me wondering just how effective MBTI has been used. Are there other major personality tests out there in use today? Have there been any new studies or new tests on the rise that could rival or improve upon the MBTI? Just how valuable is it to categorize one’s personality?
Interesting stuff.
Photo by A Long, Lone Run.
MBTI Table by Peter Forret.
