Myers-Briggs, redux

[Túrin Turambar]

It may be useful to say, "I observe Frelga to have trait X so she must be type W". I still think it's a very rough shorthand. Kind of like Amazon's "People who have bought this book have also enjoyed..." Sometimes it can get quite accurate, you know.

Saying that someone must be a particular type is unwise. It would be better to say ‘I observe Frelga to have trait X so she might be/is probably type W’. For example, I observe that ABC is physically affectionate towards others and shows a lot of emotion in her face and actions, so she probably has an extraverted feeling function, meaning that she’s probably a TP or FJ type’.

IMO, and I think that's where Alatar is coming from too, it is not useful and indeed dangerous to say, "Frelga tested as type W so she must have trait X". Because what often happens is that people will notice only those things about Frelga that fit the type, and will miss out on the infinite complexity of Frelga's nature.

Possibly. However, if this were the case, it would be a problem with the practitioner rather than the system. I know quite a few ENTPs, but I think of them as individuals first. In general, I don’t think about their type that often when talking to them (my type is compatible with ENTPs, so I usually get on fine with them just acting naturally). They have the same type, but they are still different ENTPs, and are shaped differently by their different experiences.

[anthriel]

Wow.

I did a search on "Anthy" after reading this thread... my name is mentioned on this board 88 times.

I have only 40 posts, folks.




I've been trying to figure out how to address the fact that my own sensitivity seems to be SUCH a given... you know, grass is green, sky is blue, Anth is sensitive... that it is used as sort of a defacto example around here.



Without seeming, YOU know, too SENSITIVE about it all.


And then I remembered, years ago, talking to my great friend Bryce about this very subject. Someone had been hurt at work... wasn't me, and I didn't do the hurtful thing, I wasn't directly involved at all, actually... but my friend was completely miserable and I was totally depressed about it for days. I finally asked Bryce, pleadingly, if I were maybe.... TOO sensitive?

His reply was perfect. He said, "Would you rather be INsensitive?"

Well, no. Not at all, actually. I like being me, on the whole.


This seques to a point about MBTI that I have laboured to make, with a resounding response of complete silence , at another site. I don't think I'm quite nailing this idea, but it is important to me to try again.

I have found great comfort in the label that I have gotten from MBTI... me, a person who generally feels about labels exactly the way Alatar does.

That would be... generally speaking, labels are completely stupid. And horoscopes? Sorry, Frelga dahlin', but horoscopes are... well... not my first choice for accurate personality analysis.

Anyway.

MBTI just tries to enlighten you as to the patterns of behavior that already exist. For whatever reason, I am a "J". Were the stars in some pattern when I was born? I dunno. Did my mother forcing me to clean my room every day before school mold me into a "J"? I dunno. Is it inborn? I think this is closer, but, really, I dunno. It almost doesn't matter WHY. It does matter, though, that I am a "J"... especially when I deal with one of our consultants, who is a HUGE "P". Because I know that we are different in this area, I can alleviate stress in my relationship with him. I think that is a good thing.

And when I read the MBTI description of me, I don't read the word "sensitive" in the description of INFJ... a word that SHOULD be a good thing, I suppose, but does have negative connotations. What I read is "NF". And NF has no perjorative associations, and yet is an eerily accurate description of who I am.

I LIKE MBTI. It has given me the freedom to sort of relax in my own shoes. I am a rare breed, that is true, but I am not "broken". I am a recognizable personality type within the scope of normal personalities. In this case, the label is a comfort.


I'm not weird, I'm just an INFJ. We're like that.

[Primula Baggins]

Can two INFJs get along?

I guess we'll find out. . . .

[anthriel]

Absolutely!!

We can be rare together...

[Primula Baggins]

Actually, a group of writers I know well once got onto this subject, and every dang one who had taken this test was an INFJ.

Rare in the general population, maybe, but in some fields and (I would bet) on message boards, maybe not.

[anthriel]

Well, I was the only INFJ in the sales force of 80, when I sold laboratory equipment and supplies.

Heck, I was one of only three "I"'s in the entire salesforce.




Talk about a tadpole in a shark tank...

<shudder>

[yovargas]

A self-admittedly intensely 'I' in sales?? You must be quite the masochist!

[Primula Baggins]

Or have guts. . . .

The thought of a sales job makes me make tiny squeaky noises and curl up into a ball.

[anthriel]

I made a LOT of little squeaky noises that first year or so.



But it helped a lot that I was selling one-on-one... I do fairly well in a situation like that... AND that I was selling to lab types.

Laboratories tend to attract introverts, and I understand introverts pretty well... takes one to know one, I guess.

I think many of my customers were relieved that I didn't come across as a "big personality" sales type, actually... more than one person pointed out that they enjoyed the fact that I wasn't "loud". I think a lot of extraverts (the majority of any sales force, I would think) seem pretty loud to many introverts.

It was also a very statistics-heavy detail-oriented technical sale, and I can groove all day on that kind of stuff.

[Primula Baggins]

When I was a lab rat I would have loved getting calls from someone like you, Anth. Instead we got these overgroomed, overtailored men in pinstripe suits with big shoulders and their hair moussed up to HERE (this was the '80's). I could tell one was coming because the smell of their aftershave preceded them by a hundred feet or so.

They scared the bejabbers out of me.

[vison]

When we did this on another site, we found that INFJ's ARE pretty common--on that site. Same people posting here, same results, most likely. In the general population it's a rare type, Lord_M tells me.

I test INFJ or ISFJ (the latter not that often).

As I explained once before, I used to "act" like other people, I'm quite able to put on an E-face and carry it off for awhile. But it's hard and tiring and really rather pointless. Still, when I was 15 it got me through some miserable times to pretend I was someone else!

Next Saturday I'm meeting my old school friends for lunch again. I'm pretty sure that my friend Vicky is INFJ, too, and if I remember I'm going to ask her if she knows about MBTI. Just for fun.

It's not a hard guideline, is it? It's just a measure of tendencies.

[yovargas]

I'm curious, Al (and anyone else who objected or disliked this), if you are similarly bothered by classifications of people as "left-brained" and "right-brained"?

[Alatar]

Well, it's equally generic and pointless, but at least nobodys trying to classify people as one or the other and treat them differently according to some percieved yardstick.

[yovargas]

Well, it's equally generic and pointless...

But...there's scientific backing behind the right v left thin.

...but at least nobodys trying to classify people as one or the other and treat them differently according to some percieved yardstick.

I've heard plenty of people describe themselves as "right-brained" and, again, there is scientific backing to suggest that some people have a "right-brained" style of thinking and acting.

[Alatar]

"Scientific backing". What a great phrase. When I was growing up, I was told that there was scientific proof that potatos were 90% water and 10% starch and therefore of no use as sustenance. Wonder why so many millions starved in the Irish famine so?

There's scientific backing for anything you might choose to believe. I just don't choose to live my life by other peoples hypotheses. The human brain is such a complete enigma to science that in 10 years, or 50, or 100 people will be scoffing at the Left-side, Right-side division. It's like saying left handed people were devil worshippers. It has about the same depth of research behind it.

[Alys]

Well that was an interesting discussion.

When I first heard of MBTI I was vaguely interested and I did an online test and read the type descriptions. But I confess that I thought no more of it than that until I started to see people saying things like, "Well A is an INTJ and so that explains why she behaves in X way". That made me slightly uneasy and I'm not sure why.

I don't think that it's particularly helpful to pigeonhole people on four such broad criteria, I dont' find it worrysome or anything like that, just unhelpful. It also makes me wonder about how the people making these sort of judgements interact with others when they don't know their 'type', is it that you usually have a bit of difficulty with this and find the shorthand easier?

[Maria]

I have to say I have used the MBTI info a LOT in dealing with my teenagers- and it's been extremely helpful. I first learned about it 5 or 6 years ago, and it truely has helped me through the worst of the teen years of my 3 kids.

I've been worried about my youngest daughter from the time she was about 3 or 4. She was a beautiful baby and small child, and showed every indication of turing in a beautiful, self-absorbed, shallow and vain woman. I worried about this. She lied easily, and I tried SO hard to get her to see that it was wrong, wrong, WRONG. I was trying very hard to get her to act the way I did as a child, considerate, kind, shy and sensitive- but it just wasn't working. By the time she was around 9 I was despairing until a psych grad studen temp who worked for me one summer introduced me to the Kiersey personality tests.

It was a complete and utter eye-opener. My youngest daughter is an ESFP, a natural born bimbo.

They love the excitement of playing to an audience, and they try to generate a sense of "showtime" wherever they are. Performers are not comfortable being alone most of the time, and seek the company of others whenever possible -- which they usually find, for they make wonderful playmates. Lively, witty conversationalists, Performers always seem to know the latest jokes and stories, and are quick with wisecracks and wordplay -- nothing is so serious or sacred that it can't be made fun of. Performers also like to live in the fast lane of society, and seem up on latest fads of dress, food, drink, and entertainment, the chic new fashion, the "in" nightclub, the "hot" new musical group. Energetic and uninhibited, Performers create a mood of "eat, drink, and be merry" wherever they go, and life around them can have a continual party-like atmosphere.

Now I knew why she was so clingy, why she never wanted to be alone, why she always wanted attention from someone- whereas my older children never needed that.

After I got over the shock of realizing that my daughter was a cheerleader type (the sort I'd loathed in high school!) I started working with her personality type rather than trying to pound the square peg into the round hole. I started hugging her more, and making a point of talking to her when she didn't have friends to talk to. I am able to explain to my husband why she does what she does and the best way to push her buttons so that she acts the way we want her to.

From what I've seen of other online people talking about ESFPs, they are very prone to make a complete mess of their lives- with addictions of one sort or another being a major pitfall for them. I feel like we are walking through a minefield with her, and one wrong step cause her to jump into the drug, sex and alcohol life that she talks about her other 15 year old friends doing.

So far, she's refrained. She's actually being a "good girl", and is rather proud of it. Somehow, we are walking the thin and narrow path to a decent adulthood- and she just may stick with it. I literally owe it all to the MBTI insights. If I had continued trying to scorn her love of clothes and makeup, and other girly things, I'd have alienated her beyond recovery. If I hadn't been able to convince my husband to treat her with affection rather than harshness, we might have lost her.

Neither I nor my husband were really capable of seeing what she needed from us without the insights of the Kiersey book.

My other kids were easier, although I got some good help for them, too. My oldest daughter is an INFJ, and naturally *good*. We used to get into some terrible, terrible fights before I read the section on her type, and found that they HATE being reminded to be good, because they were going to do it anyway, it's in their nature. I learned to explain my rules to her in the form of, "Well, I need to set this rule so I'll feel like a good parent" rather than how the rule was to make her be *good*. She wasl already like that, and didn't need reminding.

My son is an INTJ, and the main thing I learned about his type is that his geekiness isn't something to fight against. It's OK that he's not interested in sports at all, and that he's about to enter his last year of high school and has never, ever mentioned interest in a girl yet. INTJs are late bloomers, romance-wise. We let him do his thing, computer-wise, and he helps us with the farm chores without complaint and is really a very *good* kid. Without the MBTI knowledge, we would have worried that he wasn't getting enough socialization growing up, and thought that it was unhealthy for him not to want to play team sports. As it is, he's developing nicely, with no emotional problems that we can see. But then my husband and I are geeks, too!

Finding and reading about my husband's type was also an interesting relevation. He's an ISTP, a hands-on mechanically oriented type, and his motivations for projects is completely different than mine. When I do physical work, it's all goal oriented to me. I am doing the work because of the benefit to me and my family that I will get when done. He literally does physical work because he enjoys it! This was an important relevation to me, because he used to get so wrapped up in doing a home improvement project that he kept working until his muscles went into spasm and he'd be incapacitated for the rest of the day. After I showed him his type, he started learning to pace himself better, and stop before exhaustion went too far.

Now I understand that when we plan some kind of work for the weekend, it's not just that we are doing it because it needs to be done- but because he NEEDS something to do.

When he came down with Lyme disease two years ago, it was particularly devastating to his psyche, because he couldn't lose himself in the rhythem of physical work in his free time. I would have been very confused at his frustration with his weakness and illness if I hadn't known what what motivates him.... and keep in mind, we'd been married 17 years before I learned of MBTI and all that. Learning what makes him tick has been extremely helpful in interpreting what's really behind his behaviour under stress, and helps me help him cope with it.


MBTI info has really, really helped me in dealing with my family, and has helped me understand myself better, too.

[yovargas]

This is in response this Anthy post in the "Infinite Mercy of God" thread:

Anthy, that post made me think of a different "thinking type" analysis called BTSA (Benziger Thinking Styles Assesment) that I've learned a little about. Not sure if this is of any use to post this since I can't provide much info about it, but it is, IMO, a much more accurate and meaningful description then MBTI. It's fairly involved but the core of it is easy to explain. Look at this pic from my BTSA test results:



They split the brain into four quadrants that roughly (there are differences) parallel the four main MBTI types. They say that studies of brain activity show that people tend to use some quadrants more then others. One person might rely heavily on the Frontal Right while another on the Basal Left. (They say actually imaging of brain activity has shown this though I have no way to know if that's true or not.) The four quadrants parallel (again, roughly) to the MBTI types like this:

Frontal Right = SP
Frontal Left = NT
Basal Right = NF
Basal Left = SJ

If you see my pic, what they do is try to graph the amount that you rely on each quadrant. Since I scored over 90 in my Frontal Right and Frontal Left, my BTSA puts me as a Double Frontal. I don't have a detailed description of that but essentially it is about what you'd expect - a blend of SP and NT thinking styles. This, it's turned out, has been a much more meaningful and valuable assesment of myself then MBTI was able to provide. My chart also points out that my Basal Left (SJishness) is extremely low (you don't see a blue line in that quadrant because my use of it is virtually nonexistent).

The reason I bring all this up is because you always point out your strong NF-ness but also your very strong and passionate analytical side. This to me indicates that you are a multiple-quadrant gal, most likely what they call a "Triple-point" - someone with dominance in three of the quadrants.

[anthriel]

This to me indicates that you are a multiple-quadrant gal, most likely what they call a "Triple-point" - someone with dominance in three of the quadrants.

Woo-hoo!!1 Always wanted to be a multiple-quandrant gal. There goes my goody-two-shoes reputation!

Yov, this looks VERY interesting. Do you have a link to the test itself?

I do get frustrated sometimes when the descriptions of me don't include the possiblity of personality traits that I not only know ARE possible, but are fundamental to me being me.

The explanation of Myers-Briggs types allows that I might be analytical, and still an INFJ; a flexibility for which I am grateful. *

It is the Pisces thing that has always grated on me. One of my best buddies was born two days before me, and she is no "NF"... and certainly not a stereotypical Pisces. We first met as we were analyzing a drug test based on thin-layer chromatography, and she was the most well-versed and intuitive chemistry analyst I have ever met. She lost me many times, but patiently would backtrack and get me up to speed... she has never navel-gazed, as far as I know. And as a Piscean, she should be doing that 24/7.

Horoscopes. Whatever.






* Many INFJs perceive themselves at a disadvantage when dealing with the mystique and formality of "hard logic", and in academic terms this may cause a tendency to gravitate towards the liberal arts rather than the sciences. However, the significant minority of INFJs who do pursue studies and careers in the latter areas tend to be as successful as their T counterparts, as it is *iNtuition* -- the dominant function for the INFJ type -- which governs the ability to understand abstract theory and implement it creatively.

[yovargas]

I wish there was more to post but unfortunately the psychologists who developed this charge something like over $100 for the test. They actually evaluate your test personally as there are some short answer/essayish type questions. I got to take it for free cuz my sis is friends with them. If you really wanna try it, I can find a link. It is very interesting, if over-priced.