QUOTE
Yoshimi:
Yes, boiling your personality down to just four letters is a little bit too simplistic. But that's why they give you all those other percentages... for instance, I may be INFP, but I know I am borderline between E and I, and that is a defining factor in my life.
You can always refer to the detailed information if you want. I think it's hard, though, to write general summaries of personality types without dividing them into a small number of categories (like 16)
Oh, I do understand the approach and why it makes sense to take this route. At the same time I am always somewhat suspicious with psychological tests. They don't fall out of the sky, after all. I would like to learn a little about the research that went into this and the research methods that have been used. Things like these can very easily break the validity of tests such as this and I'm not going to believe in this test's merit just because some scientists (assumingly and hopefully psychologists) named Myers and Briggs put their name on it. That alone doesn't tell me anything. I would for example like to know why they have chosen the categories they did (Did they analyse factors? Did they just engage in theoretical guess work?) and why they think that these categories are better suited to describe personality than the good ole'
big five (that already explain
a lot of variance in the research data).
And then my general gripe with the analytic approach where enteties are cut into nice observable bits is that so much information gets lost due to disregarding interactions, associations and other links between the units of any entity. The world, as we percieve it, doesn't consist of bits but of enteties. Observing the bits can help an understanding of this world, I very well acknowledge this. But it's not taking a look at the big picture and thus I wonder whether we really should blindly trust in it (= the analytical approach).
Can you truely describe a personality by seperating it into a set number of personality traits (and the same traits for each individual even!)? Isn't personality much rather a dynamic process (some would say merely an illusion even)? The personality I have while taking this test must not forcefully be the same personality I have while talking to my dad or sitting in a lecture, for example.
Edited by Yoshimi, 29 July 2012 - 04:33 AM.