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Meyes-Briggs Alphabet Soup: At Least On My Blog I'm an INTP

Thu, 2008-11-20 17:40 — figleaf

So via Kevin Drum, who got it in turn from Andrew Sullivan it turns out if you’re a blogger you can paste your URL into the Typealyzer and get back what seems to be a pretty solid Myers-Briggs personality score. For folks who’ve played along at home it looks like I’m an INTP, which stands for Introversion, iNtuition, Thinking, Perceiving)

Hoo-boy, I’m not sure it’s any better-grounded than, say, astrology but it sure felt like the description got me dead to rights. (INTP rundown from Personality Page, Wikipedia.) It’s even more accurate in terms of my writing — introspectively theory based, intuitively extroverted, good at explaining big ideas but a tendency also to overkill the obvious, lousy attention to spelling and grammar. Yup, that’s me.

Interestingly (maybe only to me and/or possibly other INTPs?) I nerdily cross-checked the score by running links to my top-level topic categories. All sat pretty firmly either in INTP (mostly) or closely adjacent. Perhaps interestingly the one exception was the now-seldom-updated History and Fantasy category which light up way over on ESFP (Extraversion, Sensing, Feeling, Perceiving.) Which might explain why it’s now so rarely updated. :-) Oh, that and maybe because so many more people I know in real life know about my blog I’m a lot more shy.

Anyway, that link again if you want to try it on your own work (or any other website — all wikipedia entries register INTP, for instance, Obama for President is or was ISTP – The Mechanics) is Typealyzer.

Thu, 2008-11-20 20:02 — 2518 (not verified) #permalink

Mine is ISTP the mechanic. I agree with the part of my brain that works, but I hadn’t though of myself as a risk taker.

Thu, 2008-11-20 23:14 — 2518 (not verified) #permalink

I’ve done lots of those tests over the years an I know I’m an INTP however my blog comes out as ISFP, maybe because it’s a place I express my hidden self. I also have a “public” blog which came out as ESFP and a gaming blog which came out as ESTP. Given each blog’s different focus the assesments were pretty accurate…or maybe I’m a split perconality :)

Fri, 2008-11-21 00:14 — 2518 (not verified) #permalink

Interesting. Very. I put in the House and the Kitchen and got ESFP, put in Studio and got ESTP, and then I put in my LJ and got ESFP...

So I guess I’m ESFP.
Hm.
Interesting.

Fri, 2008-11-21 06:57 — 2518 (not verified) #permalink

(spooky appropriate reCaptcha: “based knowledge”)

I think the thing with all these personality tests (or horoscopes, or whatever) is always to look at what the other options look like, and see how well you think they match your self-perception, as compared to how well the one they told you you are matches it. A lot of the time, I find that they’re all sufficiently vague as to make it possible to read oneself in any of them (like the “cold reading” trick of “psychic” charlatans).

That said, I think that the Meyes-Briggs schema is fairly effective: I recall seeing a television experiment where they put groups of the different types together and had experts predict what would happen in different circumstances – the predictions were spookily accurate, especially when they said about one group that was doing the cooking, “I bet they’ll set the pan on fire” – and it happened! Of course, that could partly be part of television’s trickery (i.e. the experts may have seen the film beforehand or something).

I know my own letters from doing these tests before: I seem to land on a cusp between E/I and F/T but tend towards INFP – my blog comes up “INTP” quite strongly, but I figure that’s because when I am writing on my blog, a lot of the time I am treating it as an exercise in explaining things to someone else, where I feel that clarity is more important than emotion (even when I am expressing emotional things).

I know that my mother comes up as very different results depending on whether she answers as she would for her thoughts and behaviour at work, or at home, and yet she enjoys her work (when there isn’t BS to deal with!) so I suspect that types are dependent upon other factors like he specific role one is fulfilling.

Fri, 2008-11-21 07:14 — 2518 (not verified) #permalink

Huh. Interesting. I came up ESTP “The Doer”. Then googled around a bit. You know, it’s probably closer to reality than what I would have gotten if I’d answered a test, because I instantly try to relate the question to the purpose of the test, and then answer in the way that best fits my self-image, perhaps not what I actually would do — which of course varies. It’s weird that I come up extrovert, given how uncomfortable I am at large parties and crowds — but I do love talking to people one on one or in small groups, showing off, and being noticed … hrm.

I assumed it came back with stuff like “physical outdoor activities” because I blog so much about mountain biking and other stuff — but I looked back, and only one of the posts on the front page of my blog is actually about an outdoor activity. The single most prominent topic is … food. Heh.

Thank you so much for this link. It’s given me food for thought. It actually makes sense to me, in some ways, that an analysis of words I wrote for my own reasons are a higher-quality source of data than a test in which I give my own responses. As House says, “Everybody lies.”

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