Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator

The Wikipedia entry has more information on MBTI than I could give here, except to say that it's intended as a measure of your personality. It isn't a test, or a good-bad determiner, it's a quantified assessment of how you're put together. One of the more interesting parts about getting an MBTI done isn't to find out what you are like; presumably you have a reasonable idea already - it's to find out how other's percieve you, and more practically, how to communicate better with them.

For instance, I personally assess as an INTJ or INTP depending on who's giving the test. However, a fellow blogger mentioned a website called Typealizer which will analyse your blog and run an assessment based on your posts. It assesses this blog as an ESTP; just about the opposite of the assessments I've had elsewhere. One of the main character traits of an INTJ is an almost rigid adherence to logical correctness. Trying to have a conversation with an ESTP by use of logic is almost guaranteed to be a waste of time - the ESTP is a realist almost completely uninterested in the theoretical. Examples work best, and therefore it isn't surprising that this blog, laden with examples, seems like it was written by an ESTP.