Bad Glacier

A stunning kinda interesting example of real life and blog life coming together:

A few days ago, in preparation for a meeting at the career center, my girlfriend took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test. Around the same time, I come across some links in the second Blawg Review THIRD Blawg Review (how’d I miss the second one?) discussing the use of personality tests in hiring decisions. With all this talk about personality types, I felt left out. I kinda got into the online quiz/emode.com thing a few years back, but I couldn’t remember my MBTI type, so I googled this personality quiz thing to find out.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, the MBTI is a personality test that classifies people based on where they stand along the following four psychological dimensions:

• Extroversion (E) / Introversion (I)
• Sensing (S) / Intuition (N)
• Thinking (T) / Feeling (F)
• Judging (J) / Perceiving (P)

A person’s type is based on their position on each of these continuums, which means we end up with 16 types (ESFP, ISTJ, etc.). But really, how much does this actually tell you about a person? I don’t know, but probably not much. A person is so much more than their basic personality, and even the types seem fairly simplified (a whole continuum reduced to an A/B choice?). I guess this was kind of the main idea of the Blawg Review(ed) posts–hiring based on MBTI type doesn’t work well because it tells you little about the individual as a worker and workplace relationships are too complicated to analyze using these types.

But I got to wondering: does this work in reverse? Can you take someone you know and pick out their type? I could probably come close with a few of my better friends, but in general, I don’t think this will work very well, either.

Well, here’s your chance to prove me wrong. If you want to guess the result of my MBTI, e-mail me or let me know in the comments. It’ll be fun. No, really. Here’s a list of the different types, and here are descriptions of the four dimensions. You know you want to try it… C’mon, I’m bored over here. Entertain me, dammit!

I won’t guarantee anything to the winner(s) other than a blue mountain e-congratulation card, but I’m open to suggestions.

I’m also open to making a fool out of myself by trying to guess the MBTI type of other people, so if anyone’s up for that…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 at 9:36 pm and is filed under About Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.