Apr 1, 2008

Another Thought On The Personality Test

In the previous post, I mentioned that I took a Myers-Briggs personality test at work and found that I am an INFP. A certain part of the profile I received makes me wonder: there's a list of famous INFPs at the end. Now, it's safe to assume that they didn't actually have these famous people take the test, but I guess I'm okay with labeling some of them as INFPs, because we have plenty of evidence to support what these people's personalities were like (these include Oscar Wilde, Mr. Rogers, Princess Di, Kurt Cobain, Carl Rogers, and Neil Diamond, in case you care). Some, however, (Mary, the mother of Jesus? Homer? St. Luke? St. John? Virgil?) are quite sketchy. When a person's biography starts out with something like "Legend has it that...", there's no way we have enough information that we can assign one of sixteen Myers-Briggs personality types to them. So dumb.

But I suppose they probably just put these things at the end so that you feel good about yourself anyway ("This person was successful and we had the same personality type, so I can be successful, too!"). It's kind of like the Matchmaker things in high school (remember those, you former Burroughs students reading this?), when they tell you that you are compatible with Josh Hartnett (I'm pretty sure that's who I got one of those years), so that you can feel okay about the fact that everyone on the actual-human-beings section of your list is either a huge nerd or someone you know nothing about.

Man, I think I have my Matchmakers in my old yearbooks at home somewhere. I'll have to remember to look at those next time I'm in Ridgecrest. All I remember is Spencer Witt was #10 on my list in 10th grade and he didn't believe me because I wasn't on his list and I had to explain to him why I could have him on my list but not be on his list and he somehow couldn't get it and it infuriated me. Also, I would always have the Mormon boys, which also infuriated me but I'm not really sure why.

1 comment:

Rachael said...

Oh those Matchmakers...I was thinking about those the other day. Probably because I hung out with some of the Ridgecrest people this weekend, including a certain someone from sophmore year, if you know who I mean. And probably also because my friend is desperately trying to do some matchmaking of her own and set me up with every guy she knows. I've avoided most so far, but there's one that I haven't managed to avoid, at least in part because I don't really want to avoid this particular guy. Speaking of which...I'm going to be in Provo the evening of the 17th through the 20th or 21st. Do you think we could get together?