Slightly odd topic for a Christmas Even post, but some time ago, I talked with some people about the Myers Briggs personality model. As a contrarian, I am of course interested in pushing against the mainstream view of my social circle (if reasonable). In wide culture, Myers Briggs is very popular, but among psychologists, it is not popular, so according to Jacob Falkovich’s reaction model, my relevant outgroup here are the psychologists (academics) and other 115 IQ left-intellectuals, so naturally, I think there might be something to the Myers Briggs. At least, a lot of the criticism of it is overstated.
Going into details would take too long now, but briefly, there are some interesting occupational patterns, and taking the dichotomous nature of the types into account, the reliability of the test is fine (I agree with critics that typing people is not generally a good idea when the distributions are mostly continuous).
Anyway, as a kind of public test of interpersonal perception, I asked my Twitter followers to guess my type. I’ve taken these MB type tests for at least 15 years, and I always get the same type, so my test reliability is 1.00.
Putting all the replies into a spreadsheet, we get these results:
Whereas, whenever I take a test, and I just took it again for this purpose, I get something like this:
In this case, there is agreement for 3 of the 4 types (modal choice). However, most people rate me introverted, which people who know me well in practice would be unlikely to do. At least, I think so. I usually score about 90th centile on extroversion on OCEAN-like tests (81% above, whatever that means).
So the question is whether I am right, or others are right. Generally speaking, we trust the judgments of others more, but in this case, they almost only see me via my online persona, which is substantially an introvert space (extroverts too busy with real lives!).