At university, we have been learning a little about creativity, including: techniques, influences, abilities and other aspects like them. One of the lesson plans included a short test about personality, which would eventually link back to creativity techniques and personas. The test is called ‘Myers-Briggs’.
The test we participated in was a very basic version of this experiment, and there are more intense versions available (which would cost a small fortune), that would ask considerably more questions and at a higher level. However, the idea behind both versions of this test is to take traits of your INDIVIDUAL personality, and try and fit it into one of sixteen groups called ‘Personality Types’. Now, my first opinion when I heard the title was “ Well how can they fit billions of completely different personality types, into just sixteen groups”. But I carried on regardless. The test undertaken is to position your personality on 4 different bi-polar scales.
- Extraversion----------------Introversion
- Sensing----------------Intuition
- Thinking-------------------Feeling
- Judging-------------------Perceiving
The first refers to your energy towards social situation, so for example, partying & staying indoors. The second refers to how the person takes in information, which could be either logically or by using your creative senses. The third refers to the person’s decision making, so again, logic against personal senses. And finally, the fourth refers to living styles, so organised against spontaneous.
So, the task is to mark on each line where you think your personality traits would lie and then using a chart of results, you could determine which category your personality would fit in. In the documentation given out, it refers to the experiments origin. It states that the test has taken 80! Years of research and thinking to come up with the results for the experiment, with millions of people taking part. Now, I’m all for detail and making sure everything is correct, but that seems a very long time, and a lot of people for such a basic experiment, seen as the only results given are sixteen boxes giving a handful of complimentary adjectives, created to make the consumer (or as I like to call them – sheep) feel better about themselves and to feel a part of a group.
After everything was explained to me, I flatly refused to take part in the experiment. Without wanting to use clichés like ‘I won’t be communised’ or ‘I refuse to be put into a stereotype’, the whole concept of this test really irritated me (and a few of my colleagues). The fact that they could be so arrogant to think that people can be placed into little groups! I think that the worst part of it was looking around the class room at all of my peers. They seem to just go along with the whole concept, like sheep, following each other around just because someone says that it is fact. It is not fact. It is hypothetical, and for people to use this as evidence of their personality is ridiculous.
So instead of participating in the ‘test’, I just skipped to the end, which showed the results of the ‘personalities’. I was astounded. To me, horoscopes came to mind. They have only taken slightly more information than a horoscope, and ripped it off as factual! All they have written is some adjectives and a few metaphors that could possibly relate to someone’s ‘personality’. To think that they have spent MILLIONS of dollars to say that introvert people can sometimes be ‘shy’ and ‘reserved’ is actually laughable, and people actually believe because a few people have said that its fact. By the end of the session, I came to the conclusion that Myers and Briggs would probably class me as ‘Bi-Polar’ because I could fit into so many different ‘personality Types’.
So in conclusion, No, you can’t simply put people into clichéd boxes of personality and call it fact, when in fact, all the test shows is that extrovert people are outgoing and introvert people are shy. Well done Myers and Briggs, you stated the obvious. Genius, I’m sure!
