With a Grain of Salt

The most important thing to remember when approching any Personality test or profile is that whatever a book or webiste might claim is true about you, YOU are the final judge of whether a description is accurate or not.

It bothers me that many writers on Personality Theories insist that everyone must fit into one of their types. This is, after all, one of the main complaints agianst personality typing which turns a lot of people off from the whole endeavor. The true point of making theories about personality is to help people understand themselves and others; it is not to gain a sense of control over one's social environment by organizing and labeling people like so many test tubes on a shelf. The really appalling thing is that oftentimes writers will go on to insist that even though a person may not at first identify with all the traits in the description of his "type, " if he continues to reflect on them he will inevitably find that they do all apply to himself after all. However insightfull a psychologist may be, he can hardly know every random person he's never met better than that person knows himself. Such claims are arrogant with undertones of childish insecurity. Insisting that one's theories must be completely right in spite of contrary evidence does no service to people or "science" (if psychology can truely be called that considering how much subjectivity is involved). These claims exhibit a twisted kind of psychological power that psychologists have gotten used to exerting over people who are raised by society to assume that "proffessionals" know more about everything than themselves and thus ought to be unquestioningly believed. Sadly, many people feel obligated to make the shoe fit like the hopelessly doomed stepsisters of Cinderella. It pains me to think of people psyching themselves into believing things about themselves which do not ring true.

It is, of couse, sometimes the case that we cannot see ourselves clearly, and it is usefull to turn to the observations of people we know as well as the general observations about people like us made by Personality Theorists. But then we must take what others tell us about ourselves and examine it in comparrison to our own experience. It is very usefull to get a different perspective on ourselves, but it is in no way to be assumed that someone's understanding of us from the outside is totally "objective" and should be allowed to override our own inner understanding and sense of self.

Thus I urge anyone interested in Personality Types to always read test results and profiles with a grain of salt. Understanding Personality Types is only usefull to the extent that they actually correspond with real people in real life contexts. As you read about your own type in any of the Theories, feel free to ignore the parts that don't seem to match you, glean bits from other types, and re-analyse the author's conclusions based on your own observations of yourself and people you know. When seeking to discover the Type of other people around you, always remember that just as one description may not fit you to a T, you must not expect Type descriptions to fit others you identify with complete accuracy either.

The Quest to Understand

I've always valued listening to and trying to understand other people, as well as appreciating and encouraging their individuality.

Identifying with others and emphasizing similarities has always been my style, yet learning about people's differences is quite fascinating to me. Understanding and creating my own personal identity is very important, and fun for me, but as I have explored my own motivations, outlook, emotions, habits, and interests I can't help wondering what other people's personal experience of life is like, and rather enjoy the mind-blowing revelations of different ways of approaching life.

I suppose you could say that one of the prominent aspects of my own personality is the desire to understand. I want to understand other people. I want to understand society. I want to understand the world - how things work, why things are the way they are, and how all this works together.

I've started this new blog as a precursor to a project I've long wanted to put together - a website that brings together and compares many different theories on Personality. There are a lot of different ideas and tests out there which don't necessarily speak to eachother. Being a personality quiz junkie myself, I've always rather wished I could find a one-stop page with information and tons of links to all kinds of different theories, profiles, and quizes. I also tend to do a lot of thinking and writing about personality traits and decided it might be nice to bring all those random bits together into one place.

I plan to include links to different sites I find, both serious and silly, and provide some information on different theories that I study up on, along with my own ramblings. I may post some of my own results from different quizes - probably along with an analysis - but I don't intend this to just be about me - it's about investigating personalities in general. I think I may repost some things here that I have posted elsewhere just to gather them all together.