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.