Personality tests are fascinating - and apparently, bloggers find them the most fascinating. I have been interested in them ever since I took a more "scientific" personality test several years ago when serving in a college Christian ministry. It was a unique moment for me. Until then, I had simply resigned myself to the fact that there was something deeply, grossly wrong with me. While there was much truth in this, the ubiquity and the depth of my pessimism oftentimes was not disciplined by a true understanding of who I was. In Creation Regained, Al Wolters lays out a rubric which he calls the "creation-fall-redemption" approach to social ethics. Essentially, the idea is that the world is good and holy (creation), Adam fell and with him all of the world fell (fall), and in Jesus Christ, all things are being made new (redemption). In other words, everything has an innate structure to it which, while compromised, still shimmers with truth and reality. And in Jesus Christ, we can have hope that even these compromised structures can approximate the limit of what they were designed to be - if not now, then ultimately in heaven.
This is a nice thought. For one, for people like me, it helps us see that there are many reasons as to why we do things the way we do them and see things the way we see them. It encourages us to take note of the fact that it is perfectly okay that I have a unique style which, on many levels, is wonderful and God-glorifying. This is not to write a blank check and simply write off all of my mannerisms and habits as simply "the way God made me," for all of these structures (ie, our personalities) are infected with sin, and even in Christ, these structures are not wholly cleansed and free. This is the struggle, on one level, of actually being a Christian. As a non-believer, one is content to live with the infected structures. But as a Christian, there is an added tension one feels from knowing that, to quote Danny Glover in Grand Canyon, "this is not the way things are supposed to be."
The most popular personality metric was developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and Peter Myers. Its popularity has taken on near astrological status in some quarters - instead of asking one's sign, one asks for their Myers-Briggs personality profile. The Myers-Briggs personality profile is a fourr-dimensional model which measures personality according to a person's location on the Extroversion-Introversion, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling and Judging-Perceiving spectra. Many corporations and government agencies use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in their organizational decision-making and hirings. Several popular uses for the MBTI, aimed at everyday people, also exist. For instance, an excellent book entitled Do What You Are : Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality Type--Revised and Updated Edition Featuring E-careers for the 21st Century uses MBTI to illustrate the different career types which various personalities thrive in.
But according to academic personality researchers, there is generally seen to be evidence in favor of a Five Factor Model (FFM), which is assessed using the Revised NEO Personality Inventory, or NEO-PI-R. According to the FFM (frequently called the "Big 5"), there are five, not four, basic personalities dimensions, all of which are more or less orthogonal. These are called "Openness to Experience," "Conscientiousness," "Extraversion," "Agreeableness," "and "Neuroticism." Bryan Caplan writes, "The Big 5 factors emerge from a wide variety of data sets acros sgender, race and national origin, and appear to improve on competing personality models without loss of important information," ("Stigler-Becker versus Myers-Briggs: Why Prefernce-Based Explanations are Scientifically Meaningful and Empirically Important," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Vol. 50 (2003), pp. 391-405). Interestingly, Caplan also notes that personalities are, while heterogeneous, fairly stable over a person's lifetime. "Personality psychologists ... view the stability of personality over time as an empirical question. But they conclude that it is indeed highly stable throughout individuals' lives. ... The highest-quality cross-sectional studies, based on national samples, find that average personality scores are largely indepedendant of age, at least from 30 onwards," (Caplan ibid).
Being overwhelmingly myopic in my attention to my own personality, I was excited to discover the FFM, and found an online, shortened version of the test. My results are below.
I'm a O59-C6-E31-A90-N32 Big Five!!
Posted by scott at August 13, 2003 09:46 AM | TrackBack