Psychological personality types are always fun. It's a respectable version of “what star sign are you”? There was a huge fad for the Belbin Team Roles in the Seventies – does anyone use them now? Completer-Finishers, Specialists and Team Players? It's tempting to use a typology and then explain yourself with it: you do that because you're an ISTJ.
It doesn't work like that. Typologies are not explanations.
A personality typology is an attempt at an equivalence relation: two people are equivalent modulo the typology if they satisfy the same characteristics. Any bunches of characteristics will do as long as they are mutually exclusive and comprehensive, in other words, you can't be two types and you must be one of them. Most typologies suffer from four faults: politeness, vagueness, ambiguity and optimism. They are polite, so there's no type(s) for jerks, screw-ups and substance-abusing degenerates; they are vague, so that you wind up identifying with two or more of the types; and they are optimistic, in that the criteria chosen are drawn from the lighter, positive side of human nature. The questionnaires are not going to ask you anything about how often you have thought about making your quietus with a bare bodkin. Finally the questions are ambiguous. As an example from an online survey, You rapidly get involved in social life at a new workplace. Well, you did at the last one, but this lot are a bunch of stiffs and frankly the less you see of them the better – you're going to be making a lot of phone calls and visits to old haunts until you can find another job. And which social life? The sports-and-social club life or the serious gossipy-drinkers? Different people will have different interpretations. If you raise these questions while you're doing a typology quiz, you'll be told to interpret it how you understand it, which is not the right answer, but does get you to finish the exercise. They need you to finish or they can't work their ju-ju.
Until the twentieth century, the most developed typologies came from the various forms of astrology. The more academically-serious the typology, the more it scores you along various axes or characteristics, rather than putting you into one of a small-ish number of pigeon-holes: an equivalence relation based on a continuous parameter is still an equivalence relation.
The real problem with typologies is that their reading of you may be of the person you are pretending to be, have learned to be, have compromised as or are for want of any ideas of your own. Anyone who works in business will pay lip service to meeting deadlines, having objectives, being professional, punctual and all those other good things, even if it they don't do it very well and would not if they had the choice. People can spot the “right answers” a mile off and can be guaranteed to provide them.
According to the Chinese, I'm a Yang Wood Horse; to Western Astrology, a Taurus with Venus and Jupiter in Mercury, Mars in Capricorn and Aries rising (I think); my Enneatype for a long while was a Romantic; and to Myers-Briggs, I'm all over the INxy's. Does this help me any?
Not much. The real questions are: how did I get to be an INTP? Am I happy being one? Is it a good fit with where I work? With my partner? With my ambitions and dreams? Am I stuck with being the wrong “type” for my hopes or have you got to change your hopes to fit my “type”?
The most a typology quiz can do is help you think about yourself, how you behave, react and feel. And about the differences between how you do those things and how you would like to do them. It's the space between what we do and what we would like to do that measures how far we are from ourselves – or how much of a fantasist we are.
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