There are many personality calculators, each trying to give us an accurate and helpful picture of who we are and how we might play well with others. I remember a quiz given to my General Psychology class, which paired a profile with a biblical character. Which figure from the Bible do you most resemble? (The guy who got paired with Judas went on to become a politician.)
The Myers-Briggs test isn’t one I ever had to take, but it’s widely accepted as a solid measure of personality (with some opposition). Ruth Johnston points out that this profiler has its strengths, but like with other tests, people can easily get the impression that their personality is a bit like a cafeteria meal, each piece selected independently. In her book, Re-Modeling the Mind: Personality in Balance
Johnston has studied the roots of the Myers-Briggs indicator, the work of Carl Jung, and found what she believes to be a relevant model for understanding personality. “Jung’s personality system had leapfrogged over some of the 20th century psychological assumptions that are now being discarded. His model had been rejected by academic psychology long ago, but it actually suited the new neuroscience ideas very well.”
Johnston updates Jung’s model to make the most sense of what the Myers-Briggs indicator intends to explain. She defines personality as “the recognizable pattern of how an individual processes and responds to the world.” This pattern forms a base standard for living and thinking. It isn’t a closed system that will never change. “Living systems,” she says, “must adapt and balance within themselves… the mind is a living system. It has a unified, cooperative way of switching between patterned behavior and unpatterned potential.” By recognizing patterns, we can identify our personality and learn something about ourselves, understanding that we still have unique, unpatterned abilities.
We tend to do the easy or familiar tasks often. Our minds or neurotransmitters do the same. We have familiar ways of thinking and reacting that are easy to use, because they form our mental habits. “So we could say,” Johnston writes, “that ‘personality’ is a set of organizing principles that move us away from indecision, uncertainty, and inaction.” She hopes that this book will help people understand the living nature of personality patterns and how they aren’t the box that a profile type might appear to make them.
In one chapter, she applies her model to marriage couples. Common advice for singles is to find someone whose personality matches your own, and two people who tend to employ their feelings over thinking a matter through may find more common ground, which feels like compatibility. But Johnston recommends thinking of marriage as a team needing diverse skills to succeed. If someone who primarily feels out a situation marries someone who thinks it through, they will likely see things from differing perspectives and bring more information to the table for a mutual decision. If they can tackle a challenge as a team, working together, instead of combatants, finding fault with each other, then they will more likely help each other excel.
Considering how inexpensive this book is, I think it would be a great value to anyone fascinated with Myers-Briggs or required to use and explain it regularly. In other words, it’s a good Christmas gift for the HR professional in your life.
I received my copy in exchange for this review.
When did common advice for married couples become seek someone the same as you?
When I was engaged over 20 years ago we read, “Incompatibility: Grounds for a Great Marriage” by Chuck and Barb Snyder.
http://www.amazon.com/Incompatibility-Grounds-Marriage-Chuck-Snyder/dp/0945564023 (There may be an updated edition out there somewhere, but this is the one I have on my shelf.)
Much of the book is spent highlighting the typical differences between men and women. Yet those differences aren’t locked in stone. I found I have many traits that are considered more typically feminine. But to maintain the oppositeness, I found a wife who matched me by being more masculine in those traits. For example I’m the extrovert and she is the introvert.
The president of my college while I attended said he and his wife were 95% incompatible, based on whatever research they had done years before. They had a great marriage.
“The Myers-Briggs test isn’t one I ever had to take, but it’s widely accepted as a solid measure of personality ”
It is probably worth pointing out that I am an academic personality psychologist who teaches the subject and reads and contributes to the literature – and in my circle Myers-Briggs is approximately-NEVER used!
The main influence in academic personality psychology is HJ Eysenck and therefore (in the past) the Big Three of PEN (Psychoticism, Extraversion, Neuroticism) and in the past couple of decades the modification of this called the Big Five OCEAN (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism). These have led to many, many thousands of papers – including genetic/ heredity research.
M-B is just off the map. Which isn’t to say it is worthless – in the sense that pretty much all personality traits have some validity, and the choice between them and how many to include is somewhat fuzzy. But there is a huge mismatch between the academic and amateur worlds – make of it what you will!
(I personally have strong reservations about the validity of trait Openness – and an unfashionable respect for Psychoticism).
Thanks for the comment, Bruce. Is it possible M-B has a larger following in the US than the UK?
Hi, I’m the author, just ran across this post.
Actually, I talk about this in the book. Academic/research psychology does not accept the Jungian/MB system at all. Several reasons:
1. Academic psychology is interested mainly in what’s true of everyone in general. They are sorting “true” from “false.” Anything that isn’t falsifiable is not of interest.
2. It imitates the methods of the hard sciences, trying to use only double-blind studies.
3. In personality studies, it is answering the question posed by the 20th century’s blank slate dogma: does inborn personality exist? Or is it merely a social construct?
Putting all of these points together: personality research consists of many carefully-constructed experiments to quantify a trait’s existence, among animals as well as among people. The Five Factor model has helped coordinate the thousands of experiments needed by giving them common international vocabulary. Each one measures a particular one of the Five, so it’s easily folded into a meta-study of the literature. This is obviously valuable.
But there are a few basic problems. One is that because the 20th century required us to *prove* that inborn traits exist, the whole research project is operating at a very low level. It’s far from able to say anything about an individual—-and saying something about an individual is what the individual needs. The fact that fish and birds both show inborn levels of Neuroticism isn’t going to help Joe with his career decisions.
The Five Factor system is mostly founded on the “lexical hypothesis,” the idea that everything we need to know about people is already encoded in the language—-so to define human personality, do a statistical sorting on adjectives. I find this idea very interesting but not persuasive. It stems from 1940, when it was daring to propose any inborn traits. They get points; but I don’t see why their dictionary-based system has to become a exoskeleton for our thinking.
Ultimately, every system provides an answer to a question, and we can understand the system best by forming its question. Research personality psychology asks, “does this trait exist outside of a social construct?” The Five Factors create an organizing structure for working out an answer.
The questions that individuals need to know are different. They need to know, what do I do about this crazy person? Should I expect my marriage to get better? Why don’t I understand my child? Ultimately, they are asking, “What is NORMAL?” Is this normal? Is it broken? Can it be fixed? Should I get over it or give up?
Research psychology is not much interested in the question of normal, but I am very interested in it. By dipping back to a system created before the blank slate was dogma, I found a model that can approximate for the variations of normal functioning. Using this, I can create detailed answers to the questions people ask: this over here is normal, that over there is not.
So yes, research psychology and I are really not on the same road at all. But if Five Factor research can help define specific brain functions, I’ll be delighted.
Also, did you really receive your copy in exchange for the review? I’d like to know how that came about; was it an Amazon program?
I’d also like to know how you heard of my book. It’s not easy to promote or discuss it, so I’d like to know what worked. I’m guessing the essay series I did with Jagi Lamplighter Wright?
Thanks,
Ruth Johnston
A mutual friend promoted your book and asked Lars and I directly. That’s how I received it. I believe it was back in July.
Ah, I see. Well, thank you for taking up his/her request!