Why I changed my mind about personality tests

Growing up, I was taught that personality—and with it, individual's preferences, goals, and world views were largely self-determined. We decide to be pleasant people. Failures to adapt to other people's needs or preferences represented a failure on my part to "be more sensitive," "think about others," or worse yet—"be practical".

I was subjected to a lot of "interest shaming"—people trying to make me feel bad about not being interested in things. I'm wouldn't count this as "abuse", but its really annoying. Pro-tip: don't do this to people you want to enjoy life with.

When I did ask what these phrases meant, I was given handwavy responses of various sorts, for the most part some variation of: (1) dismissing that a problem was even brought up in the first place, (2) lawyering—nitpicking on some words to try to catch me out sounding stupid or evil, or (3) some other tangent/topic.

One result of this handwaving was that I chose to "be practical" and largely disengage from potential conflicts. As the 20th century proverb goes, 

OMG don't judge!

Going up through school this worked quite well. Cruising down the School to More School Pipeline, I succeeded in surviving via submission. Thank God I had humor to not be totally beaten down. Funny jesters get to live longer.

Personality qua excuse

The working folk psychological model I had of people was that they were very workable. At least I was supposed to be infinitely adaptive. Other people's feelings were allowed to run cray-cray everywhere and I was expected to respond. I was given the role of honorary duct tape.

Jerks and Nice-guys

Thus the world was roughly divided into jerks and nice-guys. Whereas the nice-guys took others' feelings and needs into consideration, the jerks were stubborn assholes. Erm.. ***holes. No bad words. Only jerks use bad words.

The good duct tape is the nice-guy.

Now, bring this duct tape character (at this time, me) into a world of more diverse human beings and see what happens.

Enter the Introvert Snowflakes

All over the world, people like to put themselves in categories. Like an RPG where you are a mage or a swordsman or whatever. Everyone has powers and abilities. One self-identified class of people that came to particularly scratch my brain were the "introverts". 

To this day, one fun (and potentially helpful) thing people do on the Internet is self-administer various personality tests. The most famous is probably the Myers-Briggs test. In recent times, some Canadians have brought much more attention to other measures, such as the "Big Five" personality traits.

At their worse, these tests are similar to a horoscopes or blood types in Japan, except dressed up in more "science". 

In any case, I got frustrated when people I knew would use the results of these tests—in particular being an "introvert" or an "extrovert" to justify what otherwise might be called bad behavior.

In my worldview, I had to bend over left and right to all sorts of preferences of others. It didn't matter if I wanted to go to some meeting or not—relishing in "introversion" and avoiding people was not an option. I had to go out and fulfill my duty.

"Introvert" (or "extrovert", but the Introverts complained more, ha!) was a convenient excuse to be a jerk. Those meanie poo poo heads ughhhhh!! (Remember, no bad words 😅)

Self Help

In the spirit of humility, however, I continued searching for ways to live better rather than change others. One way I did this was to read lots of books. I started with some popular psychology books including Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, Burger & Starbird'sThe 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, and other titles. Thinking about thinking in a psychological framework allowed me first to criticize myself and see where my brain could "trick" me. But perhaps more importantly, it allowed me to see other people's blind spots as well.

My 21st century reflex for "DON'T JUDGE" was suspended when I could look for how others fell for cognitive biases—tendencies presumably shared by all normal human brains.

Coming from a more objective, "scientific" (yeah, yeah psychology has got its issues) perspective served as a stepping stone to more honestly engage the world. I had a self-attack reflex. But now, I had some tools to consider the behavior of others first without the weight of moral judgment (something to be developed later).

If a person bothered me, I could think about why they might say or do what they did without immediately putting a nice-guy or jerk label on them, a tendency I think I implicitly had drilled into me. Make infinite excuses for nice-guys and perceive them as the victims of injustices, blah blah, and jerks are the worse and they make the world miserable.

I could separate differences in personality from virtues like honesty, humility, gratitude... 

Explaining Diversity

Now obviously, people's behavior differs in lots of ways. You can come up with some abstract, general principle like "self-interest" or something, but that's not going to interest many people beyond those that want to argue against the boogie man of Capitalism in a handwavy way.

If we are all subject to the same cognitive biases, what can explain people's different behaviors?

Withholding ethical issues here, one simple answer is that we differ in personality. We are subject to similar stimuli (the world), but we are different. So we act differently. 

While the statement above might sound obvious to you (or to me at this time), it is not obvious to an agreeable person that is trying to reconcile the inconsistent "principles" and thoughts of demanding people around them. 

Similarly, admitting a genetic (or otherwise 'innate') component to personality opens up a whole new pandora's box of potential trouble for modern education in the West. If we say there are inherit differences in personality between individuals, might some differences emerge between groups? For example: males and females, East Asians and American Indians, etc. This spells trouble for the equity/equality narrative.

Gets the noggin joggin.

The Way Forward

I'm not dismissive of personality tests anymore, though I recognize there is a lot of nonsense out there. I realized that I had a problem with personality tests because accepting variations in personality would spell even more trouble for the collection of premises (mostly from the advice of people older than me) that amounted to my "theory of how the world works". Experience was demanding me to admit my world view had been falsified and required serious revision. 

How could I find  people that my worldview would ask me to classify as "jerks" to be honest, moral, upstanding people? Whereas on the other hand, many people that would be "nice-guys" could be lying, appeasing, scheming poo poo heads?

I'm curious if what I have written here even makes sense to you (readers). Maybe it will make sense to some people from a similar background or a similar personality. To others it might sound batshit bonkers.

In the case that it does make sense to many of you, but not to others... ...well then we are beginning to open up an interesting conversation between people of different personality types. Stay tuned for more posts 🤔 🤷