Thanks! The forer effect is the reason many people part with their money to have their astrological chart prepared or have a tea leaf reading and so on. The Roma rely on vagueness in their fortune telling. And I agree, it is probably in play in many so-called personality tests.
I am a skeptic. By no means do I think answering a questionnaire can provide an accurrate reading of my personality. One obvious problem with the MBTI results provided on the website is total lack of negative qualities. That in itself would be enough for the testee to view the result as correct. No one wants to think about their bad side. Also, I don’t see how this test would detect unpleasant traits such as bad manners, extreme impatience, hostility, laziness and so on. I doubt that it would pick up on sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies. This would have required questions like: ‘do you think the law applies to you or do you just do as you please,’ or ‘do you treat animals with care and respect or do you derive pleasure from doing bad things to small rodents’.
Other than that, I didn’t find the results to be vague. Specific qualities were described; qualities I (and others who know me) had already noted about myself prior to the test. These qualities could not be readily applied to those I know well. Hence my surprise at a personality test that listed traits that I actually possess.
Anyway you made a very good point. Tests like these cannot be taken too seriously. Certainly they should be administered and interpretted by a professional and used as a guideline only.
I personally like the Meyers-Briggs. I see it as a way of defining how a person processes, not a definitive test (or valuation) of their personality as a whole. It helps me to understand how to work with others if I can recognize their Introvert/Extravert, Sensing/Intuitive, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving preferences. That’s all. It’s not similar to a horoscope, for gosh sakes!
Gee, I wan’t expecting a serious answer to my question but thanks. I couldn’t agree more. I have four kids, so clearly Mr. Right will have to like children. Travel, unless you’re talking Disney Land is tough, because my kids are young. I am an artist and would need a partner sympathetic toward a creative type. I have strong leanings toward science and materialism in philosophy, which would not make me a good match for a highly religious person. No test can spit out a list of qualities my Mr. Right should possess. It has to be done the old fashioned way, by going on a date and getting to know one another.
Sure. Just like you should only trust a PROFESSIONAL astrologer and only respect the PRO model of a Oujia board, not the cheap knockoffs. Likewise, be sure to only believe the REAL Bigfoot researchers, not the fakes. And ignore the imitation crop circles; only the real ones are genuine UFO landing sites.
If you don’t think your personal MBTI analysis is vague, try giving the same one to someone else, telling them that it was taylored just for them. Betcha they will find it amazingly accurate, too.
A grinning smiley might not be needed here, but I’ll provide one anyway, as insurance.
ESTJ and that’s BS. I don’t think that it is me at all.
This is much like a personality profile that I had to take at my job and it prevented me from getting promoted to management. 'Course, on that test there was an accuracy rating and on a 1-10 scale I was a 3,2,1.
I don’t think that my personality can be nailed down with trur/false questions. I’m far too complex.
Me too. I’ve taken the test in various situations a number of times. My INT is very consistent and strong. But for the last category I’ve scored as a weak P, a weak J, and once I was exactly on the border between the two.
For those interested, The Skeptic’s Dictionary has a pretty comprehensive write-up on the MBTI.
I will email my results (INFJ) to a random selection of girlfriends who aren’t familiar with the test and report back. I should warn you that, unlike me, all of my girlfriends believe in ghosts, ESP, astrology and the paranormal in general. ::sigh:: Although I’m must say I’m glad people believe in these things even though I don’t… because I am a novice fantasy writer. Ponder that for a millisecond.
I’ve being researching and writing about Roma culture and beliefs. I’m very familiar with the many strategies employed by fortunetellers to please a customer. My curiosity began with a tea leaf/ palm reading. A girlfriend had dragged me off to a medium for a lark. I was in my late teens at the time. The medium said I would have four children of the same sex. I did. (Do the math on that one.) She said a close male relative would move to LA. My brother did. (My brother and I were born and raised in Canada.) She made several more specific predictions using numbers, place names etc. I wrote them down at the time and thought nothing of it until one after the other they occurred. Hindsight. Coincidence. Lucky guesses. Must be. A self-fulfilling prophesy. I hope not and somehow doubt it. Thankfully she said I’d live a long time…
The last ‘personality test’ I took was 15 years ago in a parenting magazine. I was heavily under the influence of motherly hormones. The results were supposed to determine what parenting style you used – teacher, authoritarian, friend etc. Other than that I have only taken IQ tests (one to qualify for a job and the rest to determine that I have dyslexia). I would strongly object to taking a personality test in the workplace, but if I had to… I’d prefer that the person administering the test was a professional, aware of its limitations and flaws.
IMO there is no substitute for confidence in one’s own ability to judge workers by their gestures, words and actions. And as far as self-knowledge goes, that ultimately comes from within.
The funny thing about the MBTI test was that a day or two before I took it, I had sent a note to a pal in which I talked a bit about my personality. The similarity in the traits discussed in the email and the MBTI results was remarkable. Quite eerie.
I was drawn to this site as a skeptic, thinking I’d try the silly test to prove it was bunk. The results being so close, was, of course, nothing more than a coincidence. A coincidence is a noteworthy apparent convergence of events (usually noteworthy in hindsight). I always approach a good coincidence with a certain amount of cynicism, but it is impossible to ignore the delight or suprise felt at seeing a convergence of events.
That should be an interesting test. But be sure you tell each that the analysis is tailored for them (that’s what you thought when you compared it with yourself, right?). And of course, send each in a separate email; a mass-mailing might give too much away!
Long ago and far away, I wrote a biorythm program to compute the favorable and non-favorable days for any birth date. I gave this program to all my friends, telling them that the computer was the accurate and easy way to obtain this data and it was a scientific fact that it worked.
And it did. Each and every one of them came back to me and said that the charts had been amazingly accurate, it helped them plan their life, and thank you so much!
Sounds like a confirmation, right? Not so fast. What I didn’t tell them was that for each, I had inserted a random, invisible “fudge factor,” a number which was added to any birth date they entered before the computation was done. They only thing I could guarantee was that the charts were NOT specific to them, yet they thought they were!
If they had ever compared charts for the same birth date from different copies of the program, they would have noticed they didn’t match, but no one ever did.
So this is just another lesson on how we humans can fool ourselves. It’s all too easy.
