I made a comment to a friend that every single person on the internet seems to be an INTJ (Myers Briggs test). Deciding to empirically verify that, I pulled out the US population breakdown of the different personality types from the Wikipedia page and decided to compare it against the number of google hits and also google blog hits. That way, I could see which personality was over and underrepresented.
Looking at the blog data because that seems more reliable (ISTP seems to be an outlier in the google searches because it stands for something else as well), the first thing that pops out is that Intuitive people are FAR more common on the internet than Sensing people. That’s a clear line that hews through my data, the top 8 personalities are all Intuitive and the bottom 8 are all Sensing. Looking at Thinking vs Feeling, Feeling has a small but consistent lead in every personality type except ENPs. For the Sensing people, there’s not much of an indication of what the other trends are but for the intuitive people, it’s pretty clear that INJ’s are most common, followed by INP, then ENJ and EN*P which means that Js are more common that Ps and I’s are more common thant Es.
In summary, from most important relationship to least, here’s what people who write blog posts are like:
iNtuitive is more common than Sensing
Introversion is more common than Extroversion
Judging is more common than Percieving
Feeling is more common than Thinking
Any thoughts of why this might be the case or what this tells you?
Hah - I’m an INTJ. I’m not sure what that tells you. Doesn’t surprise me, though, since I am the kind of person who takes to the internet like a duck to water.
Don’t know about the Myers Briggs test, but after several years online I’ve come to the conclusion that every single person on the internet is mentally ill.
INTJ, borderline with INFJ… I think of INFJ as “me on a bad day,” not because INFJ is worse than INTJ but because the stuff that shuffles me over are things (like driving myself nuts over stuff and people that isn’t worth it) which are Not Good For You.
Previous threads which I’m too lazy to search for showed a large ratio of INTJs in this board. The amount of Is was just ridiculous, good thing we have shoshana to keep us talkin’…
Honestly, when you think about it, INFJ makes perfect sense for the communication style most common on the internet. Introversion certainly fits with the digital environment (you can’t actually see other people on the 'net, it’s much more solitary than real life). Being more solitary means there’s less things for your senses to react to, so more of the discussion has to be drawing on mental sources; perfect for Intuitiveness. And once you bring the way of discussion on message boards into the mess–a series of quick, short interactions between dozens or hundreds of people–Feeling would take precedence because it takes much less time to feel than to think. (How many people usually spend more than a minute on their posts, anyway?) And we all know message boards often aren’t a great source of nonbiased interaction, with most people generally trying to insert their own opinions/experiences, instead of learning from/listening to others… People Judge on forums much more than they Perceive. Perfect sense.
