Do you think that the Keirsey temperament sorter can really help a person understand themselves and others? This is where people are either:
Introvert vs. Extrovert
Intuition vs. Sensation
Thinking vs. Feeling
Judging vs. Perceiving
If you search under "Keirsey temperament sorter" you can take a test. Share your results and if it matched up to your personality.
The very question of whether "personality" exists or not is in question. Personality tests, like the Keirsey scale, are thus rather useless.
For example, a person is not an introvert or an extrovert. A person is introverted in certain situations, and extroverted in others. The decision of how to act is not dictated by the person's "personality", but by the situation. They will always act introverted in certain situations and extroverted in other types of situations. The precise situational factors that determine whether they act introverted or extroverted are acquired by learning and biological/genetic factors (nature and nurture).
In plain English, that means that saying "Joe is very extroverted" is meaningless. What you should be saying is "Joe acts extroverted in (most of) the types of situations you will encounter him in".
And anyway, self grading personality tests are next to useless. What you say you will do in a certain situation - hell, even what you think you will do - has no real relationship to what you will do.
| Indi wrote: |
And anyway, self grading personality tests are next to useless. What you say you will do in a certain situation - hell, even what you think you will do - has no real relationship to what you will do. |
Surely a person who is judged as 'extroverted' is far more likely to act in an extroverted manner in any given situation than say a person who is judged to be 'introverted'. Its all a numbers game. | trousersalive wrote: |
| Indi wrote: |
And anyway, self grading personality tests are next to useless. What you say you will do in a certain situation - hell, even what you think you will do - has no real relationship to what you will do. |
Surely a person who is judged as 'extroverted' is far more likely to act in an extroverted manner in any given situation than say a person who is judged to be 'introverted'. Its all a numbers game. |
Nope. There is no correlation between behaviours that makes a person extroverted or introverted. It is all dependent on the situation. You may judge a person to be extroverted because you observe them to behave extroverted in all or most of the situations you have seen him in. Someone else may judge the exact same person to be introverted because they behave introverted in all or most of the situations they have seen him in. So who would be right? Neither.
Introversion/extroversion, like any behavioural metric, does not correlate to a person's "character". If you say some person is "extroverted", that means nothing, because it does not give you any information about how that person will react in any future situation. Instead, introversion/extroversion, like any behavioural metric, correlates very tightly to situational factors. That means that if you figure out what kinds of situations some person acts extroverted or introverted in, then you can predict with a high degree of accuracy how they will react in a new situation.
These findings have led some psychologists to suggest that there is no such thing as "personality" at all... that what we think of as "personality" is simply a large and complex set of conditioned responses, or a program in our brains: like "IF group.size < 10 OR location = home THEN be extroverted OTHERWISE be introverted" (only a whole lot more complex than that, probably including factors, like the average age of the group, familiarity, ethnic make up, perceived group intelligence, etc.). Less extremist psychologists are a bit more forgiving, suggesting that personality exists and that it represents some kind of aggregate of these situational factors: for example, if a person is likely to be extroverted in most situations, then we might as well say he has an extroverted personality.
That last sounds rather like your position... but be careful! If you do this, then you cannot say that an extroverted person is more likely to act extroverted in a given situation, you can only say that they act extroverted in most situations. In a given situation, you cannot make any prediction at all. It's a statistics thing that most laypeople stumble over.I don't buy it completely. In my experience, a person judged as extroverted is generally judged in such a way by multiple people. Those people are more extroverted on average in situations in which they are extroverted, and are extroverted in more situations. In the former case, you could argue statistically that it is safer to say that they will be more extroverted in a new circumstance than the introvert, because prior experience leads you to the knowledge that under known circumstances they are more extroverted than normal people. In the latter case, you know that they act in an extroverted manner more of the time than normal, and are therefore more likely to be extroverted in a novel situation. As long as you have witnessed them in a representative sample of situations, I think it's safe to assume that the distribution of their extroversion likelihood is the same in unobserved situations. Therefore, in either case, one can predict that extroverts are more likely than introverts to act extroverted in a given unknown situation.
| Gagnar The Unruly wrote: |
| I don't buy it completely. In my experience, a person judged as extroverted is generally judged in such a way by multiple people. |
That does not mean anything. Time is judged to be constant by almost all people, except relativity and supporting experimental evidence shows that it is not.
Your experience is the same as most people's experience - a person is usually judged to be extroverted (or introverted or whatever) based on a fairly small sampling of situational types. For example, you may decide that Jim is extroverted based on the fact that he acts extroverted in every situation you have ever observed him in... which may be just at school, and then hanging out with school friends, and that's about it. You may never have observed how Jim behaves at a family dinner, or on a date, or in his home town where he grew up. If you think about it, you really don't get to see most people in a particularly wide variety of situations, do you?
To compound the problem, you have a group of people that all agree that Jim is extroverted, which sure sounds like real evidence that he is, right? Nope, i'm afraid not. What you have is a group of people who all observe Jim in the same narrow band of situations, because if they can all communicate, they must have at least one of the situations in common. It is very unlikely that you can get a group together who - when taken as a whole - have managed to observe Jim in a wide variety of situations. So basically, you haven't got a wide range of observations... you have the same observation reported over and over and over.
| Gagnar The Unruly wrote: |
| Those people are more extroverted on average in situations in which they are extroverted, and are extroverted in more situations. In the former case, you could argue statistically that it is safer to say that they will be more extroverted in a new circumstance than the introvert, because prior experience leads you to the knowledge that under known circumstances they are more extroverted than normal people. |
You could say that, but you'd be wrong. ^_^;
Suppose you flipped a fair coin 10 times, and it came up heads 8 times and tails twice. Would you say that, based on your experience that the coin has turned up heads 80% of the time, it is four times as likely to turn up heads than tails on the next flip?
So... why do you think you can make that kind of prediction about a person's behaviour?
As you said, "As long as you have witnessed them in a representative sample of situations, I think it's safe to assume that the distribution of their extroversion likelihood is the same in unobserved situations." All true... but you have no way of knowing that the sample of situations you have observed is in any way a representative sample of all possible situations. In fact, in the case of most people, that's very, very unlikely. In the case of very close friends that you've known for a long time and done all kinds of things with, it is more likely, but it still proves nothing (as i'll explain below).
Be careful with statistics! "Common sense" will more often than not fail you. We are biologically wired to detect patterns... but unfortunately, that often leads us to detect patterns when none exist. (The classic example is our biological predisposition to detect a face in anything that has two dots and a line :/ ... but it's not a face, it's two dots and a line.) This is evolutionarily advantageous in that if patterns do exist we recognize them quickly and can exploit them, and if patterns don't exist, no harm no foul (we just start a superstition or religion about them). i'll go into more detail below.
| Gagnar The Unruly wrote: |
| Therefore, in either case, one can predict that extroverts are more likely than introverts to act extroverted in a given unknown situation. |
But here's the problem. You have assumed... without any evidence whatsoever... that extroversion is a personality trait, not a situational one. And i know your first reaction will be to deny this, saying that you have in fact conducted a test by observing a person (or several people!) for a long time and noting that there is high consistency in their behaviour (at least with regards to extroversion, or whatever is being checked), which suggests that there must be a trait for extroversion.
But suppose for a second that extroversion is not a personality trait, but a situational one, and ask: is it possible to get the results you have observed in that case?
In fact, it is. If extroversion is not a personality trait, but rather a situational one, but it so happens that your subject(s) behave extroverted in most situations, then it would certainly look like extroversion is a trait.
So your methodology is flawed. The result you observed will support both theories.
It turns out, however, that when you assume that extroversion is a personality trait and experiment with the situation, the correlation is very, very low. However, when you assume that extroversion is a situational trait, the correlation is extremely good. Which means that if someone told me you were extremely extroverted (no one had ever observed you act introverted in any situation except when you were wearing a suit, for example), there is no way that i could predict how you will react in a novel situation. None at all. It would be a total guess. You may think it's not a guess, and even if the guess was wrong, you will simply modify the hypothesis in a self-serving way (the subject is extroverted, they're just nervous in a suit). This is so central to human cognition and understanding it is actually called the fundamental attribution error. However, if someone told me that you acted extroverted in every situation except when you were wearing a suit, then i would have a very, very good chance of predicting your behaviour in a new situation.
If you think about your own experience, you will find evidence of this, too. You may even know someone with "Clark Kent syndrome" who acts completely introverted in one category of situations (say, in the big city), but completely extroverted in another (say, in "Smallville"). You've probably also heard of the shy, quiet person who is so timid around everyone... that is a dominatrix or goes to goth raves on the weekend.
