BACKGROUND: Personality Types (MBTI)
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writercisesOriginal Posting Mon, 11 Jul 1994 18:35:02 JST
If anyone else has been wondering about these mutters of "I'm an INTJ" and such...
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is one way of modeling personalities. Specifically, it results in measures of the person along four dimensions (preference areas, scales): energizing, attending, deciding, and living (or closure).
Essentially, in circumstances where the person has control, this summarizes how the person prefers to interact.
Energizing--what energizes a person--may be characterized as Extroversion or Introversion (E or I). The extrovert draws energy from the outside world--people, activities, or things. The introvert draws energy from the internal world--ideas, emotions, or impressions.
[as may be obvious from the names, the orientation of the whole person is involved here, not just their source of energy]
Attending--what "seems important" or what the person pays attention to--is characterized as Sensing (S) or Intuition (N). Do you consider what the senses notice as the only reality? Or do you go beyond the sense into the imaginative world of possibilities?
Deciding--how does one decide--seems to separate into Thinking (T) or Feeling (F). The Thinker organizes and structures information in logical, objective terms in order to decide. The Feeler uses more personal, value-oriented methods to come up with hunches, gut feelings, and impulses.
Living--what kind of life style--sometimes also called closure, or the preference for an open-ended lifestyle, revolves around the split between Judgement (J - planned and organized, with endings and resolutions) and Perception (P - spontaneous, flexible, without endings or resolutions).
The combinations make up the 16 types, with associated psychological profiles, preferred vocabularies, and so on. There are various testing systems which indicate personal type, ranging from the "pop magazine" versions to very serious psychometric ones (well-validated, repeated, and with statistical significance).
It seems likely to me that these four dimensions could provide a helpful way to categorize your characters, and provide the kernel of conflict between the characters, as well (put a salesperson who prefers to react to everything spontaneously together with an engineer who wants to lay out plans and organize everything--what do you think will happen?)
For more information, if you have FTP access, try sunsite.unc.edu in the directory /pub/academic/psychology/alt.psychology.personality. (or nowadays a little google will bring you plenty)
[according to one of the tests there, I'm an INTJ--self-confident, pragmatic, "a builder of systems and the applier of theoretical models."] (addendum: other tests indicate that I am INTx -- fairly undecided about that last category)
If anyone else has been wondering about these mutters of "I'm an INTJ" and such...
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is one way of modeling personalities. Specifically, it results in measures of the person along four dimensions (preference areas, scales): energizing, attending, deciding, and living (or closure).
Essentially, in circumstances where the person has control, this summarizes how the person prefers to interact.
Energizing--what energizes a person--may be characterized as Extroversion or Introversion (E or I). The extrovert draws energy from the outside world--people, activities, or things. The introvert draws energy from the internal world--ideas, emotions, or impressions.
[as may be obvious from the names, the orientation of the whole person is involved here, not just their source of energy]
Attending--what "seems important" or what the person pays attention to--is characterized as Sensing (S) or Intuition (N). Do you consider what the senses notice as the only reality? Or do you go beyond the sense into the imaginative world of possibilities?
Deciding--how does one decide--seems to separate into Thinking (T) or Feeling (F). The Thinker organizes and structures information in logical, objective terms in order to decide. The Feeler uses more personal, value-oriented methods to come up with hunches, gut feelings, and impulses.
Living--what kind of life style--sometimes also called closure, or the preference for an open-ended lifestyle, revolves around the split between Judgement (J - planned and organized, with endings and resolutions) and Perception (P - spontaneous, flexible, without endings or resolutions).
The combinations make up the 16 types, with associated psychological profiles, preferred vocabularies, and so on. There are various testing systems which indicate personal type, ranging from the "pop magazine" versions to very serious psychometric ones (well-validated, repeated, and with statistical significance).
It seems likely to me that these four dimensions could provide a helpful way to categorize your characters, and provide the kernel of conflict between the characters, as well (put a salesperson who prefers to react to everything spontaneously together with an engineer who wants to lay out plans and organize everything--what do you think will happen?)
For more information, if you have FTP access, try sunsite.unc.edu in the directory /pub/academic/psychology/alt.psychology.personality. (or nowadays a little google will bring you plenty)
[according to one of the tests there, I'm an INTJ--self-confident, pragmatic, "a builder of systems and the applier of theoretical models."] (addendum: other tests indicate that I am INTx -- fairly undecided about that last category)
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