Personality-palooza

You know how sometimes the same topic or idea keeps popping up everywhere you go in a freaky coincidental way? My friend Marisa and I have been wasting time at work filling out stupid online personality quizzes. We're also people who love going to the doctor because we get to answer questions about ourselves the whole time. If you know either of us, then you understand why this is fun. :-)

Then today my friend Amanda emailed me lots of information about personality types! Earlier this week, Marisa and I did a quiz about personality disorders. These are fascinating because they can only be diagnosed once a person is 18 years of age, implying that our personalities are supposedly fully formed by then. This seems a bit arbitrary to me because I have interacted with lots of little kids (infants, even) who definitely have highly developed personalities, and I doubt they will change drastically by the time they are 18 years old. That being said, personality is understood as the overall manner in which we interact with our environment and other people which does fluctuate as we grow up. Anyone who's been through high school can attest that those four years are fairly hardcore in terms of personal growth. People who have disordered personalities have a dysfunctional way of interacting and responding to events. It's also possible to have a 'trait' and not a full-blown disorder. The beauty of these disorders is that they are usually ego-syntonic, that is to say that the person does not perceive anything troublesome about the way they interact with the world. Try having a conversation with a narcissist. Fun times.

A more functional way of classifying personality is with the Myers-Briggs personality type (or Jung-Myers-Briggs, depending on who you ask). According to this typology, all people can be classified using four criteria: extroversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, judging/perceiving. There are 16 possible permutations within these four categories. This typology is somehow related to the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (anyone know more about this? please chime in). Both of these tools are very commonly used to help people with career and job decisions, as well as questions of compatibility with a life partner. Bottom line, I love answering questions about myself, as stated earlier. It's the Leo in me... astrology being another of my less scientific ways of understanding myself.

According to Myers-Briggs, I am an ENFJ (extraverted, intuitive, feeling, judging), also known as the Teacher Idealist by the Keirsey sorter. Apparently I am among only 2-3% of people and am quite charismatic. I share the same personality type as Mikhail Gorbachev. Make of that what you will.

If you take these quizzes, do share your results and thoughts about how accurate or not you think these things are.