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Myers-Briggs Personality Profiling

Recently, Joyce and I have been discussing about personality types. In particular, our own (rather different) personalities based roughly on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

Now, I have my reservations about putting too much faith in any sort of psychological profile, and the MBTI is no exception. I just think that it’s somewhat limiting categorising human personalities in just four dichotomies (which I think aren’t as orthogonal as they should be, and don’t encompass the full gamut of human personalities… hmmm… sounds like an incomplete basis for a vector space… but I digress, as usual).

Hence, I view these “indicators” as simply a rough guideline of my functional preferences – not a definitive labeling of my personality. That being said, I can say that according to the MBTI, I am an ESTJ. After reading a profile of a typical ESTJ personality, both Joyce and I agree with the classification (in fact, Joyce said that she laughed out loud when reading it because she said that “it was just so you”).

So, I guess the MBTI is not too bad at providing a fairly accurate picture of what a person would be like (which is why I guess it’s so widely used in recruiting agencies, I’ve been told). However, whilst it’s pretty good at profiling personality types for use as a predictor of future behaviour, I wonder how useful it is within the context of the internet.

With the recent growth in social networking sites (e.g., Multiply, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), there is a noticeably increasing affinity for people to socialise via the online medium. However, due to the substantial decrease in communicative cues, there can be considerable differences between a person’s real-life persona and their online identity.

For example, I (currently) don’t have that much time to spend online. With other commitments to attend to, my extroverted-ness in real-life will impact my online personality. I occasionally throw up some blog entries just to dump my thoughts, and maybe put some photos up in my gallery, but it seems like that’s all my online presence has time for these days.

Does that mean that if my online personality took the Myers-Briggs test, it would have a substantially different profile? Perhaps.

Since I use my online persona to dump random ideas, thoughts, and muses, does that make me an online Introvert? Lack of communicative cues makes it difficult for me to process the current situation with my Senses. I’ll have to be more iNtuitive in the way that I do things. So maybe my online persona is an INTJ?

According to Joyce’s undergrad thesis, those who score an I (for introverted) in the MBTI can migrate towards the E (for extroverted) side of things when communicating via an online medium, since there is a reduced perception of being judged (i.e., receiving negative feedback) in real-time.

So, I think it would be interesting to see an experiment where an online persona could be profiled using something like the MBTI. I don’t even know whether something like this is even possible, but it would be fun to see the results. I have a feeling there may be some sort of inversion in some of the type indicators.

Anyway, this is just me dumping my thoughts on this matter. You, gentle reader, may have thoughts about this as well. Feel free to drop a comment to let me know what you think. I’d appreciate any feedback (and so would Joyce, I think…)