It’s summer vacation, so it’s time to think about…personality tests!
I was speaking with a colleague a few weeks ago about our Myers Briggs types. I have an interest in the MBTI because I’ve spent so much time with Carl Jung, whose writings on the axes of personality were reduced into the 16 Types structure and then commercialized, a process that found new life with the advent of the online personality test. I humor myself in thinking I can find some deeper, fluid truth behind the rigid determinism of the derivative structure, while also successfully avoiding Jung’s persistent sexism. Good luck, chump! Anyway. I like talking about it.
Another colleague chimed in with a comment about astrology, which, look, fair point, but in the hands of someone who’s like “astrology, fine, let’s talk about it,” that comment isn’t a deterrent. She stated that she got a different type every single time she took the test.
This is contrary to my experience, in which I’ve classed myself as a ENFJ persistently over some 20 years: that is “Extraverted-Intuitive-Feeling-Judging”. I wiggled toward “Introverted” for a time, but I think that was wishful thinking on my part more than anything else (more on our subjectivity toward our subjectivity in a later essay, I think). One way to think of this is that my public persona is best compared to a sheep dog named Sonar who is transparent to what everyone (including himself) feels and so is always trying to gather everyone around him into a herd. The dog named Dug from Pixar’s Up comes to mind. Affable and attentive, on-his-sleeve emotional, somewhat dismissible and unserious. That’s my outward persona and captures some truth of how I instinctually engage the world, and it seems like that’s been true for a long time, despite big changes in my life and the long arc of adulthood.
Perhaps because of that disposition, I didn’t ask my colleague any questions, but rather clocked the emotional tone of the comment (i.e. “personality tests make me frowny”) and went about my day — but my curiosity lingered. And here’s another thing I’ve come to think of as an aspect of my personality through the lens of this MBTI type: if my dominant mode of engagement with the world is “extraverted-feeling,” my non-dominant or shadow mode of engagement with the world is “introverted-thinking,” which Jung seemed to think we would experience as something of an attack when it was active. So my curiosity turned this colleagues’ comment over and over in my mind, and with time my thinking became more and more energetic, until another character of mine, one decisively not in my public persona, came to the fore: let’s call him Toad the Terror. Contra the Wind in the Willows character, my Toad the Terror is not all instinct, but he is a breathless and aggressive thinker whose rationality is tempered somewhat by being a Toad with the title “the Terror”. It’s not that he’s angry, he’s actually pure joy, but don’t get in his way. (Dear reader, I always get in his way.)
While Toad the Terror likes to ride the engine of my mind recklessly, he has his uses (“he chanted as he flew, and the car responded with a sonorous drone…). He is, after all, a part of me, and if I can slow him down enough to hear the connections he makes, he brings me all kinds of food for thought.
So I was thinking about this idea that one can get different results on a personality test over time, which on one hand could be a critique of a personality test as hopelessly inaccurate or subjective, and on the other hand could be a critique of the idea…that we stay the same over time! It can do work for both sides. So I wanted to take a step back and think about what we mean by personality.
I’d start with the question: are there invariants to a person’s character, detectable in their behavior, relationships, and self-reflection? What stays the same in a person as they grow? What changes? If a personality test is supposed to tell you something about you as You, how can it best describe those invariants? If your results to a personality test change, does that reflect a changing invariant (gross), or something else?
I’ll start with a safe claim: there are invariants to a person. There are things they do that make them them. These qualities can have two sources, in my thinking: they are either embodied, having been established early in life as our instinctual dispositions on an unconscious level, or they are spiritual, in the sense that they transcend our earthly, temporal form. When I talk about the former, I have the processes of depth and developmental psychology in mind, as well as baser matters like genetics. We’ve been natured, we’ve been nurtured, and the contour of those influences are established early in our human form. When I talk about the latter, I am thinking of the way the author Catherine MacCoun, following Trungpa Rinpoche, talks about “style”, the essence, what we mean when we refer to a person’s spirit. It is not reducible to material, environmental influence. It’s what’s there there.
To that point: I don’t believe these categories of embodied and spiritual are mutually exclusive or independent of one another; it’s just convenient to think of them along these lines. (Spoiler alert, this is not my first dance with dualism in this essay, nor will not be my last. Buckle up!)
The designation of invariants implies the presence of variables. (Please see the spoiler alert above, I known what I’m about.) There are things that change about you. Let’s call them mutables. The embodied and spiritual categories can do some work for me here: what is materially mutable for you is your ever-changing environment and relations. Major changes in your life can change your patterns of behavior, your manner of relating to others, and your values: becoming a parent, falling in love, winning the lottery, experiencing loss or trauma, getting religion, what have you. And what is mutable for you in spirit is that restless ego-persona of yours: the thinker-doer-chooser, the agent at the center of consciousness but not the center of the Self. This character’s fickleness is famed. Descartes was particularly concerned for this fellow, and implied his capacity for being profoundly deceived.
Same caveat here but now in two dimensions: not only does your material environment and relations influence your conscious agency and vice versa, but your experiences in the material world are a road test for your spiritual-invariant style, and your ego-consciousness is always in a tense standoff with your embodied, instinctual navigation of the world: they are two different sets of values, conscious and unconscious, always pulling in tangential or even opposite directions.
I’m going to need a chart! But developing a transcendent meta-structure for personality is beyond the scope of this post. I’m here to talk about the interesting problems of personality tests.
So along comes our modest personality test, which should ideally raise up the invariants of one’s personality, and will have some explaining power to describe how that invariant character navigates the mutables of its life. As busking street performers say: “that ain’t easy!” Not because an exhaustive taxonomy is impossible (MBTI defines 16 different types of people; the Enneagram has 18 when you account for wings; I suppose the Big Five Traits people would claim something like a continuum?), but because personality has one more salient quality: complementarity.
Complementarity is most commonly associated with quantum physics. In that realm, its origin lies in the work of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, or perhaps earlier, when it became clear that when describing light, it was accurate to describe it as both a wave and a particle, two mutually exclusive ways of being, in order to account for all of its observable behavior. Conversely, if you prioritized one aspect of light too much, you would lose essential behaviors as described by the other aspect. At an early stage of quantum inquiry, classical assumptions did not adequately describe atomic and sub-atomic behavior. At that scale, different rules applied. Following the work of Neil Theise, this idea of focus-on-one-lose-the-other is precisely a problem that occurs at any movement from different scales of organization in the world. The positive product of complementarity is emergence, the appearance of a new observable behavior that could not be predicted on the basis of the prior scale of investigation alone.
For our purposes here, it goes like this. That which is invariant in a person, and that which is mutable, are in a complimentary relationship with one another. Look at one too closely and the other, out of focus, behaves unpredictably and your describing power is diminished. I think that this is the tension that personality tests, and their users, are perpetually caught within. Personality tests need some sense of development or growth within them, while also resting on sound categories of invariant character, to really do the job well. We would need to read them in this way to get anything useful out of it as well. Focus too much on the invariant, and we get caught in determinism. Focus too much on the accidents of the current moment or the present whimsy of the ego, we make personality into a mirror of our circumstances — which I suppose is another kind of determinism! (All of this, it seems, is just as applicable to astrology, and I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain etc.)
Finally, then, to the point! Persistent and dynamic, invariant and mutable, body and spirit, a product of its environment and a free agent: our personality is an emergent property of multi-dimensional web of mutuality, unfolding forth unpredictably from along each axis, not collapsible to any one node. To layer on another physics metaphor, our personality is a three body problem, where the third body is the whole of the other two.
We’re a dance! No wonder those personality test questionnaires are so long. And for my skeptical colleague, I would ask, Sonar the Sheepdog jostling politely with Toad the Terror for the wheel — what has the test always said about you? What does it say now? And does it mean anything for you?
