what the myers-briggs doesn't say about me

Prompted by Katy's post, I just took some version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator for perhaps the dozenth time in my life. I came out as an INTJ. This puts me in the same box as Katy and Oblivio, which does give one reason to be suspicious of Oblivio's mention of research that INTJ's are the rarest of the 16 personality types, representing "less than 1% of the population."

Or, perhaps, bloggers are vastly disproportionately likely to be INTJs. It would make sense that bloggers have more similar personalities to one another than to the population at large, and, it might even make sense that bloggers are most likely to have the personality type which, according to Oblivio, is most associated with being an "asshole." (Proof positive of the latter proposition, maybe, would be if we got Drek--a blogger who regularly expresses great pride in his asshole-hood--to take the test and see if he comes out as an INTJ.)

In any case, I don't really think that my Myers-Briggs type really provides a very good picture of me. Usually, when people say this, they mean that they don't buy the idea that you can say much about people's personality by arraying them on a very small number of personality dimensions. Not me, I think there's ample evidence that a whole lot of personality can be captured via a relatively small number of dimensions.

Nonetheless, there are two problems with the Myers-Briggs representation of me. First, saying that I'm an "INTJ" is misleading because, as it turns out, I'm really barely both a T (a Thinker vs. a Feeler) and a J (a Judger vs. a Perceiver). I come out almost smack in the middle on both these dimensions, and it's only by virtue of the equivalent of tie-breaker questions that I end up getting classified as a TJ. For that matter, I also do not come out as a particularly strong I (Introvert vs. Extravert)--I've come out an E other times when I've taken the MBTI--but I am plainly an N (a iNtuiter vs. a Senser).

Second, and this is more important, the Myers Briggs is one dimension short of being state-of-the-art for measuring personality. Much of serious personality psychology nowadays is quite enamored of the "Five-Factor Theory" of personality. Research has shown that the four Myers Briggs dimensions reasonably neatly onto four of the Big Five dimensions, as follows:

MBTI E/I --> Big Five Extraversion
MBTI N/S --> Big Five Openness
MBTI T/F --> Big Five Agreeableness
MBTI J/P --> Big Five Conscientiousness

So, what's the Big Five personality dimension not covered by the Myers-Briggs? Neuroticism. Knowing somebody's score on the other four dimensions basically provides no way of predicting whether they are going to score high or low on a Neuroticism scale. And I have a more extreme score--extremely high, as if you couldn't tell--on the Neuroticism scale than on any of the four other dimensions. And thus, somebody who thought they were scientifically compatible with me because I'm an INTJ would have no idea what a neurotic quagmire they were getting themselves into.