Early Retirement Extreme Forums

The DW and I decided to retake the MB personality test and found our results to be the same as before, solidifying what we already knew.....both extremely introverted (myself in particular) but in different ways.

Here is mine.

Your personality type: “The Architect” (INTJ-A)
Strength of individual traits: Introverted: 99%, Intuitive: 45%, Thinking: 54%, Judging: 44%, Assertive: 79%.
Role: Analyst
Strategy: Confident Individualism


She is INFP 35% Introverted, 22% Intuitive, 13% Feeling, 20% Prospecting, and 15% Turbulent

She is more on the border where I am full blown INTJ.


Feel free to post your own. If you have the results emailed to you it will give you the format above.

Your personality type: “The Logician” (INTP-T)
Strength of individual traits: Introverted: 34%, Intuitive: 23%, Thinking: 21%, Prospecting: 49%, Turbulent: 36%.
Role: Analyst
Strategy: Constant Improvement

I've had INSP before on the "official" test, but INTP seems reasonable too. Not very strong preferences compared to yours!

An old thread with a different test ... viewtopic.php?f=16&t=299

What's the 'variant'? I've never seen that before.

Either A (Assertive) or T (Turbulent)

Assertive - Assertive individuals are emotionally stable, calm, relaxed refuse to worry too much.

Turbulent - Turbulent individuals are perfectionists, self-conscious, success-driven, care about their image.

I always wonder when hearing about these personality tests:

How reliable is it to answer these questions yourself rather than have people who know you very well, i.e., better than you know yourself, answer them about you? Or people who don't even know you that well.
My theory is that one's sense of self-identity is driven by a good dose of self-idealization/self-delusion. I also think it would be interesting to know how potentially differently you are perceived by others versus your own self-perception.

cmonkey wrote:Either A (Assertive) or T (Turbulent)

Assertive - Assertive individuals are emotionally stable, calm, relaxed refuse to worry too much.

Turbulent - Turbulent individuals are perfectionists, self-conscious, success-driven, care about their image.

I also don't understand how the categories these tests present can be so absolute. One can be n/either one or the other, depending on the day or even hour. I guess I am doubtful about these classifications systems' ability to describe complex individuals very meaningfully.

I am reminded of something I read maybe in Gladwell about how people who describe themselves for example as "honest" individuals will actually lie a lot. That these 'essences' are somewhat fictional, as humans tend to behave in highly situational ways.

@Peanut - Obviously anyone who either don't know themselves very well (for example someone who is not very introspective) or has an inaccurate self-impression (for example an introvert who has been taught to be extroverted) won't be able to assess themselves very accurately. In such cases, relying on other people, such as trained psychologists, would work better.

Depending on whether there's such an issue or not, the test might make for an adequate or poor substitute for reading the type descriptions and thinking somewhat deeper about the framework than a 5 minute test on the internet would reveal. In general, if one understands what the aim of the test is, that is, the context of a question, it will be easier to answer it correctly.

The dimensions refer to preferences; not absolute skill sets; not binary choices; nor any kind of deterministic action. It then becomes clear that the outcome/choice in a given situation is only statistically set by the preference to choose in a certain way.

Another issue is when people are 50/50 (no preference) on almost all dimensions. In such cases it would be hard to say anything definitive about behaviour because there wouldn't be any consistent pattern that's revealed by the four (apparently now five) dimensions. Perhaps a 17th type is needed for that ... one whose behavioural characteristics include "not seeing much use in typing"

Ultimately the proof of the pudding is in the eating in that it seems that people with the same distribution of preferences apparently behave in very similar ways. In other words there's a fairly strong correlation between preference and behaviour unlike, say, the rather non-existent correlation between astrological signs and behaviour.

In particular, if there was nothing to the idea of personality typing and the test was useless, it would be statistically impossible that so many people on this forum test more or less exactly the same way. In other words, if you sample a population of swans and they mostly turn out to be black, there's something going on! If one instead of the test let the people on this forum read all 16 descriptions and proceed to chose the one or two they thought most accurately reflected their own behaviour, I'll bet that once again, the INTJ profile would come up the most.

Peanut wrote:One can be n/either one or the other, depending on the day or even hour.

I agree with this to a point. I have taken various tests from different sources and once in a while I will flip over to ISTJ and am usually pretty close on the N/S category, but almost exclusively land on INTJ.

Today was the strong N I have ever gotten. I is nearly always 95% + and the others are generally around 50%.

INTJ, very assertive

I - 36%
N - 24%
T - 59%
J - 32%

Assertive - 70%


Not far off what I got using another test.

I got this:

Your personality type: “The Consul” (ESFJ-A)
Strength of individual traits: Extraverted: 21%, Observant: 54%, Feeling: 49%, Judging: 28%, Assertive: 60%.
Role: Sentinel
Strategy: People Mastery

I have to tell you that I am all over the map with these things. My younger self always got INTJ, and on that last one in the other thread I got ENFJ, although E and F were borderline. Never had an S before.

I did not find the "Consul" description to be terribly accurate; maybe only about half right. Still, it's cheap amusement.

INTP. I usually test borderline INTJ/INTP though descriptively I definitely identify as INTP.

I'm so INTP I could be the type specimen

ENTP-A -The Debater (AKA The YesButter or The Cheerful Contrarian .) According to related model my direction of growth is supposed to be towards the Scientist through the shared trait of curiosity and the practice of conservation of resources. So, in theory, INTJs should be a good influence on me. I don't know if this peer pressure plan is working for me but I will give it a few more years. I sometimes experience sudden breakthroughs in functioning.

Interesting. The test gave me ENTP-T, the Debater. In the past I've always tested as ENTJ. The P is not very high, so it's likely not a significant change.

Extraverted: 44%
Intuitive: 23%
Thinking: 22%
Prospecting: 10%
Turbulent: 10%.
Role: Analyst
Strategy: Social Engagement

I was a big believer in the Myers Briggs for many years, but then I started looking at the criticisms of it, and the history. I did not know that it was first developed by a mother / daughter team with no significant background in psychology. Interesting read: "The Cult of Personality Testing" by Annie Murphy Paul.

Using the other test I came across as ENTJ. This one is very different.

Personality: ESTP ("The Entrepreneur")

Variant: Assertive

Role: Explorer


http://imgur.com/Ky8oLNV

While I like the explorer label, I'm not so sure about this.

Another Architect (INTJ-A), at least according to this test.

Introverted: 40%; Intuitive: 25%; Thinking: 13%; Judging: 39%; Assertive: 44%. Role: Analyst.
Strategy: Living aggressively below my means... no wait, "Confident Individualism".

I'm with Peanut in that a lot of MBTI questions seem aspirational rather than linked to behavior. Sure, I'd like to be an ultra-rational fearless visionary, but in practice probably do consensus better/more often than debate. Guess I'd like to see more test questions along the lines of "what do you actually do in this case" rather than "are you more one thing or another in your view".

This test (INTJ or INFJ?) goes more in that direction and according to that I'm INFJ, which is more accurate based on my experience. Also of interest: INTJ or INTP?

Oh, and do others get different results depending whether they take the test at work or home??

walker wrote:Also of interest: INTJ or INTP?

Good questions in this one! I got 65% INTJ/35% INTP which is about what I expected.

walker wrote:INTJ or INTP?

53% INTJ, 47% INTP
I actually enjoyed those questions. Now I see how I don't seem to ever get a consistent result in these tests:)

The most interesting INTJ description I've read so far as it's more of an inside view instead of the usual outside view.
http://www.personalityhacker.com/intj-personality-type/

Interesting...INTJ 65% and INTP 35%. Though, I could easily see it going the other way a little more, as I'm definitely torn on some of those questions.