Encountered one of those polls offering choices that are not necessarily opposed:

[james_davis_nicoll]

"Keep things in their original state.

Make changes, even if only for the sake of change."

Depends if the current state suits my goals.

"I am very excited when I meet new people; I can talk to anyone about various topics.

If I am around people who I am not familiar with, I will feel a bit uncomfortable; some people consider me to be restrained and reserved."

Yes.

"My social circle is very wide. I have a lot of friends and acquaintances.

I have very close relationships with a small amount of people. I am very cautious and serious when I choose my friends."

Yes: Social circle is not the same as close relationship.

"I focus on the outer world.

I focus my attention internally. I spend lots of time on introspection."

Pardon me while I throat-punch the author of this quiz.

Comments

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

If that's the test I'm thinking of, the full instructions tell you to treat it as forced choice, i.e. if you HAVE to choose, which one is MORE descriptive of your approach to life.

Of course, IF it's the one I'm thinking of, it's also supposed to be administered by a trained clinician, if you want a result that's actually useful.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Forced choices of the form "Oxford coma rule! or "kittens!" are not very iluminating.

[jwgh]

Kittens.

Do the Oxford Comas happen mostly after the Boat Race? [1]

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*shrug* Not in a casual quiz, no.

I could actually summon a long and detailed explanation of why they are genuinely illuminating in a properly-administered clinical personality inventory, which includes, for example, interpreting what it means when the client finds questions totally unanswerable, but honestly, I don't see what good it would do either of us.

[1] I'm not mocking your typing, I'm admiring the accidental awesomeness.

[ironyoxide.livejournal.com]

Confused kitten with the caption "But I don't know what Oxford commas is?".

[elusis.livejournal.com]

I believe it's Meyers-Briggs, which is clinically useless as the science is crap.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*headtilt*

Okay, I'm interested in this, as many of the therapy-types I know make considerable use of it.

That it's useless or worse for many of the purposes it's put to, I'm well aware of, but noting that a Meyer-Briggs result is in no way a diagnosis, I am not sure what you mean by "clinically useless".

[elusis.livejournal.com]

It's based on stuff Jung pulled out of his ass about personality, not anything research-based.

It doesn't show reliability (getting stable results over multiple administrations) or validity (testing concepts that are clear and stable). It doesn't stand up to factor analysis or re-test administrations.

It's interesting for introspection, but useless for any kind of application that claims it has predictive or even descriptive value (and yet it's used in the workplace all the time, ugh).

You know what else is interesting for introspection? Horoscopes.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

As an anthropologist of religion, I have a whole *different* set of complicated hand- and foot- and pseudopod- waving about Jung, because he sort of straddles the psych/anth/religionist line, but this is distinctly outwith the present scope.

It can be largely summed up as "he's good for what he's good for, which is a fairly restricted area, but occasionally he's VERY good. Outside that scope, he can be very bad indeed."

And yeah, I was thinking of the job app thing. Ugh, No. No, No, No.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

I'm here to pedantically ruin people's day help. ;)

I agree with your summation of Jung.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Sadly, you'll have to ruin tomorrow because today I have a deadline so I am not clicking on that rabbit hole. :-)

But I will. Oh Yes, I will.

I seem to recall a fairly fascinating study - and I have COMPLETELY forgotten in which class, or who did it or anything - that also basically concluded that if you have a decent therapist/client match and the therapist is relatively empathic/competent, therapy tends to work well even if the system used is bunk, so it's always more complicated, I guess.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Conversely, a system that is bunk enough can ruin any therapist's work. I was thinking the other day about T.H. White's foray into psychoanalysis, which he temporarily regarded as having "cured" him of homosexuality and sadism. He seems to have liked, trusted, and admired his doctor, who may well have been worthy of that trust as a person, dunno. (At any rate it didn't sound from the Warner biography as if White had any of the really horrible therapies sometimes used in the 1930s, which if so is a point in that guy's favor.) Nonetheless, I can't look at that episode from outside and say he was truly helped.

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

Meta-analysis of therapies. I recall that as well, basically implying that a therapist can be good despite having a "bankrupt" philosophy regarding psychology. Though I also agree with ethelmay's comment.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's the Dodo Award - "everyone has won and all must have prizes." Or, in more serious terms, therapy is better than no therapy; 40% of outcome seems to be attributable to the therapeutic alliance between client and therapist, so if you have a good working alliance, you can get some movement on stuck problems a good bit of the time.

Which is not the same as actually getting help that is useful long-term, but it's something.

[ticktockman.livejournal.com]

I think this applies to physical therapy as well. The theory behind chiropracty is both quack and bunk. Despite this, the practitioners seem to have developed some useful hands-on techniques for sore and aching parts below the neck.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

OTOH, OCEAN (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits), aka the Big Five, were initially extracted by factor analysis, seem stable over time, and valid for most cultures. Not much good for predicting behaviour in specific circumstances, but you can't have everything.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

I've found it's pretty stable -- I had to take it for work last month, after not having done it since it was a fad among our internet group back in the early 1990s, and I still came up ENTP and my boss was whatever he had been for years. I mean, I don't think it has any deep meaning or that it's any more profound a way to divide up personalities than any other, but I found it be consistent.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

Which may be true for you, but it isn't true consistently enough when administered to many people for it to be a useful instrument.

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

Yep. I generally back right out of quizzes/polls like that.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I am also not keen on the ones where it is obvious the creator of the poll would fall to the ground bleeding from the ears if they had to consider the possibility the responder is not from the USA.

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

Hey, now, I'm very good at admitting when mine are US-centric! It's usually the first option.

[ironyoxide.livejournal.com]

Meyers-Briggs, yes?

Somebody should just make an MBTI/Astrological sign conversion chart and get it over with.

[INFJ, if anyone's keeping track...]

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

I'm an IDGF. ;-)

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Don't worry, no matter what you answer it'll conclude you're a libertarian.

[ironyoxide.livejournal.com]

Funny, the political ones always peg me as an Anarcho-Communist.

I'm not even soure how that would work, but OK.

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

Consistently INFP here. *high fives*

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Anarcho-commumist works fine. It's anarchy-capitalist which is a contradiction in terms.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Several of those options show an amazing lack of understanding of how introversion works. Some days it seems like the Internet exists in order to explain how introversion works; an Internet quiz that doesn't get it seems like a betrayal of concept.

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

There is only one useful thing the Meyers-Briggs test does, and that is to promote an understanding that different personality types exist and can deeply affect how people interact with the world.

For actually sorting people, it's about as functional as a choose-your-own-adventure novel or 'Which X are you?' online quiz. I thought the categories were interesting, then looked into the science behind it, and found it isn't based on science, it's based on Jungian type theory.

Among many other problems, it assumes everyone is neurotypical.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

THAT's why I never get consistent results!

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

I'm pretty certain that was why *I* wanted to throat punch the author of the introvert/extrovert questions. Though I didn't know it at the time, because I wasn't diagnosed yet.

I suspect that a considerable proportion of people who end up classified in some of the rarer categories (I tested as INTJ/ENTJ), are there because of adaptions to neurological differences rather than personality. Which makes the test a lot like 'What dog breed are you?' for a cat.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

There is only one useful thing the Meyers-Briggs test does, and that is to promote an understanding that different personality types exist and can deeply affect how people interact with the world.

My workplace uses it for that, a training/development thing, every few years. I managed to beg off, the last time we were subjected to it -- pointed out that I'd gotten that message the first time I'd been through it, and it wasn't a particularly novel concept even then. This one is a colour version -- admin types are gold, R&D are orange, sales are green, someone else is blue; something like that.

After the last run, I was chatting with one of my colleagues, born and raised in Ireland. He told me that his results were ambiguous: halfway between orange and green. I asked him if that was a northern Irish thing?

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe he was an Irish Rovers fan?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqs4EbU02As

-- Paul Clarke

[bwross.livejournal.com]

With online quizzes do you:

( ) Spend time in analysis paralysis over answers that seem the same, or otherwise wondering what crack the author was on.

( ) Pick something randomly if nothing jumps out in the first half second.

"Throat-punch?!!"

[gohover.livejournal.com]

I suppose I don't read widely enough, but I've only seen the expression "throat punch" used here, on this blog, by people I always supposed were quite nice.

I don't understand it. This blog is so full of sensitivity! I personally don't need any of the "Memetic Prophylactic" warnings, trigger warnings, NSFW warnings, and other warnings that you provide James (I treat some of them as political commentary and as indicators of something potentially interesting), but I understand that some readers here really truly benefit from at least some of them. So why are you (and other regular commenters here) so casual about imagining punching someone in the throat? Humor? No one here makes jokes about other very similar kinds of assault.

(Just to be clear: I imagine that punching someone in the throat might put them in the hospital or kill them, and would definitely be very painful and extremely distressing. Are you imagining the same thing?)

Re: "Throat-punch?!!"

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

The expression has become quite common the the last few years. See: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/why-is-everyone-throat-punching-everyone-else/281068/

Re: "Throat-punch?!!"

[gohover.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link. I was hoping that people were imagining that getting punched in the throat wouldn't cause more than momentary discomfort, but the article leads me to believe that people do think it could be quite serious or fatal. The last comment in the comments section summed it up for me: "It's about as funny as rape to me."

If someone said "I'd like to throw him in a meat grinder", I don't think I'd have a similarly negative reaction, because, I guess, I wouldn't expect that the speaker would have access to a person-size meat grinder (unless they worked at a meat processing plant, in which case I would find it it pretty disturbing.) I wonder if part of my problem with this talk of throat punching is that anyone really could impulsively do such a thing.