“Know Thyself”

Learning what makes me and others unique individuals has always interested me. My local public high school did not offer a class in psychology. As a result, I participated in National Science Foundation summer program in psychology at Western Michigan University between my junior and senior years. Aside from determining that behavioral psychology and operant conditioning were not for me, I did not settle on a particular field of interest until I had completed my undergraduate education and embarked on a doctoral program. At that time I was introduced to Carl Jung (not personally, of course) and his Psychological Types.

Focusing My Fascination

In the early 1970s Dr. Morrel Clute, one of my professors in the College of Education at Wayne State University, introduced us to the Jungian model of perception-judgment styles and speculated on how each might respond to various teaching styles. At that time, I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and learned that I was an ENFP. I was so intrigued with the idea of matching teaching methods to students’ perception-judgment styles that I designed the experiment for my doctoral dissertation on this foundation.

Initial Application

When I began my teaching career, I administered the MBTI to my high school students and did my best to develop instructional activities that I believed would best suit their personality types. I had only limited success with this method and eventually abandoned it. It was only after many years that I would discover the reason for the failure of both my doctoral experiment and my efforts to apply typology to teaching to yield the results I expected.

Revival

I am not exactly sure what prompted the intense revival of my interest in Jung’s personality styles earlier this year. I began to search for online tests and found a number of websites which offered them. The first was the infamous 16Personalities. I was surprised to learn that nearly all of the ones I took typed me as an INFJ (although the preference strengths varied from test to test).

Seeking further information about myself, I also looked for online cognitive function tests on the web. One that I found was the “Jungian Functions Test” at SimilarMinds.com. The results of the test are presented below. Apparently they were so strange that my “type” could not be determined from them. I was not sure what to make of this!

Ne	Extraverted Intuition	50%
Ni	Introverted Intuition	85%
Se	Extraverted Sensing	5%
Si	Introverted Sensing	50%
Te	Extraverted Thinking	30%
Ti	Introverted Thinking	35%
Fe	Extraverted Feeling	55%
Fi	Introverted Feeling	85%

I found a number of other tests on the SimilarMinds site. One was called a “Jung Word Test,” and its results were consistent with those I got on other sites.

INFJ – “Author.” Strong drive and enjoyment to help others. Complex personality. 1.5% of total population.

~ Jung Word Test

I found a site called Personality Max, which offered testing that provided information not only on my personality type and cognitive functions, but also on my temperament, types of intelligence, learning style, and brain hemisphere preference. The results were quite detailed, as one can see by clicking on the image below.

Retest

I finally decided to invest in a retake of the (updated since the 70s) Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which indicated that I am an INFJ; and then the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Level II, which labeled me an “Emergent INFJ.” The Level II was interesting because it broke down the dichotomies into components, revealing both typical-of-type and atypical traits. Result summaries are shown below:

I began to find MBTI aficionados on Twitter and Facebook, and followed many of them. One of them even designed a 29-question personality test that I found interesting…and accurate. Take the “Find Your Personality Type” quiz at psychologyjunkie.com.

My search for self-understanding continues.