Don't Put Me In a Box
Root 18 - On the usefulness and fallibility of personality tests.
People change. Hobbies, haircuts, values, political ideologies, and interpersonal strategies are all reassessed, discarded, picked up, and tweaked. In my intro to philosophy class in college, my professor said that typically, people can change up to about 15% of their nature—the rest is set. I think he was limiting himself and his students with that stance.
When I first took the Myers Briggs personality test, I treated the result like gospel. “I am an INFJ!” I would say, as if my position on the four axes tested were set in stone. It was quite a betrayal, then, when later I retook the test and got INTP. Then ISFJ. Then INFP. “What is going on here?” I thought to myself. “Are these tests just bunk?” The same thing happened with my enneagram results. Every time I took it, I got a different result.
Then I went from thinking I was happily married to realizing I was desperately miserable in my marriage. I left, and underwent what felt like a complete transformation in who I was as a person. I learned about codependency and worked to eliminate those tendencies in myself. I went from hating myself to loving myself. I went from thinking my writing was garbage to believing in it enough to throw it out into the world. My therapist even commented on how much I had changed. She attributed this to how unusually open I had been to facing my pain and growing past it. I have viewed myself as akin to a phoenix these past few years. I had to burn everything down in order to rise from the ashes, a new creature.
I learned about Attachment Theory recently. There’s four basic styles of attachment under attachment theory: stable (aka secure), avoidant (aka dismissing), anxious (aka preoccupied), and anxious-avoidant (aka fearful). They’re arranged in a familiar cartesian plane to illustrate how they’re connected.
These are my actual results, from taking the test here, with my attachment to different people being represented by different circles. The circles in the avoidant area of the chart represent my oldest attachments, with my newer relationships clustered in the stable quadrant. Back when attachment theory was dreamed up, it was thought that a child would have a single attachment style based on the relationship they had with their mother. What I take from my results is that just isn’t true. My attachment style has changed over time, and I now make healthy attachments to the people in my life. Looking at this graph, I realized what was going on with all the other personality tests I’d taken through the years.
They had been documenting the immense state of flux that I’d been in. The change in me that had to happen before I could be honest with myself began years before the separation, around the same time my personality tests started changing. The slow awakening that happened in me caused chaos as I started testing out who it was I really wanted to be. How I really wanted to behave. What interpersonal strategies I really wanted to use. I was growing and changing, a whole lot more than the 15% my philosophy professor said I could.
There’s so many boxes in this life, which people try to put themselves and others in. It’s simpler to think of others in simple terms. But beyond the fact that some people won’t fit neatly into one category or another, people change. Life is messy. People are complicated, and they don’t tend to hold still.
I used to be enamored with the Myers Briggs personality types. Now I see them only as useful tools to describe general patterns of behavior, and not as concrete, unchanging rules of behavior. Now I’m more interested in using them to develop character concepts in my writing than in using them to label myself.
Do you have any experience with personality tests coming back different when you retake them? Or are they the same every time?
I've often felt the very same when it comes to personality tests. I can't help but feel many of us that have taken them have at some point fallen victim to the all too human desire of "belonging somewhere", which in turn, can have extremely limiting effects on our developing personalities, that arguably never cease changing.
When I was a kid I loved these and astrology, until my mom had to pull me out of an astrology induced funk and make it clear to me that so much of that stuff is just there to make money. Now I usually take any and all of it with a heaping serving of salt.