Personality Review

The last time I did a personality test was about 3 years ago. The results have been logged on an older blog which I used to run on my own server, a long time ago. The exact date of that posting was on March 28th, 2004. I did 2 personality tests, one at humanmetrics.com and at socionics.com which both resulted in an ENTP result.

For those that aren't well versed in the Meyer-Briggs personality tests. A person's personality is categorized into 4 traits that are dichotomized. The category break down is performed in the following manner:

Extroversion vs Introversion (E vs I)
Sensing vs Intuition (S vs N)
Thinking vs Feeling (T vs F)
Perceiving vs Judging (P vs J)

For detailed information about these categories, I suggest looking at the wikipedia article on these categories, but I will cover them in passing during this post. I will be discussing my result further in this post.

Fast forward 3 years later after my arrival into Japan and living here for nearly 2 years now, I have begun to notice some personality changes since the leaving Canada. I attribute these changes from my living environment changes which has resulted in me adapting my lifestyle and the way I do things.

The interesting result of this change in environment is that I have come to realize that my ability to rationalize has improved and the ideas I generally come up with tend to be more complete in the sense that I am more able to pursue pending questions or thoughts arising from a single train of thought until it is comprehensively concluded. Also, since writing has become my main mode of thinking (as opposed to talking with people, due to some limitations of my language skills), I am far better at refining my train of thought to make it more logically consistent (something very hard to do verbally, due to memory constraints).

This is quite different from people that, say, tend to think through talking and bouncing ideas off of other people. The problem with continually bouncing ideas is that a single train of thought is generally never concluded as much of the verbal thinking progression is based on unsubstantiated information which can be cursory agreed or disagreed upon while following through some kind of argument. In addition to this problem, the original conversation is often lost while exploring some tangential discussion following a different objective.

As a result of this, what I have found is that I generally like to think on my own as opposed to asking other people questions (unless of course, the person I am talking to is a good source of definitive information). This has led me to wonder if I have become more introverted since coming to Japan, leading me to wonder if some of my personality traits have changed in any measurable way.

As mentioned before, the last time I took this test, 3 years before, yielded an ENTP result. The breakdown is that I was extroverted, intuitive, thinking and perceiving. The parts of this result that might not immediately be understandable are the remaining 3 ( intuitive, thinking and perceiving) parameters. I will discuss these in detail next.

Extroverted - Social and outgoing (obviously... in the sense of the meaning and myself as a character)

Intuitive - Means that I tend to use theoretical/abstract thinking with ideas that show a consistency or connection between each other.

Thinking - My decision making skills tend to be governed by rational thought as opposed to a gut feeling

Perceiving - My actions tend to be open ended and less fit to a rigid plan or a framework, but rather evaluating along the way and flexible to change.

I have since revisited these tests to see if my personality traits have changed in the last 3 years, in particular my extroversion qualities, which has not changed. What I have come to realize that I tend to be introverted when dealing with complex thought but still enjoy the company of people.

Further testing, especially at socionics (which I think is fairly comprehensive) indicated that I am strongly extroverted and intuitive, which I think is very true of myself. The remaining characteristics from these tests are less pronounced as the results indicate that I don't have a strong affinity to either "thinking vs feeling" or "judging vs perceiving."

Unfortunately, what these personality test neglects is that mode of thought and action depends on the situation. Meaning that the questions I answered, say, regarding empathy vs logic will conflict against each other, thus canceling them out. For example, when it comes to the emotional needs to a person, I generally say that I am quite empathetic, but when it comes to my inclination to using logic to optimize benefits in situations, my affinity to say yes to both questions will cancel out biases to either sides.

The same unpronounced results occurs for the "judging vs perceiving" characteristics as it depends on the situation. For example when I am quite knowledgeable in a field of knowledge, I tend to be very judging and decisive with my actions. In the reverse case, I will be perceiving and update my decisions on the fly while I gather information while doing something.

These results thus indicates to me that I am a combination of ENTJ (The Executive), ENTP (The Visionary), ENFP (The Inspirer) and ENFJ (The Giver) characters. After reading these character traits, I do believe that a combination of these 4 characters is a good representation of myself (with a slight affinity to ENTP).