Myer-Briggs voodoo magic

Have you ever taken the Myer-Briggs personality test? It’s the one that gives you four letters, each representing some part of your personality. We had to take one our senior year of high school as a way to help point us to potential career choices. The questions seemed completely arbitrary- i.e. Do you like to sit to the left, center, or right of a room? I remember thinking what a crock it must be as I finished it up and turned it in.

A few weeks later, our teacher hands us back our sealed envelopes with our results. I read mine, astounded that this test understood me better than anyone I’ve ever known. Well, better than anyone except my best friend Ashley- who coincidentally sat right behind me. (Ashley and I call each other “soul twins”; in a world where we feel quite different than most, we just get each other). I spun around to discuss the results of this voodoo magic with her. And would you believe it, she and I scored the exact same personality type. The rarest type at that- making up 1% of the population. If that doesn’t verify a friendship, I don’t know what does.

In previous posts, we’ve talked about how behaviors evolve. But personalities- where do they come from? Are they genetically linked? If so, did natural selection act on them during the development of our species? Did personality evolve?

I did some research into the evolution of personalities. There are a bunch of scientific papers on it. In general, most of them say that there is evidence that many personality traits are genetically linked, but there are so many variables involved that it is an abstract and a “poorly understood” mechanism. Translation: it's likely. But we can’t figure it out yet.

Somewhere in our history as tribal animals, social hierarchies emerged. Maybe, each tier in the social hierarchy can be thought of as a niche, and each individual as a particular species. Individuals had to divergently evolve to reduce competition for a singular niche, making it easier for each social role to be filled.

What if everybody in a tribe was super outgoing, or overly dominant? There would be fights and pissing contests all the time- that wouldn’t work very well. What if everyone kept to themselves and didn’t share ideas? That wouldn’t work very well either. Is it possible that this could have been the groundwork for the evolution of personalities? Populations of humans with wider ranges of temperaments and social roles were the most successful?

Who knows? Maybe. Even if it was, then a lot has happened to complicate and deepen the human personality since then.

This post answers zero questions, and raises a bunch. But I kind of love it when science hasn’t yet figured out something. Not knowing things allows us a sense of wonder that answers don’t. It’s amazing how different people can be, and thank goodness for it.  My sister and I, for instance, are as different as night and day. But I couldn’t have asked for a more complimentary sibling counterpart. And I know that I could never marry someone just like me. We’d read books on weekend nights and never be forthcoming with our thoughts or feelings. Regardless of how they came to be, personalities help make our world go ‘round.

If you haven’t taken the Myers-Briggs test, there are a few online. They’re not as thorough as the official one, but I at least scored the same on both. After getting your score, consider: if you had been Tuk-tuk in the early ages of human, what social role might you have filled?

Here are the links to a couple tests:

http://similarminds.com/jung.html

http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp