I’ve always been skeptical about personality profiles. It doesn’t matter if it’s Myers-Briggs or any of the variety of typing that gets done in business seminars, or something simple like horoscopes. My skepticism largely stems from three things.
First, I am aware of how personality profiles can be created so that people easily say “this is me!” There’s a famous psychology experiment where the entire undergraduate lecture class took a personality typing test and then had to say how well it matched their personalities. They all agreed that the resulting descriptions fit their personalities pretty accurately. Except they’d all been given the identical result and it was taken from a horoscope. Phrases like “You’re outgoing but occasionally shy” get lauded even though they’re meaningless.
Second, I believe people have a tendency to live up to their self labels. If I think of myself as outgoing, I’m more likely to act outgoing. Again, this has been backed up by experiment–tell people they are stupid before taking a test, and they do worse. So how does a personality profile help, other than reinforce behavior that one may not want reinforced? Am I really an introvert, or am I just making myself an introvert because of my self-label?
True story–my father is incapable of knowing when he’s hungry. If a meal is late, he gets irritable and grouchy and snappish and lacks the self-awareness to understand why. His solution is to maintain a rigid schedule for meal times. Well, I had the same behavior until I was in college. Then I discovered that it was learned behavior. I’d spent years telling myself I was ‘just like dad’ when I could easily say, “okay, I’m hungry, but let’s not let that affect my mood.”
Third and finally, I don’t think people are static. Sure, someone might be an introvert today, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be an introvert in five years. Yes, it might be hard for them to make that change, but personality typing assumes they won’t change. Strength changes (with weight training). IQ can change (seriously–the tests are normalized for age). Why not other aspects of who we are?
But where personality profiles come in handy, in my opinion, is actually in fiction. An author can make a character fit a profile and, if they do it realistically, the character will feel real to most readers. My Shakespeare Professor used to point out how the Bard did it with characters such as those in Romeo and Juliet. And who am I to say that it’s not good enough for me if it was good enough for Shakespeare?
Which brings me to my favorite personality profile: think-feel-act. When something happens, people respond at three levels: intellectual, emotional, physical. However, most people don’t react to them at the same speed. When told of a death in the family, one person may immediately break down crying (feel first), while their sibling immediately starts making funeral plans (think first) and the third sibling may immediately jump in the car to head to the scene of the accident (act first). Action heroes tend to be “act first.” Hamlet was the archetypical “think first” (and think and think and think). There’s basically a pattern or habit that a given person or character will follow. They may be ‘think-act-feel’ or ‘feel-act-think’ and that response pattern will be at the ‘habit’ level of behavior–almost automatic.
So it’s something I consider when I’m creating a character. I can use it to help with realism and consistency, but I can also use it as a path for growth, like Joe in Friends and Benefits. And even if I don’t establish a hard pattern, it’s worth thinking through. How will this character respond to events? What mix of thinking, feeling, and action will they tend to respond with?
It’s a case where personality profiles actually do serve me well.
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