What manner of being am I?

[sqbr]

flyingblogspot and infamyanonymous both posted about personality type things just now, which got me thinking. I did the Myers Briggs test and as happened last time was totally unimpressed with the result (me, an overbearing leader? It is to laugh. The only bit I'm 100% happy with is the T) But this reminded me of a personality classification they were talking about on the Psychology 101 podcast, and after some digging I found it: The Big 5.

So according to that test, I am...


Results are in percentiles, ie a result of 70% means I have a higher result than 70% of women of my age and nationality(*). The answers are pretty detailed, I've left the major ones, plus any sub-results I got outlier-y results for :)

Extraversion...............55
Gregariousness...........83
Assertiveness............2
Cheerfulness.............80

Agreeableness..............74
Sympathy.................95

Conscientiousness..........31
The only ones I didn't HORRIBLY fail here were caution and Achievement-Striving :D

Neuroticism................76
Anxiety..................98
Anger....................3
Vulnerability............99

Openess to experience.....79
Imagination..............90
Emotionality.............1
Intellect................91
Liberalism...............99

So I'm a friendly messy messed up robot. Sounds about right :D(**) I think the reason this isn't as popular as Myers Briggs is that instead of a horoscope like vague, open ended results from indirect questions you get out exactly what you put in, ie I'm not very surprised I got a low anger results after saying "Strongly disagree" to the "Do you get very angry?" question.

(*) apparently they have data on lots of 28 year old australian women?
(**)Well, I'm a little unhappy with the low conscientiousness, and somewhat disquieted by the fact that I apparently have no emotions.

Comments

[evil-megz.livejournal.com]

There is a tonne of normative data on the big 5 since it's the most used personality measurement by Actual Psychologists (where as no Actual Psychologist with half a brain would use Myer Briggs), so it's been tested and tested and retested.

And yeah, reliable personality trait indexes that use self reporting are never going to tell you something about yourself that you don't already know... that's kind of in the definition of them. If they tell you something you don't already know, they are probably wrong. They're really only developed for communicating your personality to other people (clinicians, employers), not to yourself.

[evil-megz.livejournal.com]

I should say, they don't tell you anything about yourself that you don't already know, but they can tell you how the rest of the population compares.

[alias_sqbr]

While it wasn't surprising exactly, it was still interesting to think about dividing up my personality that way. And it's nice to be able to point to a more theoretically valid alternative to Myers Briggs :)

[evil-megz.livejournal.com]

There is a tonne of normative data on the big 5 since it's the most used personality measurement by Actual Psychologists (where as no Actual Psychologist with half a brain would use Myer Briggs), so it's been tested and tested and retested.

And yeah, reliable personality trait indexes that use self reporting are never going to tell you something about yourself that you don't already know... that's kind of in the definition of them. If they tell you something you don't already know, they are probably wrong. They're really only developed for communicating your personality to other people (clinicians, employers), not to yourself.

[evil-megz.livejournal.com]

I should say, they don't tell you anything about yourself that you don't already know, but they can tell you how the rest of the population compares.

[alias_sqbr]

While it wasn't surprising exactly, it was still interesting to think about dividing up my personality that way. And it's nice to be able to point to a more theoretically valid alternative to Myers Briggs :)