Oprah Winfrey

[sleuthiness]

Candylandjoe:

You start with a very faulty psychological concept like Jungs dichotomous functions. You take a couple women out of the 1940's that want to play psychologist and so they invent the typing game otherwise known as Myers-Briggs. Anyone can play. You just answer a bunch of questions about yourself and there you have it...YOU. All the while this is going on serious researchers are inventing their own word game called "the lexical approach" which means you go through the dictionary and pick out personality descriptors and you keep running tests to see how people group the words. Otherwise known as THE BIG FIVE.

The next step is you try to guess peoples types without even using the test. At about a 60% reliability for the test you can imagine the reliability of the results when you have untrained amateurs filtering data about celebrities through their muddled concept of types.

At least my method is based on an objective measurement. It has been very accurate when based on a properly posed photograph.

I look forward to buying the publication in which your findings are released.

 

[neptunesnet]

She's ENFJ. It's almost painfully obvious.

 

[Psychdigg]

Neptunesnet:

Oprah is too egocentric. Too artsy. She's not tough. Again what is "obvious" is her role as a person with power and influence. But it is just her job. She is really too self-absorbed to be the "leader" that you will find in an ENFJ.

 

[neptunesnet]

Oprah is too egocentric. Too artsy. She's not tough. Again what is "obvious" is her role as a person with power and influence. But it is just her job. She is really too self-absorbed to be the "leader" that you will find in an ENFJ.

Anyone can be egocentric, type aside. She's a visionary, and she likes to do things big. Being a tv personality is one thing & can be seen as "just a job," but creating a cultural empire, with elements not too different from that of a cult, with just a talk show is another thing entirely.

Also, leaders can be self-absorbed. They just tend to be more obsessed with their image, and in what ways they can manipulate the image that they project, which is why it's not uncommon to find ENFJs in the image triad (2, 3, & 4 types).

 

[Psychdigg]

neptunesnet:

Don't believe in all that publicity stuff. There are millions of women just like Oprah and they could be better at Oprah than Oprah. A lot of them watch her show.

As audience share increases the more good advice a person gets. She is simply the beneficiary of good luck.

One thing type is about is "type" . Divide 6.5 billion people by 16 and that gives you close to 1/2 billion Oprahs in the world. If you take Kierseys stats (never could figure out how he came up with his percentages) 5% of the population are ENFJ and only 1% are INFJ. So, if Oprah is so unique why not opt for the 1% INFJ.

But if she is one out of 325 million ENFJ's in the world she's not unique. Typology is anti-celebrity. Typology ought to show us the real person underneath not the hyped version.

Oprah's somatotype is a strong chubby woman much like you see throughout the USA working in Social services and teaching in grammar school. That's the oprah that walked around bare-footed amongst her early audiences - cuz her feet hurt so much. She is above average intelligence but she is NOT a leader except in her ratings.

 

[neptunesnet]

Don't believe in all that publicity stuff. There are millions of women just like Oprah and they could be better at Oprah than Oprah. A lot of them watch her show.

As audience share increases the more good advice a person gets. She is simply the beneficiary of good luck.

One thing type is about is "type" . Divide 6.5 billion people by 16 and that gives you close to 1/2 billion Oprahs in the world. If you take Kierseys stats (never could figure out how he came up with his percentages) 5% of the population are ENFJ and only 1% are INFJ. So, if Oprah is so unique why not opt for the 1% INFJ.

But if she is one out of 325 million ENFJ's in the world she's not unique. Typology is anti-celebrity. Typology ought to show us the real person underneath not the hyped version.

Oprah's somatotype is a strong chubby woman much like you see throughout the USA working in Social services and teaching in grammar school. That's the oprah that walked around bare-footed amongst her early audiences - cuz her feet hurt so much. She is above average intelligence but she is NOT a leader except in her ratings.

I have no idea what your point is.

 

[Psychdigg]

I think I have overlooked something. Oprah is primarily a Mid-Range Body Type. This means she can easily jump into other areas. I just noticed how close her somatotype really is to ENFJ. It would not be an impossible leap for Oprah to adapt as an ENFJ. I have a friend whose body-type is in the area just between ENFP and ENTP. When he took the test years ago it indicated he was an ENTP. But then he took on some teaching responsibilities in connection with his church and headed up a lot of community service committees. Recently he took the test again and it indicated he was ENFJ. This seems to be a type of adaptation and not necessarily a maladaptive adaptation because it is reasonably close to his natural body-type/temperament area. If your occupation or even a marriage mate is fairly close to your type the adaptation has an integrative or to use Jung's term "individuating" effect.

So, Oprah may have "role-played" an ENFJ. When a person is adapting to a role that isn't natural to them it can consume energy and lead to exhaustion sometimes referred to as burn-out. We may be seeing the real ENFP/INFJ Oprah re-emerging. This would be the less glamorous barefoot Oprah who just doesn't feel like climbing stairs, giving up comfort foods and squeezing into tight clothes for a red-carpet stroll.

 

[Arthur Schopenhauer]

Nobody should claim Oprah... She should be free!

 

[OrangeAppled]

I thought ESTJ was pretty obvious.

 

[skylights]

ENFJ. it's so brilliantly clear.

E: i don't think we really need to question this.
N: everything is big with her, like neptunesnet pointed out. she can be quite practical (J), which can seem like S detail orientation. but seriously, her slogan is "live your best life". it reeks of NF. and whenever she does her weight loss stuff, she doesn't get right down to business, she does all this N idealizing and visions and crap.
F: the ENFJs i know can actually be very logical and tactical, but at the foundation of their life lies F. thus it is with oprah. everything she does is people-oriented.
J: i'm suprised that anyone's suggested P for her, even though her J isn't super-clear, now that i think about it. the biggest thing that points me to J is she's obviously got very strong Fe, and i really don't see Fi or Ne. it also accounts for her occasional S-seeming practicality. but she's very much in charge, and Ps just really don't do that, not unless they have a very specific reason to be in charge. oprah doesn't really, she just likes heading things up. nothing wrong with that, but she's no P. you also really wouldn't ever think of her as "fuzzy", would you? that's the mark of FPs.


don't get your panties in a bundle though, ENFPs have to claim Regis Philbin

 

[Psychdigg]

Skylights: There is no doubt she is NF.

 

[Cloud of Thunder]

I have this media mogul as a 3w2 So/Sp ENFJ. Anyone agree?

 

[Anew Leaf]

I have this media mogul as a 3w2 So/Sp ENFJ. Anyone agree?

I agree on ENFJ, and being social Dom. I could also see so/sx in that she is very intense in some of her interviews. I'm terrible on enneagram so no comment from me on there.

 

[Orangey]

ESFJ or ESTJ for the love of God.

 

[lunalum]

Methinks E_FJ 3w2....


Why is ES_J so obvious?

 

[Elfboy]

I have this media mogul as a 3w2 So/Sp ENFJ. Anyone agree?

I think So/Sx, but other than that, yes

 

[Speed Gavroche]

ENFJ 3w4 So/Sx. Anyone who've seen her in the color purple or listen her express her onviction can't ignore her dramatic actress and vision oriented quality, her personlity style is "The Professional" more than "The Seducer" (3w2). She's very engaged in one-to-one relationships (So/Sx) and don't play the bon samaritain like 3w2s, her emotions are more complex.

 

[Anew Leaf]

ESFJ or ESTJ for the love of God.

She is not Te at all. (see: dr Phil)

why do you think she's esfj? Or is this one of those "I'm sick of everyone thinking someone super successful had to be an N?" things?

 

[EJCC]

This could be personal type bias but I'd say she's way too quick to hop onto the conspiracy theory bandwagon (e.g. The Secret) to be an ESFJ. Not that ESFJs wouldn't do that, but I don't think I've ever seen Si-skepticism in Oprah before. Or really, any kind of skepticism. She just enthusiastically accepts any ideas that come her way.

Could she be an ENFP?

 

[Orangey]

She is not Te at all. (see: dr Phil)

why do you think she's esfj? Or is this one of those "I'm sick of everyone thinking someone super successful had to be an N?" things?

Yeah, I lean more strongly towards ESFJ than ESTJ (because she seems to thrive on Fe), but I see nothing but ESxJ in her. She was known for being an over-achieving, hard-working, hyper-involved child with a knack for public speaking. She has even said herself that she attributes her success to early ambition and a belief in hard work and dilligence. Moreover, she is quite infamous for her nit-picking, detail-mongering ways (as well as for her megalomania, but I don't think that's type-related.)

All of this taken together points way more to ESFJ than ENFJ. Unless of course you think that her belief in some conspiracy theories or the character she played in The Color Purple are more typologically relevant than the things I listed. Oh, and before anyone does it, I'll just go ahead and say that if you attempt to say that the characteristics I listed in favor of ESFJ can be equally applied to ENFJ, then you are guilty (as many on this site are) of stealing the standout traits of SJs and giving them to Ns for no other reason than that you are stubbornly stuck, for whatever fucked-up reason, on calling her an N.

For the record, I do not type people based on some sort of sensor quota system. If it seems that way, it's simply because there is, not a tendency, but more like a rule in this subforum that everybody is a goddamn N of some sort. You'd think that, given the accepted statistical proportions of types ("SJs rule the world, boo fucking hoo me"), someone will have noticed the ridiculousness of this behavior. And, admittedly, many have noticed, but the rule remains. I type Ns as Ns when they display characteristics of their type. It's much more work (and much more confusing, not to mention theoretically scattered and inconsistent) to rationalize someone's type using stupid little meaningless details. That's when I know it's become less about discovering someone's actual type and more about rationalizing one's own type because they want to be N (they think, "well if I'm an INFP and I have these traits, and person X also has these traits, then person X must be INFP too. She can't be ISFJ, because then that might mean I'm ISFJ, and that's simply not possible.)