Cecily Lahey
Alma College
A Dangerous Guess
“It’s all nonsense, you know!†I teased my mother.
“Why?â€
“Because it’s pointless. You list all your personality traits, find a label for a person with those traits, and then—what does it tell you? That since you’re that type of person, you have all the traits you just listed. So useful.â€
“That’s not the point,†my mother always insisted. “You learn more from knowing your personality type, because it helps you find traits you didn’t know you had.â€
“It helps you guess that you have traits you didn’t know you had. And it’s a dangerous guess,†I always maintained.
My mother and I repeated that sort of conversation many times. She believed solidly in the importance and usefulness of personality type systems, and I suspected she was half-right—but I worried. I know now that I was wrong, of course; personality typing is not by any means “all nonsense.†And my mother was right in saying that the point of personality typing is to learn more about ourselves and about others. But my concern was valid. What worried me, as I told her, was that it’s guesswork. We list the details we know about ourselves, receive a label for a person with those qualities, and then extrapolate the qualities of other people with that label to find other qualities we may hold in common. We infer the unknown from the known. That extrapolation is the helpful part—but it’s also the risky part, as well. Sometimes the guesses are right; sometimes they’re dead wrong; sometimes they lead to generalizations and stereotypes. So I struggled for some time with the question of how much we can rely on type theories, and what use we should make of them. But now I think the question hinges on how we treat extrapolation, that dangerous guess. We know, of course, the benefits of extrapolation. After all, without the inference, personality typing only tells us what we already know. But we must recognize the risks and understand how much we can rely on it in order to properly use the results of that dangerous guess. The key to using it, I believe, is to balance our use of the systems with careful observation of real life and real people, because observation plus careful extrapolation equals perception. And perception is what personality theories are really all about.
The great risks of extrapolation are that we will end up with incorrect inferences or that we will generalize our extrapolations too much and end up with stereotypes. The results of such careless blunders are always ugly. Let’s consider incorrect inferences first, since they’re simple and straightforward. I must immediately admit that I’m frequently guilty of incorrect inferences myself. For instance, I thought for years that my younger brother, Daniel, was an extrovert, because he loves talking, so I always asked him to deal with people for me, assuming he would enjoy it. After several years of what I thought a clever bargain for both of us, he began studying personality types for himself and eventually told me my guess was wrong. He is just an introvert who loves talking, as he now informs me too often for me to forget. I’ll take his word for it. I can see now that I took a quality of his, corresponded it to the incorrect type, and then assumed, based on that type, that he had qualities that he in fact did not. I also know what it can be like to be treated as someone you’re not, based on your type, rather than your real personality. For example, our father, who is intensely interested in birth-order theory, often treats Daniel and I as “typical†middle-born children—indecisive, unobtrusive, and secretive. This causes trouble for us, because the “typical†middle-born is nonexistent—it is an average and an estimate, and certainly not a description of either one of us. So the dangers of incorrect extrapolations are clear enough and fairly simple to understand. The remedy, of course, is observation—look carefully and always be sure of your facts.
The other essential function of observation is to counteract generalization, the second danger of extrapolation, which stems from how we use those facts. Generalization is the basis of what I consider the greatest misuse of personality typing: stereotyping, or treating people based on assumptions or generalizations about their types, rather than on their own personalities. I’ve had unpleasant experiences with this kind of misuse. A few months ago, my mother was spending more time than usual researching and using the Jungian, or Meyers-Briggs, system, and she thought and talked about everything in terms of the MBTI types. In a fit of excitement about her new hobby, she made my younger sister, Elizabeth, take a number of tests to discover her personality type. Elizabeth, a clever, humorous, and imaginative thirteen-year-old with a complex personality, had enormous difficulty uncovering a result that made sense to her. Every quiz she took gave her a different result, and she ended up with four different possible types—ENTJ, ISFJ, INFJ, and ENFJ—which all described her just a little bit. This mystified my mother, who became fascinated by Elizabeth’s enigmatic personality. Elizabeth, however, was less fascinated. After a couple of weeks, she confided in me that our mother’s quest to solve the mystery was making her life miserable. “I don’t know what to do,†she said unhappily. “Mama treats me differently every time I change my mind about what my personality might be.†I asked her what she meant. “Well, for example, right now, I think I’m an ENFJ. And since ENFJ’s are feeling types, Mama keeps acting like I’m really emotional and sensitive. But I’m not. I’m still just me.†After I spoke to my mother about the incident, she resumed treating Elizabeth like Elizabeth, rather than as an ENFJ. Elizabeth did, in the end, turn out to be a feeling type, but she doesn’t want us to treat her differently than we did before we discovered the fact.
I wondered for some time about the incident. What did my mother do wrong? Why did her use of personality typing color her view of Elizabeth, and how could she have prevented that unfortunate side effect? I strongly believe that the best counterbalance to prevent generalizations is the same as the best balance overall for extrapolation: observation. It was hard for my mother to see clearly that Elizabeth was just Elizabeth, no matter what her type, and it can be difficult to interact with people as they are. And it’s a difficult balance overall between, on the one hand, treating someone as the stereotype of their personality and, on the other, ignoring theory entirely and thus ignoring what can be a highly useful tool for understanding each other. But balance is possible. We simply need to pay attention. We need to look carefully at what others really do, say, and think, instead of letting ourselves rely on our inferences.
So we have seen that the extrapolation, the helpful part, must be balanced with observation. But the strange thing is that the guess isn’t the only helpful part. I’ve found that the very process of typing someone can lead to better character understanding, because it can actually help us learn to observe better, of all things. For instance, I learned a great deal about my sister from our adventure in trying to figure out what type she was, because we had to think so carefully about her specific qualities. What was more helpful than deciding on her type was discussing with her examples of how she thought and reacted to things in order to type her. It is, I suppose, an unintended benefit of thinking carefully about people. It can sharpen our powers of both observation and deduction. And when we balance inference with observation, we have perception, which can be a priceless tool to help us understand each other . . . and maybe even to make us into better people overall.