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saidtheraina's review against another edition
Abstaining from a star level since I only read a chapter or so. Wasn't engaging enough to booktalk.
sakusha's review
funny
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
4.0
A thin book which gives a good overview of all the attempts of humans to classify each other by personality types. There are a lot of pictures included, and it’s easy to read. Ideal for teenagers.
Personality tests are used by some employers and dating websites. Galen Buckwalter, a psychologist who created eHarmony’s algorithm, explained, “Our models emphasize similarities in personality and in values. It’s fairly common that differences can initially be appealing, but they’re not so cute after two years. If you have someone who’s type A and real hard charging, put them with someone else like that. It’s just much easier for people to relate if they don’t have to negotiate all these differences” (55).
Have to be careful about personality tests though, because some people are dishonest in their answers, have poor self-awareness, or just think that any vague description describes them well (51, 66). Psychologist Bertram R. Forer gave his students a personality test, gave them all the same result, and 85% of them said it was accurate of them. This became known as the Barnum effect, based on showman Barnum’s remark that his circuses had something for everyone (66).
My summary and interesting things of note:
Chinese tradition called zhua zhou (pick up/first anniversary): On a baby’s first birthday, parents place her on a table set with food, toys, tools, books, and weapons. Whatever the baby reaches for is said to indicate her personality and future path in life. Sword = warrior. Abacus = clerk. Celery stalk = hard worker. Scallions = intelligence. Orange = good fortune. In the more modern version, people place newer items like calculators and stethoscopes (13).
Chinese Astrology (65). The book’s descriptions of some of these types doesn’t seem consistent with what I’ve read of them elsewhere. Chinese zodiac descriptions may not be as consistent in general.
Greek Astrology (62).
Humorology: good health requires balancing body fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) (14). In Rome, Dr. Caludius Galenus in second century CE, said that if you have anger-management problems, it’s caused by an excess of yellow bile. You can cure it by eating melon, cucumber, lime juice, and dandelion greens (15).
Physiognomy: body reveals mind. Adherents in ancient Greece “believed that especially long ears signaled a fool and that witty, thrifty, and modest individuals possessed small and thin ears. Wide nostrils on a man denoted a lustful nature. Eyebrows close together were signs of a dull but good friend. Eyebrows far apart meant that someone was hard-hearted, vain, and greedy. The ancient Greeks also assigned personality attributes based on hair color, thickness, and degree of curliness. One subset of ancient physiognomy involved comparing individuals to the animals they most resembled. Someone with the physical attributes of a bull (a thick and wide head), for instance, would be considered unintelligent but physically powerful. Someone with elongated facial features, resembling those of a horse, was thought to possess that beast’s regal and spirited nature” (17).
Graphology: handwriting analysis (20).
Rorschach tests: Ink blots (28-29).
IQ tests to determine intelligence (34). (Mental age divided by chronological age) x 100
Big 5/OCEAN (47-48).
The Type A personality: unreflective, anxious, impatient, enjoys completing projects, hates failure, focussed on success, prefers to stick with proven, time-tested methods as opposed to experimenting with new concepts or ways of doing things. (Sounds like SJ in MBTI.) Type Bs are calm These labels came from cardiologists Friedman and Rosenman. They hypothesized that the patients who paced anxiously in the waiting room were more likely to suffer from heart disease. They did a study which confirmed their hypothesis, but later studies disproved it (52).
Finger differences (49):
My measurements (dominant hand): Index 7cm. Ring 7.2 cm
Divide index by ring to get 2d:4d ratio. Lower ratios are associated with less ability to delay gratification. Women with high ratios are more likely to suffer from depression (49).
Enneagram: “The first person to connect the symbol to personality was 20th century Bolivian-born philosopher Oscar Ichazo, who employed it as part of a larger spiritual system. One of Ichazo’s students, psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, further developed the enneagram as a psychological tool in the early 1970s” (50).
Psychoanalysis: talk therapy developed by Sigmund Freud (26).
Word association tests developed by psychiatrist Carl Jung to determine what’s going on in your unconscious (27). The book provides some example words so readers can try testing themselves.
Jung’s psychological types in summary: “Jung established the groups based on three questions. He asked: Is a person extroverted or introverted? In other words, to what extent does an individual crave stimulation outside themselves—from friends and social activities, for example. Introverts tend to look for stimulation from within. Jung then asked whether a person was guided more by thinking or by feeling. Thinkers, he said, made decisions based on careful logic. Feelers made decisions on gut reactions. The last question concerned how a person takes in information. Some people use their five senses to gather data. Jung described these people as sensing. Others rely more on hunches, instinct, and previous experience. Jung said that these people were intuitive. Every person, Jung believed, consciously expressed one side of the spectrum or the other in each of the three categories. He said that the side that wasn’t expressed would be revealed through unconscious actions. For instance, if a person’s conscious behavior showed him or her to be a thinker, then the person’s unconscious actions would reveal his or her feeling side. But Jung also cautioned that it was unwise to try to pigeonhole people into rigid type categories. He wrote, ‘Every individual is an exception to the rule’” (37).
MBTI: “Briggs and Myers were not trained psychologists. They created their test simply by surveying acquaintances and keeping track of their answers on thousands of note cards. They then attempted to show correlations between specific answers to questions and wider personality traits. After they ran out of acquaintances to survey, they had family and friends give questionnaires to their friends to collect more data. Eventually Briggs and Myers administered their test to college students. . . . The test was said to produce dependably consistent results” (44). They claimed that people’s MBTI type doesn’t significantly change over the lifetime, but “studies have shown that when test takers take the MBTI once and then take it again five or more weeks later, 50% of them are classified as a different type on the second test” (46).
Kiersey Temperament Sorter is like a combination between the four humors + MBTI (55). It too has 16 types made up of four letters, but gives different labels to them, and also sorts them into four categories (like “rationals”).
Listing as many of my personality traits in 60 seconds (38).
16PF questionnaire (39). Can take at https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/16PF.php
Eysenck personality questionnaire (40). Can take at https://psychology-test.net/test/eysenck-epi/pxi14a787be6089aaac01a265a16877c4d2/
Dungeons & Dragons Alignment Test (46). Can take at https://easydamus.com/character.html