How do you calibrate yourself against the ‘average’ person when self assessing personality traits?
For example, when a standard big five or myers briggs test asks you if you are more extraverted than normal, how on earth are you meant to answer? The people I interact with are obviously a non-random sample, and I’ve no idea what a ‘normal’ level of extraversion (or whatever) would look like.
I look at the people I choose to interact with (friends), the people I have to interact with (relatives, public employees, etc.), compare and contrast, and extrapolate, but I’m not sure how reliable that is, given that I interact with the two in quite different sets of situations.
It gets worse: the tests I took asked me to compare myself to the typical person of my age and gender, and over most of the past decade nearly all of my friends have been members of the other gender, the kind of people that Graham here calls freaks, and/or graduate physics students, so my guesses about what the typical twentysomething male is like may be unusually unreliable and/or contaminated by stereotypes and/or the horns effect.
So combining two biased samples balances out? Or is it more testing self perception? E.g. do you think of yourself as X not whether you are objectively X. Probably thinking about this question in detail ruins its usefulness as a text question anyway....
Offhand I don’t entirely know, but the tests do work so your comparison issues can’t be serious. If they’ve been normed for your group, perhaps that screens off the worst of the issues.
I’m only talking about myers briggs here, but I’m really confused about why you say the tests seem to work.
One of the main criticisms of MBTI is actually its lack of reliability—that is, its lack of consistency from test to test. MBTI in general is rubbish and when I talk about personality tests or correlations, it’s always Big Five or some other decent test.
How do you calibrate yourself against the ‘average’ person when self assessing personality traits?
For example, when a standard big five or myers briggs test asks you if you are more extraverted than normal, how on earth are you meant to answer? The people I interact with are obviously a non-random sample, and I’ve no idea what a ‘normal’ level of extraversion (or whatever) would look like.
I look at the people I choose to interact with (friends), the people I have to interact with (relatives, public employees, etc.), compare and contrast, and extrapolate, but I’m not sure how reliable that is, given that I interact with the two in quite different sets of situations.
It gets worse: the tests I took asked me to compare myself to the typical person of my age and gender, and over most of the past decade nearly all of my friends have been members of the other gender, the kind of people that Graham here calls freaks, and/or graduate physics students, so my guesses about what the typical twentysomething male is like may be unusually unreliable and/or contaminated by stereotypes and/or the horns effect.
Don’t worry; the people whose responses the tests were built on didn’t have access to a random sample either! Still seems to work, though.
So combining two biased samples balances out? Or is it more testing self perception? E.g. do you think of yourself as X not whether you are objectively X. Probably thinking about this question in detail ruins its usefulness as a text question anyway....
Offhand I don’t entirely know, but the tests do work so your comparison issues can’t be serious. If they’ve been normed for your group, perhaps that screens off the worst of the issues.
One of the main criticisms of MBTI is actually its lack of reliability—that is, its lack of consistency from test to test. MBTI in general is rubbish and when I talk about personality tests or correlations, it’s always Big Five or some other decent test.