I absolutely refuse to be one of 16 personality types. Probably my reluctance to pigeonholing people began at engineering high school, where we introduced to Kretschmers typology. There were two types of people leptosomic who were physically thin and weak with a introvert and timid disposition. The pyknik was round, happy and easygoing. Looking around at the +200 attending the psychology lectures I had my doubts that we could be sorted into two groups, if we could be classified at all.
As a management consultant I sometimes feel the need to know a bit about different personality tests. I keep reading that personality changes very little during lifetime. So various tests should be fairly consistent. But are they really?
I recently bought the Personality Code and completed the test on the web. The IDisc personality types, like Myers Briggs and all the rest of them can be very interesting and to some extent revealing. But whenever I do tests like these, my scoring gets stuck inbetween subtypes and a marginal tilt to one side declares my as being such-and-such personality.
IDisc declares that I am a Detective, but like astrology columns half of the descriptions fit extremely well, but not the rest. And there are 4-5 other personality types that I think fits as well.
And then what? Now that I ”know” that I am a Detective, what do I do with the rest of my life?
Many years ago I did Myers-Briggs and the closely related Kiersey test. They use the same scales, but label the results differently. According to MB I am Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving. Had I been in a slightly different mood that day I probably could have been Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging, as there was only one point tilting me to one category on two of the scales. Kiersey labels INTP as an idealist.
To some extent I guess that the Detective is closely related to Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving, but Idealist? At least all these tests are fairly straightforward and categorical. I am such-and-such a type. This summer I completed the Spiral Dynamics CultureScan and got a brief and very hard to understand report. I am Yellow, New Alpha, Systemic Flow, Transitional, 2nd Order Change Preference and Moderately Analog. Above all I need a 16 page handbook to decipher who I am.
I am glad that I have had supervision and therapy by some very good psychologists. I feel quite familiar with who I am and quite satisfied with who I am. I consider my personality (and those of others), as very complex and which cannot be satisfactorily revealed by a 15 minute test. But then of course this is an attitude which would be very typical of a Detective.
You say ”Kiersey labels INTP as an idealist.”
No, he labels INTP a ”Rational,” the ”Rational Architect.”