Also, I completely agree that an audience is a different kettle of fish all together.

If you design a personality test, I want to hear all about it because I’m sure it would be endearingly quirky.

Me? I’m definitely an ambivert. Solitude is like protein or starch — eliminate it from my diet and I will starve quickly. Social interaction is like manganese or folic acid — eliminate it from my diet and after a while I start getting weird and sickly.

I interact comfortably with one person, I can enjoy groups of three or four people, but once you get up to five? Either they’re an audience or I want to get the fuck out of the room.

(And it’s interesting to note that I’m not the only anti-social type who sees an audience as an entirely different type of animal than a social group.)

The label I’ve chosen is ‘anti-social extrovert.’

And I’ve got to say. If I was designing a stranger personality test, I’d be more interested in characteristics like, “Willingness to defend ignorance,” and “Relative mintiness,” than how observant or good with math someone is.

I love the neuroticism factor! That’s awesome, and I’m sure almost everyone will have more than they want to admit.

And, yes, if your number isn’t pretty high on one side or the other, then it’s probably not a very important factor overall. But even the OCEAN test has an introvert/extrovert category; these are categories that human beings express, to others and in themselves – not just something that shows up on one test or another.

People are known to develop in their weaker attributes as they get older, such that their percentage of whatever (introversion vs. extroversion, intuitiveness vs. sensor-behaviour, etc.) balance out over the course of a lifetime.

All of which just goes to say that: While we all have some degree of introversion / extroversion, there really aren’t that many actual introverts or extroverts out there–just people with something of a tendency, one way or another, depending on a variety of factors.

Most dichotomies are in fact continuums – and therefore the dichotomies themselves are false.

Personality traits on these kinds of tests show a normal distribution, meaning that most people are kind of average.

Now take a situation where most people are kind of average and try to segment them into two boxes. It means all those people in the middle get artificially pushed outwards. This is only avoided if the majority really is out in one direction (the US truly is a very extroverted nation, for example).

This gives the MBTI what’s called poor test-retest reliability (if you’re in the middle, which box you’re pushed into varies depending on how you’re feeling that day and so on).

Social scientists don’t use it. If they have to use a personality test like this they use the Big 5/Five Factor/OCEAN test. It has two key problems that keep it from being popular:

1. It uses numeric scores (1-5 IIRC), so it’s way harder to remember peoples’ results.

2. It’s not feel-good. When the psychologists checked their data for patterns, they found four MBTI-like factors and a fifth factor called “neuroticism”. Nobody wants to be labeled neurotic. Even the other scales have reasonable but somewhat value-judgementy names like “openness”.

I understand why people obsess about these things – categorize me relative to others! – but they’re what’s called “stranger personality” tests. They measure aspects of personality that could be most readily be noticed by a stranger after limited interaction, and don’t really predict peoples core values, approach to relationships, and all that stuff.

The tests that do measure those things with any reliability are not necessarily ones people want to publicize the results of. For example, how authoritarian are you? Anything that isn’t a feel-good test tends to get skewed results when people think the results might be shared.

Your quiet art gallery makes me think about how I also prefer quiet environments in general. If I’m home alone, I’ll never put on the TV or music just for background noise. For that matter, I’m much more likely to produce music myself than listen to it. And one of my pet peeves is when the music at a party is on so loud (or there are other noise factors) that I can’t hear anyone talk.