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Individual Behavior - Who Am I?

December 8, 2007 @ Project Shrink: The Blog from bas

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This week I will run a short series on the behavior of individuals in general.

From a very high level perspective the behavior of a person is determined by

• who he is;
• how he is at the moment;
• what he wants, and
• what he thinks will happen.

Who he is

I am not going to debate the existential question “who am I?”. I am talking more about the matter-affect properties as “I am a 36 year old male living in The Netherlands.” Your gender, your age and if you have kids or not have a great impact on how you do the things you do. Although these properties of an individual can be expressed in exact values (number, yes/no, male/female) there is also the more vague concept of personality. Most people would agree in this respect, and would even be able to express some characteristics like outgoing, closed and kind. But if you are trying to get some objectivity in this matter, you quickly get stranded.

Luckily for us, a lot of psychologists have dedicated their lives to this question, and provided us with some ideas. By creating categories of personality everyone can be assigned to a certain personality “value”. This is not perfect, but it is sufficient for our discussion. I will use the most famous one, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. By answering some question a person can be assigned a certain Meyers-Briggs type, which gives a basic outline about your personality. People are scored against four dimensions (called “dichotomies”), and in every dimension you can only have one value.

The dimensions are (based upon Wikipedia):

• Introvert and Extravert; are you focused inward or outward.
• Sensing and Intuition; this dimension discusses the way you perceive information; a stronger tendency towards the present and using stuff you see (sensing), or more focuses on the future and let your gut guide you (intuition).
• Thinking and Feeling; discusses your tendency towards how you make decisions, more rational and calculated (thinking) or more emotional and subjective (feeling).
• Judging and Perceiving; when given a situation, do you approach this more with a predefine judgment, or is you approach more open minded, and are you just “consuming” the situation?

By assigning every score on a dimension a letter (indicated with bold), the indicator can be expressed by a 4-letter combination, having 16 possible combinations in total. Like I said, this approach has drawbacks, but at least it allows is to assign a value to the term “personality”.

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