Which Box Do You Fit INTo?
Personality Profiling — What Next?
Have you done one of those tests to find out your personality type yet?
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to go through life without finding yourself in one of somebody else’s categories. Psychometric testing of new hires is everywhere. Myers-Briggs remains popular, but there seem to be dozens of others — some of which use an astonishingly small set of data points to derive something about you that might point your life in a different direction…usually without you knowing.
When there are a handful of questions and some massively broad-brushed findings, you have to feel as though it’s little more than a Horoscope. I will find love. My finances are on the up…
All because my parents got drunk on holiday and shagged in the sand-dunes behind the funfair…I knew everything was their fault.
If we were to introduce another new personality type test today, I think the one I would find most useful would be a test that indicated how likely a person is to be persuaded. By anything.
The traditional media has always needed to be questioned, but I do still tend to believe the news when I read it. Cat stuck up tree. Heavy traffic on the M25. Liverpool in shock defeat to Chelsea. My brain has other things to do than question these reports. There is bias in this media, sure. We know this. We even know what the bias is that’s inherent in most of these outlets — the right wing press, the left wing press, the comedy press… But it’s information, and we can filter it.
Social media is the Wild West. It’s a place to get information, some of which is probably factual, some of which is certainly useful. Doesn’t make it news though — unless it’s cat stuck in tree videos…
And then there’s people. You know? Folks. People who are around who say stuff. People in work. People on the bus. People who want you to hear the things that they’ve got in their head. It is also information. There is bias (because we’re all frail and human) but you do not necessarily know which way that bias goes — unless they’re wearing the T-shirt and the Hat.
Everyone believes in things. Quite often people believe in different things than you do, and once they’ve got that in their head (Liverpool didn’t really lose to Chelsea) it’s very difficult to persuade them otherwise — even if you show them replays of the goals on YouTube. It’s all conspiracy. It’s all fake.
These people are odd, because it seems on the surface that they’re incredibly easy to persuade — hence their odd-ball viewpoints — but they’re completely unpersuadable when it comes to changing their minds.
I want a test to find out whether the people I meet are this kind of people or the kind of people who know when to believe that the cat really is stuck up the tree. I also want to have a test to find out whether people understand that a cat in a tree news story is not very important, and not worth killing anyone over.
Where is this test?
When will it become mandatory?
When will they start tattooing the results on people’s foreheads?
Please make it very soon.
Merton Barracks lives in Hong Kong after a life literally and metaphorically on the road.
He is a security technology expert, an autonomous vehicle expert, a counter-terrorism expert, a writer of fiction, a father, a ranter and an exposer of bullshit.
He is also a victim of childhood sexual abuse, who took half a century to face up to what that did to him and also what it made him. You don’t recover. You don’t repair.
Take a look at some of his fiction
Or read about the process of coping
