- Today's video is addressing a question I get
far more than any other about typology,
which is, "What's the difference between an INFJ-A
"and INFJ-T in terms of personality type?"
Or it could be any type, like INTJ-A, INTJ-T,
and so on and so forth.
And this is coming from the 16personalities.com tests
and their results, where they not only give you
the typical four-letter acronym for a Myers-Briggs type,
but they also give you an A or a T at the end
to further describe the personality type.
The short answer is A stands for Assertive,
T stands for Turbulent, and what it means
is an assertive type will be someone who,
in their decision-making, feels more confident about it,
they don't ruminate too much on past decisions,
they're pretty good about just doing their thing
and not worrying too much about it,
whereas the turbulent type is going to be
very much more worried about the implications
of their decisions, is always gonna be doubting themselves,
and is going to be more inclined to anxiety
and trying to figure out,
"Am I doing the right thing or not?"
That's just the surface of it, though,
and this opened up a whole thing about 16personalities.com
and their test which I didn't realize before,
and now that I understand it I have a greater appreciation
for that site and what they're doing.
But it's a little bit controversial
because on the one hand, what they're doing
is somewhat, in a sense, more legitimate
and scientifically valid than what other Myers-Briggs tests
might be doing, but on the other hand,
if you're a Myers-Briggs purist,
it's very much not "true" Myers-Briggs typology
or Jungian typology.
And here's why.
Because, and this is all open on their site,
they don't hide this, it's just that me being so incurious,
if that is a word, I never really looked into it until now,
and then I started to put it together,
and then they just said it.
What 16personalities.com is doing
is taking the Big Five personality aspects,
which is the only scientifically valid personality scale
out there, which I have taken myself
and I posted my results in a video, which I will link
in a card above my head.
They take the Big Five and they marry it
with the Myers-Briggs terminology,
so they basically take the, you know,
the introvert/extrovert, intuition/sensing, all that,
and they find correlations
between that and the Big Five.
But of course, in Myers-Briggs, there's only four letters,
so they had to add a fifth one to account
for all of the aspects of the Big Five personality scale.
It's quite interesting when you start to look into it,
because it means on the one hand, the results that you get
are accurate in a sense of the Big Five,
but might not correlate to what is considered right,
if there is any such thing, for Myers-Briggs,
for cognitive functions and so on.
I forgot to record this the first time through,
but let's see if YouTube would like to show
a commercial right now and support this channel.
On the Big Five scale, one of the aspects is extroversion,
so that ports quite well over to Myers-Briggs
with the I/E letter designation.
The more extroverted you are in the Big Five scale,
it means the more conducive you are
to positive emotion, the more excitable you are,
and it's more close to the everyday common understanding
of being an extrovert, and if you're low
on the extroversion scale, you're what we'd consider
an introvert, but Carl Jung, his definition of those things
was a bit different when he was talking
about cognitive functions.
To him, extroversion was more objective,
focused on the outside world,
and introversion was subjective,
focused on the inner world.
Now, that might then lend itself to a person
being more introverted or extroverted
in the common sense of the word,
but it's not really exactly the same thing.
But for 16personalities.com, that's the first bridge
they make between the two.
Another aspect of the Big Five personality scale
is openness, openness to experience,
well, what does it sound like?
Being open to new experiences, being creative,
being imaginative, so what 16 Personalities does,
did, is they translate that to sensing versus intuition.
So on the scale, if you are less open to experience,
you are more of a sensing type, and if you are more open,
then you are a intuitive, N type.
It makes sense because intuition is generally,
if you wanna think of intuition from a very basic sense,
it just means imagination,
and sensing is, oh, the real world,
the observable universe around us.
It's a little problematic to assign openness
to intuition versus sensing,
but I can see their justification for it.
But it's when you start to see kind of the differences
between how 16 Personalities is straddling
these two things and not doing a pure Myers-Briggs,
not doing pure cognitive function kinda stuff.
Another one is they take thinking and feeling
from Myers-Briggs and they correlate it
to agreeableness on the Big Five scale.
Agreeableness is pretty straightforward,
it's how likely are you to be agreeable with others?
Or if you're low in agreeableness,
you'll be the kinda person who's a bit more combative,
you don't go with the flow,
and if you're more agreeable, then you're more likely
to wanna maintain harmony with others
and you're not gonna put up a fight
when others are trying to make decisions.
This is interesting, it's an interesting way
to go about it, it's making the assumption
that if you are agreeable, then you favor feeling,
which doesn't, it's not necessarily the case,
because you could be logical and still be agreeable.
Or, on the other hand, that they're saying
if you are a thinker, if you're a thinking type,
then you're more disagreeable.
And in a stereotypical sense I can see
how this might be true for these Myers-Briggs types,
but you can find people who are lead feeling,
people who have--especially ExxJs--
who have extroverted feeling first,
who can be more disagreeable,
so this is a judgment call on their part
to port those things, but that's what they're doing,
basically, they're assuming that if you're disagreeable,
you're logical, you're a thinking type.
And then the fifth one they do
is the judging versus perceiving,
this might be the most problematic,
but they correlate that in Myers-Briggs to conscientiousness
in the Big Five.
And conscientiousness consists of orderliness
and industriousness, how hard you apply yourself to work,
how organized you are, and to a degree it makes sense,
but the problem with this is that in Myers-Briggs,
the J or the P, in and of itself,
isn't a aspect, it's not a function
in and of itself, what it is is telling you
how to decode the cognitive function stack of a type,
so the difference between, for example,
an ENFP and an ENFJ is not just one thing,
it's everything, they have totally different functions.
So it's a bit problematic, but for simplicity
and for their purposes, 16 Personalities,
of making these correlations, it makes sense,
they view J versus P as its own thing.
Conscientiousness, if you're low in conscientiousness,
you're a P type, if you are high
in conscientiousness you're a J type.
And then they add the A versus T at the end,
assertive versus turbulent,
which corresponds to the Big Five aspect of neuroticism,
and neuroticism is the sensitivity to negative emotion,
and if you are high in neuroticism,
then you will have a lot of anticipatory anxiety
about things, you'll always be overthinking things,
you'll find a lot of anxiety in everyday circumstances,
and you'll be kind of withdrawn, you won't,
you will feel a lot of relief
after some kind of social event is done with,
and you'd prefer to just stay away from other stuff.
So if you're high in neuroticism, you're turbulent,
if you're low in neuroticism, you're assertive.
On the one hand, this is ingenious,
because 16 Personalities has legitimized
this system by making it based on a scientifically
valid personality scale.
But they've also basically just redefined
all the stuff from Myers-Briggs.
It's not without merit, like, you can see
the correlations there,
but if you are a purist when it comes to Myers-Briggs,
16 Personalities isn't going to be pure,
because it doesn't account for cognitive functions.
That's the long answer to "What is the A versus T mean,
"and what is 16personalities.com all about?
"What is their test all about?"
Now the further thing is that all tests
are flawed in the sense
that they rely on self-reporting.
So you're taking the test yourself,
and Carl Jung, when he was writing about psychology
in general, and especially personality types,
was, you don't really know yourself,
and you will set up, you have this defense mechanism
within yourself where you will think you are something
other than you are, and not really see yourself clearly.
This is the problem with all self-reporting
personality tests, even the Big Five,
even though the Big Five is scientifically valid,
you have to take it with a grain of salt
if you are just answering the questions yourself.
Because you might look at yourself and say, "Yes, I am
"very agreeable," but then everyone around you
is saying, "What are you talking about?
"You're a very disagreeable person."
And then you say, "What do you, no I'm not!
(chuckles)
"I am not disagreeable, screw you!"
What you are most aware of are the times
when you kind of veer from your norm, you know,
so if you are, to go in Myers-Briggs terminology,
if you are an intuitive person, you are probably
gonna be much more aware of the times
where you are doing more sensor things
to the point where you might think you're a sensor,
'cause you're like, "Oh, I'm good at this,
"this is my strength."
It's like you get your strengths and weaknesses inverted,
because you're very calm with your strengths
and you don't even notice it because you do it
on autopilot, it's easy.
But on the other hand, when you're doing something
that's tough, when you're facing your weaknesses,
it can feel like, "Oh, wow, I'm good at this."
It sticks out in your mind.
You're like, "I'm actually very, I'm a very good sensor.
"I'm very logical, I'm a good thinker."
So it's just to show you that even though
it's scientifically valid, the Big Five,
that doesn't mean that when I take the test,
it's going to be scientifically valid and 100% fact.
Same when you take a Myers-Briggs test,
whether it's the 16 Personalities one, which you'll notice,
they don't call a Myers-Briggs test,
first of all 'cause they can't, 'cause it's trademarked,
but also because they realize
they're not doing cognitive functions,
they're not, this isn't based,
it's inspired by and takes some of its descriptions
from the Jungian psychological types,
but its basis is the Big Five, not anything
having to do with Jung.
So when you take those tests, the Myers-Briggs tests,
you might be scoring yourself as being very intuitive,
very feeling, or very extroverted, or whatever,
but you're actually just seeing your weaknesses,
and being like, "Man, I'm good at that.
"That's what I do." (chuckles)
Or the other way around, you're like,
"I'm not good enough at my imagination,
"so I can't be intuitive.
"I'm not good enough at thinking,
"so I can't be a thinking type."
But that's really just your warped view of yourself,
it's not actual reality.
How can you see reality, the reality of yourself?
It's very difficult, it takes a lot of work.
As I said, that was Carl Jung's whole point
in a lot of his work, is that you don't know yourself,
you don't, and if you think you do,
there's probably a lot of it that you're wrong about.
And something you gotta realize
is that every personality system, even if they're all
using the same letters, is different.
Like, there are some that are so different
that they're not even talking about the same thing.
And 16personalities.com is a case in point
that even though they're giving you a type,
they're not talking about the same thing
as if you took the test from the Myers-Briggs Institute.
They're not talking about the same thing
as if you went to Objective Personality, DaveSuperPowers.
They're not talking about the same thing
as if you went to Personality Hacker, and so on.
They're talking about similar things,
there is some overlap, I'm not saying
that they're in totally different universes,
they are definitely seeing a lot of the same things,
but they're using definitions that are different
from each other and looking at slightly different things,
so keep that in mind when you're looking
at all these personality systems and these tests,
they don't all work together.
They're not all congruent with each other.
Try to read about whatever test you're taking
or system you're going into to see
how do they define things, what are they looking at?
How are they classifying people?
And then from there you can see,
"Does this make sense to me?"
Is it unlocking something for you to help you
on your journey to improve yourself
and be a better person?
I think that's the whole point
of personality stuff is to shine a light
on yourself so that you can improve yourself.
If you have any other questions about typology,
let me know, and I'll see if I can answer it.
Speaking of industriousness and conscientiousness,
I have started a second YouTube channel
called "The College of Tuber Studies,"
which is YouTube advice for YouTubers,
new YouTubers, people who are getting started,
people who need some guidance on making a YouTube channel.
But even if you're not a YouTuber, you might enjoy it
to kind of get a behind-the-scenes glimpse
of what goes into YouTube and my thoughts on it.
If you go to my home page, it's linked there
as a featured channel.
Check it out if you so wish.
Thanks for watching, and thanks to 16Personalities.com
for doin' your thang with your clever
and ingenious marriage of these two personality systems.
And until next time, (gentle guitar music)
stay cool and attractive.