The test involves stating your degree of agreement or disagreement with one hundred different phrases-or, in Peterson’s words, “You will be presented with a series of phrases, such as ‘carry out my plans,’ ‘respect authority,’ and ‘like to solve complex problems,’ and asked to indicate your agreement or disagreement with those phrases as they apply to you, typically and personally.” The results are comparative to other test takers, or perhaps to some pre-existing database, on a percentile basis. He’s a clinical psychologist by profession, so this is his field, and his test is strictly objective, although perhaps the conclusions he draws across groups of people from the test are not ones everyone agrees with. It is not designed to fit any particular hobbyhorse of Peterson’s (of which there are plenty). So I took the test Peterson offers presumably, it’s one he and his team derived from earlier tests. The second is to give people a starting place for them to reconfigure at least their behavior, and maybe their personality as well, if they are unhappy with some aspect of their lives, through his “Self-Authoring Suite.” As to the latter, I have no thoughts, since I am not unhappy with any aspect of my life, or for that matter, my scores. This is basically the same point Jonathan Haidt makes about moral views it’s just broader in analysis and application. The first is to allow people to understand that there are real differences among people, and so disagreements are often not based on, and not susceptible to, rational argument. Peterson’s purpose in offering his own version of the Big Five test isn’t just to let people navel-gaze and compare their scores while drinking at a bar. It should be relegated to the dustbins of the past because it’s no longer properly valid. Corporations love it because nobody gets offended by it because everybody wins. “Perhaps they did a fine job for the 1930s. This seems similar to the extremely commonly used Myers-Briggs test it is not, and Peterson has nothing good to say about Myers-Briggs. Underlying it is the theory that word usage in a society’s language can be used to identify key personality traits, and then statistical analysis of responses to questions relating to those words, including correlation of different responses (“factor analysis”), can be used to rank individuals relative to each other with respect to those traits. This analysis is not original to Peterson it has been developed since the early 1960s by a variety of psychologists, and, from what I can tell, is widely agreed to be useful. For today’s purposes, though, I am focused narrowly on his implementation of the “Big Five Aspects” personality analysis. I like Peterson quite a bit, although I am hardly in perfect agreement with him. The spur for this line of thought was the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, whose meteoric rise has caused him to appear everywhere, it seems. Of course, if you don’t care about me, and are wondering what happened to the interesting book reviews, you should just ignore this entire post! It may also illuminate some of my own writing. Mostly this is for my own amusement, though maybe it will be interesting to others (especially given my, um, outrider test results) and cause them to pursue their own self-analysis. Nonetheless, my purpose today is to examine myself, in certain respects. Nobody ever accused me of being self-hating. Why, exactly, is the unexamined life not worth living? Thus, I’ve always been more interested in action than introspection, although that certainly hasn’t stopped me from having extremely positive thoughts about myself. The Delphic Maxim “know thyself” has never appealed to me.
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