Thinking Styles Inventory

[EndogenousRebel]

Since there is a craving for classifying quality of thought, I'm going to say fuck you and say we classify nature of thought.

More details on the test here including the guy who conceived it.

Best link to PDF, has to be done manual. Idk do it in paint?

Found this test on this talk where a retired CIA operative was talking to Google employees. The talk was generally about bias. Her thesis about it is that you want different types of thinkers. She mentions how the CIA had a bias towards recruiting people that were one-sided concrete-sequential thinkers. When it comes to criminals, they are a very wide a net of thinking styles and will think of things that a concrete sequential thinker would never think. Not good if the are in a rush or want to predict some willy thing on the opposite end of the spectrum.

I seem pretty balanced leaning towards random thinking. I like that it puts a positive spin on the matter, and doesn't really claim to think one way of thinking is better than the other.

I do have issue with the fact it associates higher number with higher quality of that type of thinking. I think it's arbitrary though I haven't seen any literature for or against it so I have no idea.

ps: sorry about data limits I may have shanked with the images.

 

[Black Rose]

 

[BurnedOut]

Abstract Sequential, Random and Concrete Random have points that overlap. They seem too similar. This test also suffers from the problem of using too many barnum statements to describe a phenomenon just like those pitiful MBTI description. Firstly, everybody is usually quite logical while doing actual work that takes effort. Any kind of intellectually engaging work works as a debiasing tool. Not only that it engages your brain pretty efficiently. Therefore, a person who is able can use logic deftly even if she is not usually analytical. The test fucks up badly because it mixes emotions with logic and presents it as if emotions enable or disable certain directions of logic itself. This is never the case. Logical work evokes logical thinking. Work itself is always with a sort of guiding logic and hence all kinds of work in this world requires relative emotional detachment.

Emotions come into play in the work when the persons in question have to avail cooperation to get something done.

The natural separation of individual work and collective cooperation makes MBTI gibberish because people have difficulty understanding how these functions fit their patterns. This simply means that MBTI does not give you insight into your own behavior to any extent because the mode of determining such is too complex for the human mind. Humans cannot compartmentalize logic and emotions but they can allocate their responses. Logic needs to be evoked in all people and when evoked, the type is irrelevant. The mode of application of logic is purely dependent on the person's experience. Similarly, emotions need to be evoked to elicit a particular behaviour and this is dependent on nurture more than nature.

Nature does play quite a role in determining your overall intellect and emotional responses but as of now, the genetic correlation found among big 5 personality traits are not big enough to called causation to any extent. Despite the fact that your emotional predispositions and intellectual acumen depend on nature to some degree, it is typologically irrelevant.

Now insofar my scores on jungian functions (I made a threas about it) are concerned, it simply means that I am an emotional person (as per my predispositions and my experiences in relationships and my perceived behaviour that works in a feedback loop) with a tendency of being analytical. Had I figured as a child that logical analysis cannot solve everything that gives me trouble, I could have been tested as an INFP or INFJ. Therefore the tendency of analysis that got me labeled as an INTP may not hold water in the future if I stop behaving like this. However since logic does a lot of work with people and work in my case, I am comfortable systemizing than affectively dealing with emotions. If you go a little more meta, the initial decision to engage in either of the two kinds of logic, requires logical thinking too because concocting a response notwithstanding affective or not requires initial analysis. However since it is not possible to keep analyzing every situation, the initial decision made as a child determines your habitual heuristic which you assume to be your personality. In your lifetime, you will encounter several such situations and your responses in all of them will lead to attribute traits to yourself which is self-delusion but not of a kind as it makes you predictable as you follow your heuristics that determine your behaviour in a feedback loop. However, it is very much possible for a person to take decisions that do not align with their previous decision which can lead to discord in the person. In such a situation, the person will usually rationalize the new decision and attribute new traits. We call this 'people changing' but in reality it is just about attributing and reattributing traits after every major decision taken. Objectively, this is logical but affectively cloying for many so almost everybody sticks to one pattern of behaviour. The last sentence gives validity to MBTI and other similar personality tests but the fact that there is even a minute chance of being a completely different person, these tests are less tests and more prescriptions that can be influential. This is a dangerous property for a test to have.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

I don't see generalized statements. I see a prompt for someone to identify 2 words that they associate more closely with from a set of 4. It's impossible to get a score less than the total score anyone else gets.

So I have a problem. My first reaction is to do X. My last resort is to do X. That is what this test is getting to the center of. I don't think this was intended to be a one size fits all model, as it was designed by an actual PhD professor who did put some effort in to validate it scientifically, unlike Myers and Briggs who didn't even hold a degree.

I'll agree it's nothing robust, but it's not even something ambitious.

What is and isn't logical depends on someone's ability to communicate it to others and have them understand. An argument occurs when two communicated things with the same intent but different understandings are to be resolved.

Emotions get in the way of all decision making. Logic without emotions is impossible.

I agree with what you say though. This test isn't really going to let you do much. But say this tool is a hammer not a screwdriver, nor a wrench. There are things that they can substitute for, overlapping uses, with a single intended use. You can use both to accomplish something that you couldn't accomplish with only one of the tools alone. That's the essence of why someone even bothers to do something like this.

 

[BurnedOut]

This test isn't really going to let you do much.

Like I said, personality emerges from self-perception and so such tools are not good as they influence your perception pretty directly. After achieving a result, you will not have any usage for it because you already know what all things you do already. However, if you are willing to believe that this will somehow open your perspective about yourself, it will still fail. What will not fail is examining your decisions while taking into consideration the situations and emotions that prompted you to do a particular thing. If personality is mutable, it is not wrong to assert that such tests are meaningless because you can actually change yourself a lot if you care enough about your mistakes. Typing people is a useless activity and concocting simplistic tests like these do not even measure an iota that will prompt you to look back at your decisions. Analytical people being perceived as analytical may give them an air of being always right but that is because the said person usually comes off as confident. It has more to do with how you seem to other people than how you function internally. Furthermore, it is futile to model frameworks like Jungian functions because nobody in the world is consciously aware to the extent of determining if you are 'judging' or 'perceiving' (don't know what the distinction is) or intraverting or extraverting your cognition.

 

[BurnedOut]

Psychology enthusiasts unwillingness to accept that personality testing will lead to inconclusive and usually useless results if typing is the main agenda is an issue debated a lot. The Halo Effect is one such book which examines the degree to which people can engage in stupidity in the name of having some kind of a self-imagined personality. This leads to the creation of nonsense like enneagram, socionics, MBTI, etc which is nothing short of being a petty horoscope that seems insightful but has pervading descriptions which when perused will reveal the ambiguity in the author's mind regarding coming up with actual deductions. Inductive reasoning is a hallmark of science but it is also a hallmark of bullshitting and lying when it is not accompanied by counterbalancing deductive reasoning affirming the inducted logic.

 

[scorpiomover]

1) The definition of "CONCRETE SEQUENTIAL" sounds like an ISxJ. What about people who love working in structured environments, but also like working in groups?

2) ABSTRACT SEQUENTIAL: people who don't like dealing with people of differing views, are really going to hate dealing with situations where there are no clear right or wrong answers, because then they might be right AND the other people might be right, which means they're going to have to deal with other views as if those other views are equal to their own. So ABSTRACT SEQUENTIAL has some of the traits that are ascribed to CONCRETE SEQUENTIAL.

It sounds like the author is thinking of certain types of people and their traits, are trying to develop a classification system from that.

Classification systems that get used, work like the Linnean classification system, or the Periodic table, or the Dewey Decimal System.

1) The vast majority of species in the Linnean classification system that humans see, are domesticated cats, domesticated dogs, urban foxes, bees, ants and flies. So in reality, most humans would probably never encounter 99% of the species in the Linnean classification system

2) The Linnean classification system identifies humans as part of the group Mammalia, as it also does to Komodo dragons, that look and act extremely unlike humans.

3) The Linnean classification system differentiates which dicotomy you belong to, by traits like if there's a spinal cord running across the body, that is hidden beneath 8 layers of skin.

So understand, that a valid, workable system that can categorise people like the way that the Linnean classification system categorises every living organism on Earth, would be likely to show the following:

1) You have probably met only a minority of the personality types.

2) People with wildly different personalities would frequently belong to the same groups.

3) The way you'd differentiate between dichotomies, would be the behavioural equivalent of being an invertebrate or a vertebrate, which would be very difficult to observe without any special training.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

The problem with tests that have no grounding in research is that they're going to classify things that don't exist.

If you get people to do this or any test few of them will question whether the test and what it describes makes sense.

When people do any kind of test they invariably use thinking to solve it, even if they are intuitive or emotional.

Lastly, people will feel inclined to make sense of the test results they got even if they're meaningless. People would try to make a bigger sense of what it means that someone likes one brand of cereals over others and what it means about their personality.

I got high abstract random, high concrete random and high abstract sequential. What can I say, my love for chaos is too strong

 

[ZenRaiden]

I just let the machines do it for me.

 

[birdsnestfern]

Highest on Abstract Random & Concrete Random