Myers-Briggs and Morality

“Well, it wasn’t easy, but, by following my feelings, I wound up doing the right thing. I guess I learned that my duty is to my heart.”

Mulan 2 (2004)

 

The ethical implications of keeping a human brain in a light bulb are not something this post is concerned with; I just liked the picture.

This post heavily concerns the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), of which you may or may not have heard; if the latter is true, you might like to read up a bit about it and do a quiz or two to discover your own Myers-Briggs personality type before reading further.¹ Then again, I don’t like to give my charming readers too much homework aside from hefty portions of scripture, so here’s a quick introduction to the test that should provide a portrait of it sufficient to enable an understanding of what I’m on about in this post:

The MBTI was developed by Isabel Briggs Myers, and her mother, Katharine Briggs, based on a theory of psychological types described by Carl Jung. The theory essentially boils down to the idea that differences in behaviour between individuals can be explained by differences in the way they prefer to use their perception (becoming aware of things) and judgement (coming to conclusions about what has been perceived). Four areas of such preference are concerned:

Favourite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I).

Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).

Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).²

Choose the letter that represents your preference in each area, put them together in the given order, and hey presto, that’s your Myers-Briggs personality type. There are sixteen possibilities in all. Mine is ISTJ, aka the ‘Logistician’, the ‘Duty-Fulfiller’, the ‘Examiner’, or, more cynically, the boring one. It’s apparently the most common, and it’s all on the left side of the brain,³ very logical and methodical and pragmatic. Online quizzes tend to tell me I’ll most likely do well as a surgeon or an engineer – no thank you.⁴ Used properly, though, the MBTI doesn’t attempt to shoehorn and confine people into rigid, stereotyped boxes: every factor is a spectrum rather than an outright dichotomy, and so not every ISTJ is expected to be exactly the same kind of person. Rather, each personality type represents a variety of individuals who display broad similarities in the way they are naturally inclined to interact with people and information.

I think knowing one’s Myers-Briggs type can be enormously helpful in terms of emotional intelligence (which, I was assured at one of those largely useless compulsory careers events my university likes to put on, is ‘the new competence’) – by which I mean that, true to the behaviour-explaining purpose of Jung’s original theory, knowing that I’m ISTJ gives me an improved awareness of why I do the things I do. For instance, I really dislike being left in charge of something without clear and thorough instructions as to what I’m supposed to be doing. I also dislike spontaneity: if I’m invited to do something without a good deal of notice, the process of shifting my energy and focus towards the thing I’m now actually doing, rather than the thing I thought I would be doing, is an unpleasantness even if I enjoy the former significantly more than the latter. And I become tired very quickly when required to do something my dad rather eloquently calls ‘socialising in cold blood’ – spending time with large numbers of people I don’t really know and nothing to do except talk to one another.

Ugh. Socialising.

It’s useful to know that these are my natural inclinations, that they are products of my innate character rather than the circumstances around me, and that if other people cause me upset, or vice versa, this may well be the result of a clash of personality types rather than any culpable malice or neglect on either part. For instance, my hesitance to agree to a spontaneous activity could be perceived as a rejection of the activity, or the company in which it would take place, when in fact, the spontaneity itself is what’s perturbing me; or I might become irritated at someone leaving me with less exhaustive instructions for a task than I would like, when that person is simply of a more think-on-one’s-feet-type temperament and thought to do me a favour by not bogging me down with excessive detail.

So, knowing one’s personality type is helpful for anticipating the kinds of areas in which one is likely to have to make allowances for others. Moreover – and this is really the heart of what I’m getting at – I propose that the best use for that knowledge is to help us make such allowances. I propose that, in an odd sort of way, the best use of the knowledge of one’s personality type is to enable one to act against the grain of it where necessary, rather than to provide an excuse for indulging one’s preferences without restraint. Bear with me a little, and I’ll try to unpack that a bit.

An old friend and myself spent several happy minutes the other day Googling ‘what each personality type does’ and seeing how well we matched up with the suggestions the Internet had to offer. My friend is an INFP and found the Internet’s perceptions of her to be of varying accuracy – but not only because they sometimes drew strongly on aspects of her personality type less manifest in her personally. This, for instance, is what an INFP supposedly does at a party:

Tells everyone at the party how much they love them and then drunk dials their ex and cries.⁵

The drunkenness described is a situation that simply cannot apply to my friend, because, for religious reasons, she doesn’t drink alcohol. My friend has made a decision about how to behave that renders the natural inclinations of her personality type irrelevant. She is conducting herself according to an external moral standard, rather than her own personal predispositions.⁶ I, similarly, aim to conduct myself according to the desires of my God as laid out in the Bible, which are, again, an external moral standard totally independent of my personal predispositions. And that means that I shouldn’t be allowing the desires which I am able to identify as being down to my personality type to take precedence over that moral standard.

Let’s work a couple of examples. What, according to the same article, does an ISTJ like me do at a party?

Stays mostly sober and low-key judges everyone else for acting like a drunken idiot.

This one, I have to say, I found fairly accurate. Now, not indulging in excessive drinking is certainly a Biblical behaviour,⁷ so in that respect, I’m lucky, because my natural inclinations make that behaviour easy for me. Judging everybody else as inferior for not according to the same behaviour, however, is distinctly un-Biblical,⁸ so that’s an element of my disposition I should make efforts to combat, rather than follow.

As another example, the same author has written another article called ‘What Each Myers-Briggs Type Does If They Like You’, and according thereto, an ISTJ like me

Rearranges their schedule in order to spend more time around you but fiercely denies their attraction until you make it clear as day that you’re interested in them.⁹

Again, it’s a pretty good match for what I myself would actually be inclined to do, but the outright lying involved isn’t exactly scripturally sound,¹⁰ even if the alternative to such fibbery¹¹ be Incredible Awkwardness. I am, in this scenario, once again required by the moral standard to which I try to adhere to act in contradiction of my natural inclinations.

That such a thing should be required of me should really come as no surprise. While no personality type or preference is naturally wrong in and of itself, that my natural inclinations should prompt me towards ungodly behaviour is an absolute given from a Biblical point of view. It’s been happening ever since Eve listened to the serpent¹² and we all of us fall prey to it.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? – Jeremiah 17:9

The trouble with giving a label to a natural inclination is that it then becomes a component part of one’s identity, which makes it easy to justify behaving according to its prompts regardless of whether doing so is appropriate according to the moral standard one follows. For instance, I personally have no natural desire to stay behind after church on a Sunday and chat to people I vaguely know over assorted beverages. Naturally, I would much rather go home and read a book or watch a boxset¹³ or translate some Hebrew or something. On the other hand, however, the Bible tells me that God is pretty keen on his people actually spending time together and encouraging one another,¹⁴ and post-Sunday-service beverage time is a key opportunity in my week to do that. Now, if I had no idea what extroversion and introversion were, if my only justification for not staying after church was that I didn’t feel like it, that would look pretty lame next to the contrary exhortations of the word of God, and I’d be content enough just to deal with the fact that I didn’t feel like it and get on with the always painful but, admittedly, usually ultimately rewarding process of introducing myself to someone. Knowing myself to be an introvert, however, gives me a ready-made excuse as to why after-church chinwags are simply not my vocation. I’m an introvert; it is against the very nature of my being to stick around and be sociable for any longer than strictly necessary; I won’t do it. Like Mulan in that clumsily-scripted sequel whose only really good bits are a song or two and the really dramatic bit where Shang does an awfully good impression of having fallen to his death,¹⁵ I could claim that my duty is to my heart. I could even go so far as trying to put the blame on God: he made me like this, he gave me this preference, so it would be unfair of him to ask me to do anything that contradicted it.

 

This lady doesn’t look much more thrilled by the prospect of post-service beverages than I usually am.

But God doesn’t ask us to live in accordance with our hearts, our natural preferences, but with his will. He asks us to do that even if it’s painful: “if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”¹⁶ I am to deny myself – yes, the very nature of my being – where it prevents me from fully following Jesus. I am to deny my ISTJ-ness where it conflicts with God’s will and purpose.

So what, then – if our preferences prompt us to sin, will we all, upon being made perfect in God’s New Creation, be rendered clean and blank of any preference, any personality, at all? Um, that would be a no. We’re not designed all to be the same; the whole the-Church-as-one-body-with-many-parts metaphor is clear enough on that front.¹⁷ My ISTJ-ness is, like every aspect of our fallen world, a good thing that sin persistently hijacks for wrong purposes, to such an extent that I can’t imagine what it would look like for it to exist without that persistent hijacking. And, because it is a good thing hijacked for wrong purposes, by fighting against those wrong purposes I restore its goodness to it. In other words, when I deny those wrong urges to which I am more susceptible than others on account of my ISTJ-ness, I am actually being a better ISTJ person than when I surrender to them.

I realise that last bit sounds rather abstract and unlikely, and I think that, again, that’s because we’re so riddled with wrongdoing that we simply can’t envision what it would be like to have different preferences and personalities without sin getting in there somewhere. But in any case, my duty, as a follower of the Lord Jesus, is not to my heart – my preferences, my personality, my fallen human nature with its peculiar catalogue of flaws – but to him. After all, my heart is deceitful above all things, while Jesus is truth itself; my heart spills over with sin, while he is entirely without it. And that means that the ISTJ label, much as it is useful for revealing the factors behind aspects of my behaviour, is not to be used as a justification for that behaviour: that basically amounts to me saying ‘I’ll behave in such-and-such a way because that which is deceitful above all things is telling me to’. Rather, my MBTI result is to be used to help me to understand myself better, and where lie my strengths and my susceptibilities, so that I might be better aware of where I am likely to be required to act in accordance with, or in opposition to, my natural preferences, and so be prepared for such action.

But then again, I suppose that’s exactly what a typically logical, rule-adherent, non-emotionally-driven ISTJ like myself would say, isn’t it?

Footnotes

¹ There’s a pretty good one here to get you started: https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test.

² Information paraphrased – and, where in italics, directly quoted – from the Myers & Briggs Foundation website, which is a pretty good indication of its reliability, for those of you fact-focussed types like myself who pay especial attention to such matters: http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/.

³ I learned about the left-brain, right-brain theory from a Horrible Science book called Bulging Brains, and it would feel like a betrayal to point you anywhere else for this information. There are one-penny copies going on Amazon if you’d like one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bulging-Brains-Horrible-Science-Arnold/dp/0439944473.

⁴ Too many sources of information for me to be bothered to cite them all (and, since this isn’t academic work, I rather pleasingly don’t have to). You’ve got Internet access: go fish.

⁵ That’s according to Heidi Priebe at Thought Catalog: http://thoughtcatalog.com/heidi-priebe/2015/05/what-each-myers-briggs-type-does-at-a-party/.

⁶ To be fair, I doubt that the friend in question would be particularly inclined towards drunkenness anyway, but my point still stands.

⁷ Ephesians 5:18 is the go-to verse, but drunkenness is also explicitly condemned in several lists of Bad Behaviours in Paul’s letters, as well as a number of times in Proverbs (23:29-35 are rather good fun; have a look: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+23&version=ESVUK), and implicitly in various narratives.

⁸ Try Romans 12:3: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+12&version=ESVUK. Bet you were expecting me to say something about logs in eyes or “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Aren’t I full of surprises? That little chunk of verses will be relevant later too, though, so do keep it open.

⁹ It’s the lovely Heidi Priebe again: http://thoughtcatalog.com/heidi-priebe/2015/05/what-each-myers-briggs-type-does-if-they-like-you/.

¹⁰ Psalm 101:7, for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+101&version=ESVUK. Please do read the whole psalm: it’s only short and context matters.

¹¹ Not a real word, but I really think it ought to be.

¹² Genesis 3: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+3&version=ESVUK. But you knew that, didn’t you?

¹³ I’m currently enjoying the first series of Reign, which is a shamelessly fun drama of exactly the type I’d been missing of late. Fancy an extended promo for the first episode? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX7e0IlLucs That friend I mentioned earlier and I sat in front of five consecutive episodes while eating cookies and grapes and chocolate fingers the other day and it was joyous.

¹⁴ Hebrews 10:25 would be the standard verse on this point: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=hebrews+10&version=ESVUK.

¹⁵ Here’s the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZw3BSqTruA. Not many points for originality, but it would nevertheless surely be pretty high on the Best Disney Death Scenes list if he, you know, actually died.

¹⁶ Matthew 16:24. And also Mark 8:34. And also, with one minor change, Luke 9:23. I have an inkling this might be something Jesus is pretty keen for us to do.

¹⁷ I said you’d need Romans 12 again; now is the time. (The link’s in footnote 8, if you didn’t spot it earlier.)