A more interesting question for me is - Are there distinct personality types at all? My anecdote: I lived in a very white, very blue collar suburb of Vancouver for the first 20 years of my life and did not know anyone who wasn't in the same boat as me. Then I started working in an area that was dominated by Indian immigrants. I was surprised to find out that people where the same they just had different faces and names.
By that I mean that Raj was very similar to Steve, they laughed at the same sort of humor, they acted similar, they could have traded bodies (ala "Freaky Friday") and nobody would have noticed. At 26 I moved to Tucson AZ and the whole cycle repeated. Now I was living in an area that was 50% Hispanic. The same cycle repeated itself, where I met people that seemed to me to be personality clones of others I had known before. Now it was Juan who was just like Raj or Steve from my past. It felt like to me there was 12-16 basic personalities out there and I thought I could understand where the seed of Astrology or Meyers-Briggs sprouted from.
Now I am an employer of about 10 people in a manufacturing company. I have seen many people come and go, and after a while you see patterns. Of course humans are known to find patterns where none exist, so maybe I am just fooling myself. This foolishness keeps popping up though, whenever I meet someone new and I think "He is just like Steve, or Raj or Juan" and possibly this helps or hurts our relationships on some hidden level.
edit: I am Scorpio but have never taken the Meyers-Briggs test. I do apparently have nine of my planets in the house of money for any investors out there that are basing their portfolios on astrological principles :)
I dunno. I try to consciously avoiding reframing people in the context of a certain personality template or whatever. I prefer taking people at face value and gradually forming an opinion as to who they are while consciously dissociating the superficial characteristics. This is not an easy task and something I work very hard to do (and often fail).
( This is mainly because I was born and have lived in quite a few countries which were very different from the region that my race originates from: I have found that people take a shortcut to judging others which always annoys me. Some do it based on race, e.g. You are Ashkenazi jewish, you must be so smart. Others based on superficial personality traits observed in biased environments: You look so vibrant and love to talk, you clearly are an extrovert. )
I suspect the evolutionary advantage of having these short cuts is that it helps you size up a situation really quickly. However, in this rapidly changing world of ours, I find this to be a hindrance. People rarely are unidimensional and have significant personality shifts depending on who they interact with or who they talk to. E.g. I was working with a potential advisor back in School who is known to be a paranoid insecure tyrant who is incredibly sarcastic and mean to his grad. students. On the other hand, this person has been in a committed, long term relationship with his significant other, brought up kids in what could be described as the most gentle patient person.
( I realize that we are both trading anecdotes here but I tried looking for hard science to back this up a few years back and all I found were speculations.)
If you look for similarities, you will be able to find them. If you look for differences, you will be able to find those, too. Is a platypus a mammal even though it lays eggs? (Yes. But why does the categorization matter?) Is Pluto a planet?
The thing about the MBTI, and other personality tests, is that they're tools. You have to treat them as tools; they're not authorities. They're methodologies. I enjoy taking personality tests and classifying myself and the like. I like having a label; that's a facet of my particular psyche. But I don't give them a huge weight; I let them influence my self-reflection and then I move on.
(Incidentally, astrology is far more complicated than personality typing. The popular kind today is just a simplified natal horoscope; here's a more complex natal horoscope that's a lot more interesting: http://chaosastrology.com/ Also take a look at http://www.friesian.com/elements.htm for more fun.)
One trait that I've seen about Scorpios is that very few of them can get along together: whether that be friends, lovers, business partners, or other closely affiliated people. I've seen this time and time again, sometimes with me not even noticing. I am a Scorpio as well as my girlfriend.
I started practising witchcraft (if you were to give it a name) about 5 years ago after I received "proof". This proof is a personal type of something that I observed. So no, I do not expect you to _believe_ me.
By that I mean that Raj was very similar to Steve, they laughed at the same sort of humor, they acted similar, they could have traded bodies (ala "Freaky Friday") and nobody would have noticed. At 26 I moved to Tucson AZ and the whole cycle repeated. Now I was living in an area that was 50% Hispanic. The same cycle repeated itself, where I met people that seemed to me to be personality clones of others I had known before. Now it was Juan who was just like Raj or Steve from my past. It felt like to me there was 12-16 basic personalities out there and I thought I could understand where the seed of Astrology or Meyers-Briggs sprouted from.
Now I am an employer of about 10 people in a manufacturing company. I have seen many people come and go, and after a while you see patterns. Of course humans are known to find patterns where none exist, so maybe I am just fooling myself. This foolishness keeps popping up though, whenever I meet someone new and I think "He is just like Steve, or Raj or Juan" and possibly this helps or hurts our relationships on some hidden level.
edit: I am Scorpio but have never taken the Meyers-Briggs test. I do apparently have nine of my planets in the house of money for any investors out there that are basing their portfolios on astrological principles :)