INFJ-What?

I have always enjoyed being a part of experiments and psychological tests because I look forward to learning something new about myself that I had overlooked or never tackled head-on. I heard of the Myers-Briggs Personality Test and the 16PF Questionnaire when I was seventeen. The 16PF website seemed more user-friendly, so I decided to take that test and discovered that I was an ENFP. I read the personality breakdown on the website, thoroughly enjoying myself, but though it seemed rather accurate to me I knew that this particular test resembles aptitude tests rather than psychometric tests. I re-did the test a few times in the following months and seemed to stay between the two personality types ENFP and ENTP. Three years later however, living in a completely different environment and having a different lifestyle, I took the test again out of curiosity and my result was INFJ-T. I had gone from belonging to a personality type that represents a large chunk of the population to the rarest one that represents less than 1% of the general population.

I’m sure many of us have come across “SAD” while living in Montreal — seasonal affective disorder. This is actually the reason I decided to take the 16PF test again. I wanted to see if I had “lost” myself, to see if my lifestyle in winter made me lazier and affected my mood. At first I was shocked and wondered if somewhere in my subconscious I answered these questions differently in order to get a different result, but when I read the extensive report of the INFJ-T personality type I found that I related to a great deal of things, things in my personality that I disregarded as outliers but had become prominent in my life.

Though self-reported tests are biased and subjective to the test-taker, it does give the test-taker a lot of perspective and opens up the idea of self-regulation. There were some questions that I was hesitant to answer because I was afraid of being honest with myself, and realizing the things I lied to myself about made it less likely for me to lie to myself in the future.

Coming up with three different answers to the personality test may raise questions of reliability and validity, however I would say that with every kind of test regarding human perspective, to a certain extent, the answers rely primarily on the mental state of the person and their mood.