Hesitation is the worst of all crimes

Mahabharata

If there’s one positive thing to say about a personality test, it’s that they are short. Answer a few simple questions and a few minutes later you possess a shorthand for understanding yourself. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the most popular personality test, is based on Jung’s theory that we have a mixture of of attitudes (extraversion or introversion) and a primary way of seeing the world (thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition). These cognitive functions help us to make sense of stuff, make decisions and form a large part of our personality. But they’re not perfect and even Jung emphasized the fact that these labels are more useful for orienteering rather than any sort of definitive explanation.

The last time I took a personality quiz, about eight years ago, I was told that Thinking was my primary function. I wasn’t surprised, since I’m often ruminating or lost in thought, but I remembered feeling disappointed with the job suggestions for a ‘logical’ type like lab technician or legal clerk. Recently, I took the test again and got Intuition, quite a different way of seeing the world than categorizing and analyzing everything. Had I got myself that wrong? Have I been ignoring my strength this whole time?

Jung defined intuition as a “perception by ways or means of the unconscious.” It doesn’t sound practical, but there’s good reason we all have the capacity for intuition. When you live in primitive conditions, like humans have for most of their existence, unpredictable things are likely to happen. The weather turns nasty. Floods. Famines. There’s a river or an impassable mountain right where you least expect. These situations couldn’t always be foreseen by sights and sounds alone. When you can tap into intuition, you now have ‘hunches’, hints, deeper feelings of uncertainty or confidence. To help him survive, man learned to listen to these gestures from the unconscious.

Since I usually rely on my ego to make decisions, I am not comfortable being intuitive. And it turns out, in 2023, I don’t think you need intuition to get by. Our culture and the modern world is geared around, protects and encourages Extroverted Sensing type people (practical, outgoing, social, pragmatic) types to succeed. We have really good signage, GPS systems and documentation to explain the world and make it really easy to get around. Gamblers, the classic ‘extroverted intuit’, who think with their guts are probably beaten by machine learning models or uber-rationalists. Even dreams are ignored by most people, or denied entirely.

But without intuition, decision making can degrade. It’s appropriate to use your ego to shave or make your bed. But often it gets in the way and even makes the process of decision making feel worse. Take driving for example. If we are good drivers, we’re usually letting muscle memory do most of the work. But when we need to stick a difficult park, we might find ourselves thinking our way through it: “Is he leaving or not? Can I fit there?” This can feel painful. We hesitate. We second guess. We jitter. This is where we make mistakes. It’s like we have suddenly slammed the handbrake on bubbling unconscious processes. And the longer we hesitate (is it this turn off or the next?), the more confused we get and the more likely we are to take the wrong turn.

I really can’t blame the personality assessment. Unfortunately, because our sense of self is a bunch of thoughts and feelings we believe about ourselves, there is a risk that a personality quiz can have too much influence on us. I was the one who created a narrow world view, who told myself for years that I’m a thinker and I’m only interested in cold hard facts, not the test. By ignoring my unconscious, and my gut, I have tended to approach decisions (and driving) in a halting, hesitating way.

If you can accurately find out your primary cognitive function, go for it. Like using your whole leg to push the pedals, life should roll more smoothly for you if you can lean into this strength.

But if you have any doubts about your ability to self-assess, don’t bother. Instead, I think it’s worth learning the framework, and notice what you can in yourself and others.