Album, the Soul-Quest

I came up with the idea for a Meyers-Briggs themed album in the fall of 2011, during my first wave of enthusiasm for personality theory. I was washing dishes in a vegan restaurant in Montreal and wrote “Personality = Essence + Experience” on a napkin, which I stared at for a while before deciding I should read what scientists were actually saying on the subject. I was a bit surprised to find that personality theory was pretty soft science; a lot of the tests and metrics were owned by private companies, and the common theories chose the characteristics they measured relatively arbitrarily. Even the most common one they currently use, Big 5, chooses the 5 spectra it uses to describe personality based on “qualities that reoccur again and again in literature”, or something like that.

It seemed to me that personality theory was, like the Philosophy of Mind stuff I remembered taking in school, waiting for neuroscience to provide quantifiable physical evidence to ground its systems. Faced with this vacuum of hard physical evidence from the brain itself, Meyers-Briggs and theories like it do what Phenomenology does to explain existence: look to the phenomena. So, if you want to find out what a person is like, study what they do. Specifically, study what they prefer to do most often. And since following people around and keeping track of what they do would be too long and expensive a testing procedure, get people to self-report what they prefer to do most often.

Meyers-Briggs and Big 5 represent two very different ways of turning this data into a description of a person. This has a lot to do with their intended application. Meyers-Briggs was developed by laypeople, interested in how a person prefers to function: what mental tools they employ in what order, without attempting to measure the acuity of those tools. A Meyers-Briggs personality type is an archetype that successful and unsuccessful, happy and unhappy, healthy and unhealthy can share. Big 5, on the other hand, was developed by psychologists, whose jobs often entail diagnosing and treating personality disorders, so they need a theory that can both indicate the possible presence of these disorders, and demonstrate positive change as a result of treatment.

The results of a Big 5 personality test indicate a person's percentile on 5 spectra, and therefore have almost infinite combinations of percentages to describe people. After therapy, one's “Openness” score might increase from 40% to 60%, or their “Neuroticism” score might drop from 76% to 51%. A Meyers-Briggs result purports to show a person's preferred method of functioning through four either/or dichotomies. So a person is either an I (introvert) or E (extrovert), and while they may enjoy doing many extroverted things, if they're an I they will find those things draining whereas introverted behaviour will energize them. Since there are four dichotomies, there are only 16 Meyers-Briggs types possible.

So when I started thinking about doing a collection of songs that related to personality theory, Meyers-Briggs was the most attractive to me, since there were a manageable amount of types and I could describe without worrying about being judgemental or prescriptive. The idea of sorting people into boxes, trying to determine what people in each box have in common, and then writing something specifically about them was appealing. The first thing I did was take a short version of the test myself and try to understand my own results, which are expressed as four letters: I/E (introvert/extrovert), S/N (sensing/intuiting), T/F (thinking/feeling), and J/P (judging/perceiving).

I got INTJ, with INT all fairly confident and J only 1% confident. So I read an online description of the INTJ type and thought it was fairly accurate, but was concerned about the effects of horoscope-like confirmation bias, where you're subconsciously trying to make the description fit you. So I read a few more type descriptions until I was satisfied that at least they didn't all describe me. So with the goal of finding out which one described me best, I read the closest ones to my result, and found that INTP seemed to describe me a lot better than INTJ did, so much so that I was satisfied that INTP was actually my Meyers-Briggs type.

From there, I started asking other people I know to take the test and go over their results with me. It was shocking to me how wrong I'd be trying to predict their answers; I guess often I'd been assuming that everyone else thought the same way as me, and if they were truly honest with themselves they would prefer the same things as me, but I was clearly wrong. The best proof that this is a common thing for people to do was when someone would insist that their result was entirely confirmation bias, when I couldn't identify with their type description at all.

As I had more and more friends and family take the test, I started to know the dichotomies better and be more accurate in predicting people's results. If people often hosted or initiated social events, for example, they often came up E instead of I. If people liked to play board games, a lot of times they'd be N instead of S. If they sometimes hurt people's feelings unknowingly, they were usually T rather than F. And if they had to go to a library or café to study instead of staying home, they generally came up J rather than P. Not hard and fast rules, but useful questions to quickly approximate a type description.

I wrote down all the results I'd gathered in a shabby old binder, still deciding how I'd convert the information into songs. One night I used the binder as a fan to light my barbecue, and then forgot it on the back porch for several days. My roommate threw it out unknowingly, which was totally understandable but which meant the project lost a lot of steam since I didn't have a backup of my notes, and I wasn't immediately enthused about redoing them. It took a couple years and several other album projects before I got interested in the Meyers-Briggs album idea again. I decided to ask everyone whose results I'd lost to take it again, as well as a bunch of people I'd met since. Once I had multiple people I knew test as each of the 16 types, I was ready to start in earnest.