Have you ever taken the Briggs Myers personality test? It’s designed to help people better understand their own personalities, and, of course, to help employers and supervisors make the best use of their personnel. You sit down and answer what seems like eight billion questions, and some computer spits out an analysis of where you fall on four key personality indicators: whether you’re inwardly or outwardly focused, how you prefer to take in information, how you prefer to make decisions, and how you prefer to live your “outer” life. Each of these indicators is essentially a scale from one binary extreme to another (for instance introvert or extrovert), and the test is supposed to identify how strongly you incline toward each.
The concept behind the test is fascinating to me as it represents an attempt—and one that is pretty well-accepted in government and industry these days—to quantify human personality. The old expressions “he’s a good guy” or “she’s a smart lady” just don’t seem to cut it for us anymore and we appear driven to more precisely label one another in the name of workplace harmony and higher productivity.
The funny thing I noticed after taking the test a second time, one can achieve a drastically different result across multiple iterations of the test. Did my personality, the very root of what makes me who I am actually change? Not really, I’m still me . . . I just felt differently when answering all those questions the second time around than when I took it the first time. My surroundings were different and there were other stressors in my life and so, quite naturally, my answers changed the second time I answered. So, if the test can’t accurately and consistently quantify my personality, what good is it and why do bureaucracies and corporations continue to rely upon it?
It’s weird how hard we try to put people into clearly labeled and definable boxes. Almost as if we can’t handle the fact that everyone we meet is a virtual question mark and so we’re compelled to identify some means of categorizing them. This starts from the moment we meet, subconsciously running down a list of binaries in our mind’s eye that will help us figure someone out. Dress well? Check! Physically fit? Check! Latest iPhone? Check! Oooh . . . Body Odor . . . Check! It’s not unlike the Terminator running through his list of potential responses to any given stimulus. “Are you Sarah Connor?”
On and on it goes until we feel we have enough information to classify and label someone like a rock in geology lab. But aren’t we just fooling ourselves? Does any of this tell us who a person really is? And knowing that we’re all doing this binary judge-a-thon from the moment we meet, isn’t it pretty easy to meddle in that process? Isn’t this in fact what con-artists count on? Tripping the right binary indicators so that their mark will trust them, allowing the thief, in turn, to exploit them for profit?
And what about our senses, our ability to judge other people? How many times have we all heard the news story where a deranged killer is captured and a reporter goes to the neighbors who say something like “He was such a nice boy.” Seriously? This guy?? How could they get that so wrong?!?
Working on my next novel (about 10 chapters into it thus far) I find myself thinking a lot about this kind of thing. The main character is a despicable human being and yet he’s forced to comply with a set of strict rules and exist in an environment that forces him to act against his natural, albeit evil, inclinations. I’m finding it very challenging to write as his interactions with others must at once reflect both his own dark ambitions as well as the façade of righteousness required of him by external forces.
Having lived and worked for so many years in Japan, I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from their approach to human interaction as they value person-to-person relationships in business a bit more than we do in the West. That said, they also maintain a very strict separation between what one thinks to themselves, called honne, and what they show to others, or tatemae. This concept—which exists everywhere in the world, but nowhere as strongly as in Japan, I think—provides the oft-noted impression of Japanese politeness while at the same time leaving us with the feeling that it can be hard to get close to them at times. Japanese accept this division and have no problems navigating their own social structure which means it’s our foreignness that makes it a problem.
How does crossing cultural boundaries affect how we categorize the people we meet? What does this do to our binary measurements? Our personal set of human criteria are generally based upon our experiences, and these in turn are affected by the culture in which we were raised. So why would anyone think they could adequately judge—or if that’s too harsh a word, then “figure out”—the personality of someone from a different culture? Don’t we generally, out of either sheer laziness or cultural unawareness, default to judging how well they speak our language? I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard the primary description of a foreign co-worker to be “His English is really good.” That tells nothing about the other’s personality or their work habits, and yet that may be the only impression made.
It can get even worse than that when we try to apply our culture’s norms to folks who have no reason to be subject to them at all. I heard frequently while working in Korea how strange so-and-so was because he wouldn’t look someone in the eye when the two conversed. But if you grow up in the Korean culture you show deference to higher-ranking individuals by not looking them in the eye when you speak, by averting your gaze. Thus you get the crazy mismatch of someone from one culture attempting to show respect, and that gesture being misinterpreted as distrustful in the other culture. Works the other way too as many Koreans find Americans in particular to be terribly self-important . . . because a conversation—even with a superior—becomes a virtual staring contest since eye contact is very important to us.
None of these cultural norms are wrong, they simply are what they are, the product of any given culture’s development over time. Given the young age of the United States as a country, it shouldn’t be surprising that most of our cultural norms are still identifiably borrowed from other nations. But this is not true in much older societies, those which can trace their cultural roots back over thousands of years. Regardless, the bottom line is that we can seem every bit as weird to them as they may appear to us and it’s important to keep that in mind during cross-cultural interactions of any nature.
Chances are we can’t stop running down the Terminator list of binaries when we meet new people, but it’s important to be aware that we’re doing it. That awareness, tinged with even a little cultural knowledge, can help us adjust our own personal criteria in a way that is, perhaps, more reflective of the individual we’re meeting and less representative of our own cultural biases.
People will always be individuals, no matter how alike or conformist they appear, and we’ll likely never gain the ability to truly know what another is thinking. This is, I believe, what makes people interesting, and I shudder to consider a future where that constant wondering is taken away from us by some revolutionary technology. We are, each of us, a mystery to a certain extent, and life is all the fuller for having to figure one another out. Enjoy that process, but never forget that while you’re looking at me . . . I’m looking at you too.
M. G. Haynes