life & style // no. 16 theotherpress.ca

Myers-Brigg Personality Types

> The mystery of the four-letter abbreviations

Carlos Bilan Staff Writer

H7 you ever encountered four letter abbreviations on someone’s online dating profile, or in their bio attached to their social media accounts, like INFJ, ENTP, ISTP, ENFP and wondered “What the heck does that mean?” Well, those are Myers-Brigg personality types. That answer probably doesn’t make things clearer, but it’s actually pretty simple.

The Myers-Brigg Type Indicator (MBTI) is a kind of assessment created by Katharine Cook Briggs with her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers. This indicator was developed from the typological theory of Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology, who conceptualized the two core human personality traits: introversion and extroversion. He also proposed the idea of cognitive functions, which are the different ways individuals perceive and judge their daily surroundings.

In addition, Jung theorized that there are two sub-categories of cognitive function associated with the two main functions, perception and judging. For perception, it’s “intuition” or “sensing,” and for judging, it’s “thinking” or “feeling.” According to him, each

individual prefers one of each from the two main functions. It then follows that the MBTI personality type was created so that it can put the Jungian preferences in a convenient order. Hence, the four pairs of personality traits are: Introversion (I) or Extroversion (E), Intuition (N) or Sensing (S), Thinking (T) or Feeling (F), Judging (J) or Perceiving (P). Finally, those four-letter abbreviations are no longer a mystery! I’m guessing you probably would like to know what your MBTI personality trait is? Luckily, you can find out for yourself in less than 12 minutes by

Get Good vol. 2

> The games you should be playing vs. the ones you might want to play

Brittney MacDonald Life & Style Editor

ou’ve accomplished your first

level as a PC gamer. You now have some idea of what your equipment should be, and how you can adjust more easily from a controller to the ever-so-intimidating keyboard and mouse. So what is there left to do?

Unfortunately, as a PC newb, your

troubles don’t end there. In order to better train yourself into adapting from console to PC, you must take the time to select the games you want to begin learning on ina very careful manner. The number one reason an individual will choose to PC game is the social aspect—you do it because your friends are doing it. As such, your first instinct might be to jump into a game with a high co- op value: something like an open-world MMO, where the majority of the game involves interacting with other players. If you have a group of friends who are all jumping into a new one at once, then I say go for it, but more often than not, you'll be the one entering the party a little late. MMOs have a high learning curve, because there’s a lot of key mapping— the need to assign skills and powers to

different buttons on the keyboard—and as someone used to an average of 10 buttons, this can get overwhelming. Not to mention, your friends are probably at a way higher level than you, so you'd end up playing mostly on your own anyway... at least for the first 100 levels. Instead, try joining your friends in something like a team-based strategy or battle arena game. This will ensure that you can all play together, even if you are a pleb. Playing with you will help them out by giving them a chance to try new tactics, weapons, or roles against an enemy team with a collective level slightly lower than what they’re used to playing—and you'll get to cut your teeth playing against people a lot more skilled. So, by the time you face people of your actual level, you'll be able to wipe the floor with them. Games like Overwatch, League of Legends, Dota 2, Rainbow Six, and Rocket League can all serve this purpose. These types of games also generally have a much easier learning curve with less key- mapping, so you can begin on a much smaller scale than something like World of Warcraft, which requires at least 20 equipped skills and alternative set ups based off of whether youre going to fight other players, or just doing some quests.

taking a test, and it is pretty fun!

There are many websites out there

that you can use, but the one I think seems to be the most reliable and has

a better approach to the test is from 16Personalities. According to its “Our Theory” page, their model combines the best of both worlds, the MBTI and Jungian models. They retain the MBTI acronym format due to its convenience and simplicity, but they redefined many of the traits in the Jungian model, which leads to a more simplified model. In this way, they claim that their model “achieves high test accuracy while

Image via Disney Pixar

Kim S White

also retaining the ability to define and describe distinct personality types.”

From the homepage’s statistics counter, more than 61 million people have taken the test so far, and you can also see the comments of people being mind-blown by how freakishly accurate their results are. Once you take the test, the results from the website evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, romantic relationships, friendships, parenthood, career paths, and workplace habits. They even mention celebrities and popular figures in literature and media as examples that possibly share the personality type you are, which is pretty cool to know. As the website mentions, the theory simply says how people belonging to those different personality types are likely to behave, and is not a definite answer to how these individuals will behave. Therefore it should not be used as a criterion when hiring employees.

The beauty about taking this personality test is that you get to know more about yourself, since it assigns you to one of the 16 personality models that could potentially describe you. In this way, you can use it as a self-help guide, or for personal reflection.

I’m an ESTP, by the way—I wonder what yours is?