From the profile of an INTJ or Architect.
Previously: Telling Your Story: Starting Notes.
Let’s talk about Lego bricks1 and how to tell a story.
This is another analogy, which you know from the previous post is one way your brain better understands the world. This time, we’re looking at how data are2 used to tell a story.
You will eventually be asked to take the data you already have, collect more data about yourself through various discussions and activities, and then tell the story of those data in a way that makes sense to you. This is often a narrative, but it can also be a presentation or another kind of project. For now, consider the analogy of LEGO bricks. Read Brent Dyke’s article on it, where the concept is broken down into five steps:
Step #1: Data Collection
Step #2: Data Preparation
Step #3: Data Visualization
Step #4: Data Analysis
Step #5: Data Storytelling
This is a lot like the way you put together your own story: Sort all the data you have about yourself, find the patterns, figure out what they mean, and then put it all together.
Thinking About Thinking, and Carefully
As you gather and generate more data about yourself, remember that no online test — and not too many offline tests — should be treated as absolutely accurate. The Forer Effect is the phenomenon to watch out for3. More on that in a moment. First, your role is to become, as David McRaney says, “capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting.”
You Are Not So Smart – Book Trailer – Procrastination
Metacognition is at the heart of all learning, and you can always brush up on the difference between that skill and reflection. You need to think about thinking. You are the subject of your own story, and that means your thinking is the central action.
The idea is not that a personality test like the ones you’ll be offered is inaccurate or useless. It’s that you must be metacognitively vigilant about anything a test like this tells you, especially when your goal is self-improvement4. How you learn is always most important. Consider metacognition the skill that unlocks everything else:
For this unit, you should specifically learn about the Forer Effect before exploring much further. Your brain is wired to find meaning in details and data, which is what happened when Forer tested students:
Forer tested his hypothesis in a sneaky way: He gave a personality test to psychology students and then asked how well the results matched them. Only thing? They all got the exact same “sketch” of results that “described” their personality based on their unique answers. And pretty much everyone thought the personality feedback was spot-on or close to it. This classroom demonstration of gullibility is the Barnum effect, which is also called the Forer effect.
Whatever you discover about yourself needs to be scrutinized. Sort the data, find the patterns, and analyze what you find. Tell the story that makes sense to you, but be careful not to make assumptions about yourself. Again, your brain is wired to see things that aren’t there. One of the most interesting examples is pareidolia, which is a kind of apophenia. Again, the precise terms matter! Here is a blog that defines the terms and offers some fascinating examples and analysis.
Next up: Testing for yourself.
The debate over whether to pluralize this as Legos or not is fascinating. Technically, it’s LEGO, all capital letters, and LEGO is the plural, as well. Trying to change the way people speak is difficult, however. ↩
Here is another debate, and one where I may have joined the losing side. Though it’s technically correct to use the word data with are or were, it sounds weird to many folks. I will continue to conjugate it that way. ↩
Last prescriptive vs. descriptive note: Ending a clause or sentence with a preposition is okay. It’s also likely a rule you’ve never heard of. There it is again — of is the preposition, and writing “a rule of which you’ve never heard” would be awkward and unhelpful. Interestingly, you might never have learned what a preposition is. Many of you were taught to read in almost exactly the wrong way. ↩
I wonder, for instance, where I fall between an INTJ and an INTP these days. Perhaps my old age has softened me into an INFJ. Without taking the test again, I can read the profiles and thinking metacognitively about myself. I can analyze the data I have at hand. And if I believe the differences are crucial to my work as a teacher, then I have a starting point for meaningful reflection and change. ↩