Sensation Seeking And Personality

Earlier this semester, in my personality class I took a (fittingly enough) personality test - the Myer-Briggs test. After taking the test (two different ones actually, just to see if they would correlate with each other) I found that my personality is characterized as introverted, intuitive, judging, and thinking. Essentially, this means that I keep to myself, predict patterns in order to attend to the future, plan out details or actions ahead of time, and analyze data objectively, and use logic or data in order to make a decision. Looking at the characteristics associated with my personality, I feel that they fairly accurately represent who I am.

One interesting point is that while I thought that they were accurate, I did not show a strong correlation with one particular personality trait. This may be because, in taking the test, I thoroughly thought about each question, and imagined situations in which I would behave differently, where my personality would shift a little bit to adapt to my surroundings. I wondered how this would translate into sensation seeking, so I took the test that is linked in our slides.

Before taking any tests, I knew I would not be an extremely high sensation-seeker. It's just not me. Looking at the data from the Myer-Briggs test, I register as an introverted person who plans out many things in advance, not typical of the sensation seeker.

Sure enough, I scored low on the sensation-seeking assessment. I scored a 15 out of 40. I don't believe that the test was the most accurate assessment available; it was only 40 questions compared to the 72 on the other personality test and for several answers, I did not believe there was a right or wrong choice, if I had the option, I would have selected both choices as answers. Overall though, I felt that the test was fairly representative of me; there are some high-sensation activities I would absolutely love to do, and others that I would not do even if someone paid me. Upon further reflection, I do have to state that even though these online personality tests may not be the most accurate, the data revealed between the two tests tend to correlate with each other, giving merit to certain online personality assessments.