I actually tracked down the other test. It was the Keirsey Temperament Sorter and I later found out I'd originally taken it at that same site about nine years ago. I answered all the questions again (and they did feel friendlier to me somehow than the ones in the Jung Typology Test).

The catch came at the end: before they'd score it, they wanted me to enter an e-mail address and choose a password. I did -- and they said they already had me on file but that wasn't the right password. I do keep careful track of some of the passwords I use, but I hadn't yet started doing that when I first registered there. I followed their procedure for getting a lost password re-sent, they assured me I'd be getting it "soon", and 24 hours later I'm still waiting.

I did print out the page with the questions and my answers and I still think I'd like to retake the test, but the longer they keep me waiting for the password the less interested I get.


I just found a copy of an e-mail I'd sent a friend around that time, discussing that very test! It turns out we'd both scored as "Idealist Healer" which, yes, translates to INFP:

It's funny, when [username] first published that URL, she mentioned that Idealist Healers were only a teeny part of the population -- but quite a few of us turned up in that thread. Maybe [online community] attracts us?

The authors seem to think everyone falls into one type; yet it's pretty obvious to me that I switch according to who I'm with and especially what I'm doing. In a way I prefer to be in Idealist Healer mode, but when circumstances require I can set it aside and concentrate on the (usually technical) job at hand.

It reminds me of the way you can get a quitar string, say, to vibrate differently and produce quite a different sound depending on how/where you pluck it: it may be vibrating in "fundamental" mode, or in modes that produces lots of overtones. I'd say I shift in and out of at least two modes, maybe a few more that I haven't paid much attention to.

I thought it was interesting that, unlike other scales that have "better" and "worse" poles (higher IQ is more desirable than lower), the Keirsey (and the related Myers-Briggs) are more like "which way are you facing?". Facing north isn't better than facing east, just different. And they seem to have gone to some trouble to come up with fairly complimentary names for their types: healers, teachers, guardians, but not a klutz, dummy or villain in the lot!

I can remember seeing "idealist" used almost dismissively -- as in "don't pay any attention to him, he's just an idealist". Keirsey seems to take some trouble to give the term better associations, though.

As I recall, the book [Keirsey, Please Understand Me II] tells us how the individual questions are scored, so we could figure out from that which answers make us what. I don't want to get too tricky with the test, though -- it probably doesn't prove anything anyway.

Oh, and Keirsey calls his INTJ the "Mastermind." and/or