Science Experiment - Personality type and atheism/agnosticism/belief

[The Procrastinator]

OK, we're probably going to have a small sample size and a fair bit of unsubstantiated opinion, but what else is new.

Aim: to determine if there is a link between personality type (Myers-Briggs, for the sake of the experiment) and belief or non-belief.

Hypothesis: (for the sake of argument) F's are more prone to belief than T's. T's are more likely to be atheists than F's.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Myers-Briggs test, this page has a pretty good explanation: MBTI Personality Test: Understanding Your MBTI or Myers Briggs Personality Type , although there are many other pages online - just google. Descriptions of the 16 types can be found on this site, but there are many others online as well, and if you're unsure its best to read from a few different sites.

A free Myers-Briggs style personality test, with spectrum-style answers rather than those annoying yes's and no's, can be found here: Free Jung Personality Test

The point of Myers-Briggs is basically that a lot of our differences (and similarities for that matter) are because of our personalities, and the different ways we perceive, relate to and react to the world. No type is superior or inferior to another.

As I am proposing this experiment I will go first.

I am INFP (I have read somewhere that INFP's are particularly drawn to personality tests, ha ha!). That puts me in the F camp. I would classify myself as prone to belief, although I am not a religious person (I tried it but it didn't take). Mind you I'm not sure what I believe in, if anything - certainly nothing approaching conventional religious ideas - but I feel that there is something and I have done so since I was small. I feel a connection to other living things, including trees and so on, the web of life blah blah, but I'm not sure what it means. Being a P, I am quite content with the mystery. I am not an atheist.

 

[Lioness]

Lol...love the question in the second test...'I am weird'

but that one gave me a diffrerent answer than the first one did, and I'll go with the first one as it backs the results I've had before.

INFP

And I'm agnostic, if not athiest. I'm more of the 'if you show me proof then I'll believe it but I'm not fully on either side' type

 

[Delvo]

I'm a major bigtime T; it's the one of those four things on which I'm the most thoroughly, lopsidedly, all-out for one side and not its opposite. I routinely find myself in situations where people are trying to get me to say what I think or feel about something that I don't know enough about to think or feel anything about it, and they just don't want to accept "I don't know" or "nothing" as an answer, as if they don't believe it's even possible to really not have an answer. To me, this is a matter of simple honesty: I won't claim to have information that I don't have, and get irritated with people who do claim to have information they don't really have. It's similar when there really is enough information to support an answer but the answer doesn't seem to be what people wanted to hear or what they think people should think/say, or it goes against what they themselves would say (even if it comes directly from something else they say and thus exposes self-contradiction on their part). People often seem amazed to hear the steps of logic I go through to reach a conclusion and ask me why I bothered with all of that analysis (especially when they think my conclusion is too different from what I'm supposed to think/feel or what they want me to think/feel), but to me it isn't work, it's just how things naturally are to be done, and I can't imagine just skipping to the end and making something up without a real basis as they seem to want me to do.

I shock and confuzzle people by not only saying "I don't know" but also sometimes adding meaningless/incomprehensible (to them) things like "and you don't know either", to point out that what they're saying is just made up and not supportable from the facts, no matter how certain of it they act. They shock and confuzzle me by saying meaningless/incomprehensible (to me) things like "I don't understand how you could want to say that" when I hadn't been talking about what I want at all but just laying out facts, which have nothing to do with what I want.

And I'm quite anti-religious, and it is because of exactly that F-ness of it, so you precisely hit the bullseye for me. All religion, spirituality, superstition, and such are based on bad logic and stuff that people just made up, and I can't stand bad logic and people making stuff up. Not long ago, when I said that to someone else, her reply was "Well, you can't know everything just through science and logic", to which my reply was "Right, only everything that you can actually know at all; anything you can't get from those is just made up, not known or knowable". And the holding back that I tend to do among the religious, to keep the peace by not jumping on how stupid and dishonest a lot of what their religions say is, feels just the same as the holding back that I tend to do among F-types in general on all kinds of issues where the T and F mentalities clash.

I'm an atheist because the facts of the world we live in are just as they would be if there were no gods, and completely different from what they would be if there were gods (unless those gods happened to be stealth gods who don't do anything to expose their existence, but invoking ad-hoc complications like that just to get around a desired conclusion's lack of similarity to the facts would be bad reasoning, and even then, I'd still have to conclude that those gods are such that their existence doesn't matter anyway because everything's the same as if they didn't; and one could even logically argue that existence which is no different from non-existence is no existence).

 

[TheEndIsNigh]

INFP : apparently.

 

[Lioness]

Join our ranks, TEIN!

 

[Interference]

INTP - I'm in 3.3 percent of the population, if I read it right. I quite like the implications, but seems I won't be joining your ranks, Lioness

My position on faith?

Hmm ...

It's changed in the last couple of years. I now think I know there's an absence of a guiding intelligence, but I still have a sense of connectedness between everything in the universe, something that Newton was determined to prove through science and to some extent I think he succeeded, though in other ways he missed the mark a bit.

This recent independence from a god concept is something I find liberating because, as I think I've said somewhere before, I know I'm the only one to blame for my screw-ups. But I'm also the only one responsible for my achievements. It has left my appreciation of beauty and the marvels of existence unmarred and, if anything, increased - if no aesthetic godhead put them there then isn't the awesome beauty of a waterfall even more remarkable?

Yeah. I like that T just where it is

(I enjoyed your rant, btw, Delvo )

 

[mosaix]

ISTJ - "Trustee". Decisiveness in practical affairs. Guardian of time-honored institutions. Dependable. 11.6% of total population. .

Atheist

BTW that was no rant from Delvo. Just a cool, logical statement of his position.

 

[Interference]

That's the J coming out of you, Mosaix

 

[Pyan]

ISTJ - "Trustee".

Introverted (I) 61.76% Extroverted (E) 38.24%
Sensing (S) 54.84% Intuitive (N) 45.16%
Thinking (T) 51.52% Feeling (F) 48.48%
Judging (J) 64.29% Perceiving (P) 35.71%

Hmmm...wonder if there's an age factor in there....

 

[BookStop]

ISTJ - "Trustee". Decisiveness in practical affairs. Guardian of time-honored institutions. Dependable. 11.6% of total population. .

Atheist

Me too. My j was pretty high. what's that supposed to mean?

 

[HoopyFrood]

INTP - "Architect". Greatest precision in thought and language. Can readily discern contradictions and inconsistencies. The world exists primarily to be understood. 3.3% of total population.

I think that applies to me quite well, actually.

Atheist.

 

[Tillane]

INTJ - "Mastermind". Introverted intellectual with a preference for finding certainty. A builder of systems and the applier of theoretical models. 2.1% of total population

And a humanist who has (once or twice) been called an anti-theist.

 

[Nik]

My firewall blocks the test-site...

By the age of seven (7), I'd noticed that organised religion was a load of tosh. Technically, I'd falsified the hypothesis...

My preference would be atheist, but honesty keeps me very, very slightly agnostic.

 

[The Procrastinator]

Bookstop and Pyan, come on you logical T's, are you telling us you are ISTJ and then not fessing up to where you stand on the belief thing? Or what? The experiment needs you...

Nik, if you can't take that test, check out the first link, which has a pretty good list of indicators that should enable you to place yourself as an F or a T without going through a test. Alternatively, if you hunt around you should find other Myers-Briggs based tests online. Btw belief can exist without organised religion, and there are plenty of people who are religious just for the security of the rules, and who would not rank strongly on actual belief.

Lioness, if it helps, when I say "prone to belief" I do not mean prone to belief in any specific thing, or prone to belief in anything traditional. I think if you are reluctant to put yourself in the good old black and white "there is no god" camp right here, right now, you are probably agnostic rather than atheist. (It would not surprise me if a high proportion of agnostics are P's btw as P's are prone to not making up their minds if they don't think the evidence is in.) By "prone to belief" I mean that there is a part of you open to ideas that cannot be proven (either logically or through experimentation) and that therefore require belief rather than hard evidence. These ideas might be emotions, ideals, vague feelings, doubts, abstract concepts, whimsies, all the way up to full on delusions. All that stuff Delvo can't stand. A true atheist would toss these out the window without a second thought. If you are hanging on to them in some form, then you value belief in some way, be it ever so small, and you are leaning over the fence in the same direction as me. I would call myself an agnostic rather than a believer, but if I'm honest with myself I probably believe in something - I just don't know what it is (not a beard in the sky or any kind of normal idea of God, or anything atheists typically object to along the lines of "if there is a God why did he let that storm kill those people etc"). Clear as mud?

So far the hypothesis seems to be standing up pretty well. As one would expect there's a goodly number of T's around here and a goodly number of atheists...

 

[the smiling weirwood]

INFP- The Questor

I have faith in myself. I believe in humanity. Not as in the current state of affairs of the species...but in the ideals of our race. The potential and beauty.

 

[Talysia]

INFJ - "Author". Strong drive and enjoyment to help others. Complex personality. 1.5% of total population. ​

That does sound like me, actually.

I'm going to sound very out of place here, but I am prone to belief, as The Procrastinator puts it.​

 

[BookStop]

Procrastinator, the 'me too' part of my post was to point out my ISTJ and athiest status, just like mosaix.

I am not surprised there are so many Ts here. In fact, what shocks the heck out of me is how we Chronnies can get into religious arguements, when religion itself seems like such an obvioius fairy-tale. By Thor's Hammer, what are people thinking? I just don't get the point of gods, never have. (btw - I was extrememly high on J)

 

[HardScienceFan]

with Taly and Procrastinator on this one.
Amazing,isn't it?
A year ago I used to be sure.
Didn't take the test.My firewall would have blocked the site also ,i think.
Have been described as complex.
Like to help others,like Taly.
Prone to believe
that's the phrase ,Taly
and:

nicely put,Weirwood

 

[ktabic]

INTJ - "Mastermind". Introverted intellectual with a preference for finding certainty. A builder of systems and the applier of theoretical models. 2.1% of total population, also a radical atheist.

 

[The Procrastinator]

Procrastinator, the 'me too' part of my post was to point out my ISTJ and athiest status, just like mosaix.

I am not surprised there are so many Ts here. In fact, what shocks the heck out of me is how we Chronnies can get into religious arguements, when religion itself seems like such an obvioius fairy-tale. By Thor's Hammer, what are people thinking? I just don't get the point of gods, never have. (btw - I was extrememly high on J)

Oopsy Booksy, my bad. All I can say is, maybe I shouldn't be posting when I'm coming down with the flu!

After this one my next investigations will be:
1) Why are T's so sensitive (those religious arguments are something to behold)
2) Just how many INFP's are there on the Chrons and why...?