ABSTRACT
The MBTI map is a way to represent relationships among the words that describe people's personalities. Derived from the methodology of knowledge visualization, the map shows an objective way of grouping people's personalities. Using the 161 words in the MBTI test which describe various personalities, we conducted a survey asking the relative closeness between pairs of words. A total of 39 factors-representative words- were extracted using the cluster analysis method. These 39 representative words were then arranged spatially using the Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) method. The resulting map shows the 39 representative words of human personality, and also represents the original 161 words hierarchically in the MBTI.
Keywords: MBTI, Personality, Information Design, Metaphor, Knowledge Visualization
1. Introduction
The field of personality has been investigated in psychology and sociology, but seldom in the area of visual communication and information design. Because personality is a subjective matter, it is often assumed to be difficult to represent visually. In other words, attempts at visualizing personalities and characteristics have not achieved a universal agreement on their objectivity. This study attempts to propose an objective method of visualizing personalities by converging the idea of the MBTI test with information design theories. Such an attempt, then, would provide people with an effective way of grasping the complex and confounding structures of human personalities.
2. MBTI Analysis
The MBTI is a test designed to identify certain types of psychological characteristics. A total of 16 types of personalities can be identified with the test, and a total of 161 words are used to depict one's emotions, feelings, and sensibilities.
A survey was conducted on a sample of 20 university students. The participants were asked to rank the degree of closeness between dyadic pairs of the 161 words in the MBTI. The purpose of the survey was to identify how these concepts and ideas – describing personalities – are congruently clustered together in lay-people's minds. We, then, conducted a cluster analysis to extract the dimensions of the 161 words. The analysis resulted in a total of 39 factors that we call “representative words”. Based on the analysis, we also obtained the distances among the 39 representative words using the Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) method. MDS is a method to measure relative distances among entities in two-dimensional space.
Figure 3: 39 representative words on the graph using MDS method
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Information Aesthetics Showcase at SIGGRAPH 2009, ACM (August 2009)
[actual poster image], [small image], [pdf]