Textual Reflexions

« Good evening, my name is Piotr and I am an INTP. »

These would be my first words in a hypothetical INTP Anonymous meeting. For those who are not accustomed to this terminology, an INTP (Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving) is one of Myers and Briggs’ psychological type indicators (in short MBTI) and it’s not a disease, even if many INTPs are outcasts in the “normal” society.

As stated by the excellent Portrait of an INTP, INTPs are people with a high tendency for abstraction and little interest in the outer world. This characteristics push them towards mathematics, but limit their interpersonal relationships. They are lonely wolves since they can neither become alpha wolves, nor they tolerate the status of omega wolves¹.

The interactions between Myers-Briggs types and sexual relationships have been analysed and published (e.g. see Personality and Relationships for a simple explication of the results), but I failed to find these principles applied in any of the On-line Dating Communities, such as Yahoo! Personals or Meetic that advertise themselves on every possible webpage.

I was thinking for some time of the best application of psychological tests to Computer-Aided Soulmate Search: let the computer restrict the choices of possible partners not using the usual descriptions of who you are looking for (since you didn’t already find someone matching those requisites, maybe you are looking for the wrong things), but rather the description of who you are. I won’t explain my theories here, since I had to modify them after the following:

Experiment

Eventually I found something that follows these principles, when I noticed the recurrent appearance of a Parship advertisement on my BOINC statistics page (here it is). I decided to analyse their methods and their free psychological test, to see if it fitted what I had in mind.

I was mainly struck by two characteristics of the test: it has much more questions to acquire knowledge about my habits, in a “what would you do if” way, that I had expected. It does make sense since practical habits like “smoking”, “working in the kitchen”, “cleaning the flat”, etc. have a bigger impact in a relationship than some behaviour predispositions. Other aspects that I didn’t take into account in my theories was all the “do you believe in monogamy” stuff. A theoretical test such as Myers-Briggs’ can show that you believe strongly in some principles, but it doesn’t collect data about the principles.

For example I have strong feelings about smoking, but a theoretical test cannot show if I don’t like smokers or don’t like people that don’t tolerate smokers (actually it’s the second one).

The other thing that attracted my attention in the Parship test was the part when I was supposed to choose between different figures the one that I liked the most. I could not find the pattern in these questions, but I suppose that they tested my predisposition for order rather than chaos (in every pair of figures there was a symmetric one and an asymmetric one).

Let’s go to the results. Most of them were not really a surprise and filled the INTP pattern: I am mostly rational (62%), with strong feelings (25%), but not impulsive (13%) and a great tendency towards introversion. Some of the advises are generic one (they work for everyone): Action: move yourself; Communication: express your feelings. Other are more original: I must be more tolerant with myself and find someone that leaves me some freedom; others are quite impressive: the test showed that I am a rather conventional person, while I still think of myself as of an eccentric and original mathematician that likes to write nonsense in his blog.

While the test is far from being original, I think that the approach taken by Parship opens new horizons to the whole Online Dating Systems and that the data they collected about me would have helped me to select a much better partner for me than I would find using Meetic, but I am not willing to continue this experiment, since I am not interested in relationships
right now and I don’t even have time for them.

The experiment showed me that I have still many flaws in my understanding of human nature and psychology, so I am willing to accept all references to academic publications that would allow me to improve my knowledge of psychology.

¹ I am talking about social life, not professional life. Professionally I have always sought the establishments populated by many sharks (the choice of the links is entirely arbitrary, the footnote is not big enough to mention all the names).