THINKER'S ALMANAC - October 18

How can four letters of the alphabet help you to understand yourself and others better?

 

Subject: Personality - Myers Briggs 

Event: Birthday of Isabel Briggs Myers, 1897

Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination. -Carl Jung

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a questionnaire that helps people understand their psychological preferences and identify distinct characteristics of their personalities.  Since it was first developed in 1944, the MBTI has become one of the most popular personality assessments.  Its questionnaire is published in 29 different languages in 115 countries.  

The MBTI was created by the mother-daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who was born on this day in 1897.  Despite the fact that neither had formal psychological training, both were fascinated by the topic of personality.  Katharine first gained notoriety as a writer when she wrote a parenting column in the 1920s; her primary subject was the details of how she was raising and educating her daughter Isabel.  When Isabel left home for college, Katharine became depressed and began reading the works of Carl Jung.  Jung’s theory of psychological types captivated Katharine, and she adapted his work to develop her own method of categorizing personality types.  

The key to the success of MBTI, however, came later when Katharine collaborated with Isabel to develop a questionnaire with 117 questions that would help people identify the individual indicators of their personality.  Katharine sold her system to Edward N. Hay in 1944, and the timing could not have been better.  The post-World War II jobs boom made the MBTI an easy instrument to sell as businesses looked for effective ways to fill jobs with workers who were the right fit.

                                                                   Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay 

The MBTI is organized around four dichotomies of personality preferences:

I. Energy - How do you acquire energy, and are you more outwardly or more inwardly focused?  

-Extrovert (Energized by spending time with people:  social, active, expressive, outspoken)

-Introvert (Energized by spending time alone or in a small group: independent, reserved, thoughtful)

II. Information - How do you take in information about your world? 

-Sensing (Interested in empirical, concrete information, what can be directly perceived by the five senses.  Hands-on, realistic, practical, sequential, detail-oriented).

-Intuition (Interested in abstract thinking, such as concepts or theories:  future and big picture oriented, idealistic, creative)

III. Decision Making - How do you prefer to make decisions?  

-Thinking (Make decisions based on reason and logic:  objective, rational)

-Feeling (Make decisions with the heart: subjective, compassionate, seek harmony)

IV. Order/Organization - How do you prefer to get things done and to live your life? 

-Judging (Appreciate order, structure, and planning.  Like rules and following a process.

-Perceiving (Appreciate flexibility and spontaneity. Like to improvise and embrace surprises and novelty) (1)

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What are the four dichotomies of the MBTI?

Challenge - Your Four: For each of the four dichotomies, assess your own personality.  Which do you think sums you up the best?

Extrovert (E) or Introvert (I), 

Sensing (S) or Intuition (N), 

Thinking (T) or Feeling (F), 

Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)

Once you have determined your four preferences, do some research on your four letter combination (There are sixteen different possible combinations.  Explain whether or not the descriptions you find about your four letter combination fit what you know about your own personality.

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

October 18, 1922:  On this day, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) was formed.  In its almost one hundred years as the United Kingdom’s public-service broadcast service on both radio and television, it has been responsible for propagating what is known as Received Pronunciation.  What the printing press did for making written English standard, the BBC has done for making spoken British English standard.  With a variety of regional dialects of English in the United Kingdom, the BBC created an Advisory Committee on Spoken English in 1926 to explore and establish the best forms of pronunciation among competing usages.  The influence and popularity of BBC broadcasts, especially during World War II, established the English spoken on air as the “correct” way to speak English.  This Received Pronunciation goes by several names:  “Standard English,” “the Queen’s English,” “Oxford English,” “Public School English,” or “BBC English.”

Sources:

1-https://forge.medium.com/the-capitalist-origins-of-the-myers-briggs-personality-test-309187757d4e

THINKER'S ALMANAC - October 17

How can looking at a four-year-old’s attitude toward jigsaw puzzles help us better understand our motivation to learn?

Subject:  Mindset  - Jigsaw Puzzle Study

Birthday of Carol Dweck, 1946

Two men look out through the same bars; One sees the mud, and one the stars. -Frederick Langridge

Today is the birthday of Stanford professor Carol Dweck.  Born in 1946, Dweck’s work has been highly influential in helping us understand human motivation.  Her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success provides insights into the nature of human intelligence and how our beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, can influence our attitudes and our effort.

Dweck’s work describes two mindsets:  the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.  A person with a fixed mindset believes that intelligence, talent, and character are static, and they cannot be changed.  A person with a growth mindset, however, believes that intelligence, talent, and character are fluid and that they can be changed through hard work, experience, and effort.

The two mindsets are most prominent when we look at students’ attitudes toward learning.  In one of Dweck’s studies, she gave four-year-olds a puzzle to complete.  Once they completed the puzzle, each child was then offered one of two options:  one, redo an easy jigsaw puzzle or two, try a harder puzzle.  The students who believed that their intelligence and talents were fixed chose the safe option of redoing an easy puzzle; in contrast, those who believed that they could become smarter through effort, chose to challenge themselves.

                                                                   Image by Hans from Pixabay 

Older students might assess their own mindsets by thinking about the following scenarios.  

Imagine you’re in class.  The teacher asks a question.  In thinking about the question, you have an answer, but you're not certain it is right.  Would you raise your hand?  A student with a fixed mindset most likely would not raise her hand, for fear of giving the wrong answer.  The student with a fixed mindset sees a wrong answer as a threat to her ego since she sees being wrong as a final judgment on her lack of intelligence.  A student with a growth mindset, however, would most likely raise her hand, seeing it as a win-win scenario and as an opportunity to check her understanding of her learning.  If she is right, she will confirm what she knows, and if she is wrong, she will have an opportunity to correct her misunderstanding.

Imagine a second scenario.  You are in class the day after completing a test.  You did not do very well.  The teacher then offers you a choice.  One, you can look at the tests of students who did worse than you did, or two, you can look at the tests of students who scored higher than you did.  Which would you choose?  In this scenario, students with a fixed mindset typically choose to look at the tests of students who did worse than they did since this helps them feel better about themselves.  Students with a growth mindset, however, chose to look at the tests of those who scored higher than they did since this offers an opportunity to see what they got wrong and to correct their mistakes.

At the core of each of the two mindsets is a distinctly different attitude toward failure and learning.  For the person with a fixed mindset, failure is to be feared.  Since they see intelligence as fixed, any failure is a challenge to their self-esteem.  As a result, they frequently will not even attempt new challenges for fear that it might threaten their self-image as a smart person.  For the person with a growth mindset, failure is not something to fear; instead, it is an opportunity to identify weaknesses and to focus on specific areas that can be improved with effort and practice. Instead of a final judgment that they are not smart, people with a growth mindset see failure as an opportunity to get smarter.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  How does the Puzzle Study illustrate the fixed and growth mindsets?

Challenge - Fix Your Mindset and Grow:  Write a public service announcement for elementary ages students that explains the fixed and growth mindsets.  Try to persuade the audience that they should embrace the growth mindset both in school and in life.

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

October 17, 2005:  On this date in 2005, comedian and television personality Stephen Colbert unveiled a new word: “truthiness.”  Speaking in the satiric tone familiar to fans of his show The Colbert Report, he introduced the word as follows:

 

And on this show, your voice will be heard... in the form of my voice. 'Cause you're looking at a straight-shooter, America. I tell it like it is. I calls 'em like I sees 'em. I will speak to you in plain simple English.

 

And that brings us to tonight's word: truthiness.

 

Now I'm sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster's, are gonna say, "Hey, that's not a word." Well, anybody who knows me knows that I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that's my right. I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart. (2)

Sources:

1-Dweck, Carol S. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York:  Ballantine Books, 2006.

2-This Day In Quotes.  “True or false: Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness? (Hint: you’re right!).” 17 Oct. 2021.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - October 11

What can a cherry tree teach us about the nature of writing history and thinking about the past? 

Subject:  Apocryphal Anecdotes and Hagiography - Washington’s Cherry Tree

Event:  Birthday of Parson Weems, 1759

Today is the birthday of Parson Weems (1759-1825), the man who might be called “The Father of the Father of Our Country.” It was Weems’ biography of Washington that first published the story of young George Washington and the cherry tree.

Parson Weems, also known as Mason Locke Weems, was a book agent, author, and ordained Episcopal priest.  His primary employment was as a book salesman.  When George Washington died in 1799, Weems saw an opportunity.  He thought that a biography of the venerated first president would be a big seller.  Weems published The Life of Washington in 1800, one year after Washington’s death. Excerpts of Weems’ biography were later included in the enormously popular McGuffey Readers, the most widely read elementary textbook from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century (1).

 

                                                            Image by Welcome to All ! ツ from Pixabay 

One of the excerpts included in the McGuffey Reader was Weems’ account of the cherry tree incident, an anecdote that Weems claimed he got from one of Washington’s distant relatives:

One day, in the garden, where he often amused himself hacking his mother’s pea-sticks, he unluckily tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful young English cherry-tree, which he barked so terribly, that I don’t believe the tree ever got the better of it. The next morning [an] old gentleman, finding out what had befallen his tree, which, by the by, was a great favourite, came into the house; and with much warmth asked for the mischievous author, declaring at the same time, that he would not have taken five guineas for his tree. Nobody could tell him anything about it. Presently George and his hatchet made their appearance. “George,” said his father, “do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden? ” This was a tough question; and George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself: and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.” “Run to my arms, you dearest boy,” cried his father in transports, “run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son is more worth than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver, and their fruits of purest gold.” (2)

The historical veracity of this anecdote is questionable. Certainly by modern standards of historical research, Weems’ citation of a single distant and unnamed relative makes it dubious.  To be exact, however, we cannot call it a myth nor a total falsehood.  What we can call it is apocryphal — that is, a story that is widely circulated as true, yet is of doubtful authenticity.  The adjective derives from the Greek apokryphos, meaning “hidden or obscure.”  Another relative of the word is the Latin noun Apocrypha, a word used to identify the books excluded from the canon of the Old and New Testaments.

No doubt a part of a story’s appeal is its foundation in truth, but often we can sniff out an apocryphal story if it sounds just too good to be true.  This is the nature of stories we call legends, stories based on actual characters from history but that cannot be verified as true.  If we try to classify Meeks’ Washington story on the continuum of narrative between fact and fiction, the most accurate term would be legend.

Another term that relates to our tendency to craft subjective rather than objective narratives is hagiography, a term that originated from the traditional religious practice of crafting idealized biographies of saints, monks, nuns, or other icons within a religion.  Because historical figures like Washington were so revered for their contributions to the founding of the United States, some writers, like Meeks, framed them subjectively, exaggerating their virtues while ignoring any of their vices.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is hagiography, and how does it relate to objective history and the story of Washington chopping down the cherry tree?

Challenge - Bogus Back Stories: What are the keys to creating a story that sounds believable enough to be really true?  Try your own hand at a little fact-based fiction by selecting a well-known person who is no longer living.  Think about what you know about that person’s character; then, craft an anecdote that seeks to explain a defining incident in the person’s youth that formed his or her character.  Include a plausible setting and vivid enough details to make it believable.  Share your story with some of your friends to see if they can detect any dubious details. 

Sources: 

1- Richardson, Jay. “The Cherry Tree Myth.” Mount Vernon.org. 2-Weems, Mason Locke. 

2-The Fable of George Washington and the Cherry Tree. 1809. Washington Papers. University of Virginia. Public Domain.