One of the early camp activities will be about the Meyers-Briggs personality test. This test measures four dimensions of personality that tend to lead to misunderstanding among people. For example, an extroverted mother might worry that her introverted son doesn't have many friends when in fact it's perfectly natural for her son to have a small number of intense friendships rather than the large number of friendships she had when she was his age.
Everyone can be join in and take the exam yourself by filling out this form. Everyone who fills out the form will get an email with information about their personality result. This will allow us to pool a large amount of data about the gainer community in general.
Individual communities often have a distinctive pattern that shows up on the Meyers-Briggs test. For the gaining community, there are four personality traits that occur more often than in the general population:
Below are the results so far with 284 people responding:
There are also striking patterns when you look at what are known as the four temperaments, which is a less precise division of people into four personality types.
One of the strong results is the total lack of SPs. SPs are fun-loving people who like to party and there are many of them in the general population. Their absence in the gaining community helps to explain why we find it difficult to organize successful social events.
Another strong result is the dominance of the NFs. NFs seek harmony and are constantly focused on "becoming" (becoming something new and better). NFs are usually a small minority in the general population. As a result, NF gainers are probably excited to find a community of like-minded individuals. Having so many harmony-oriented people in one community might lead some NFs to lower their guard and then they seem to be surpised when they come across other members of the community who are comfortable with criticism, sarcasm, debate, and other forms of what seems like conflict to the NFs. Also, NFs often live in their own fantasy world that they find difficult to share with others. Perhaps the common fantasy of gaining allows these NFs to open up among gainers more than they can with others in their lives.
The particular version of the personality test we are using comes from a great book on the subject called Please Under stand Me by David Keirsey. Another excellent book on this subject is Life Types by Sandra Krebs Hirsh and Jean M. Kummerow. In their book, they include an alternate acronym for each type that is meant to capture the essence of the type.
There are many resources on the web. You can google your personality type and you'll find plenty of hits. People seem to particularly enjoy reading a set of pages that discuss relationship issues for each personality type.
The table below shows the alternate acronym for each type and has links to that set of pages that describe relationship issues and other aspects of the personality type.
Remember, you can take the test yourself by filling out this form.