PERSONALITY (JUDGING AND PERCEIVING)

BLOG 3: PERSONALITY (JUDGING AND PERCEIVING)

Recently I have seen a movie named “Split” directed by Mr. M Night Shayamalan, the film follows the journey of a man with 23 different personalities (suffering from dissociative identity disorder) who kidnaps and abducts girls. Throughout the class, I couldn’t think less of Mr. James McAvoy who played the role of the main protagonist in the movie and brilliantly showed the ability to switch personalities without any special effects. In the MBTI exercise we have already learned about 16 personality types; mine own result came as INFJ which has already showed the insight of my personality in a big way. What if we all can harbour more than 10 personalities within ourselves? We can show the right one at the right time. It would be freakishly crazy, right? Maybe it would have been easier for us in that way, but if we weigh that in our ethical parameter it will be considered a disease. And we can’t fall sick so easily! The work of Carl Jung was discussed in class in respect to the study he had done on “Extraversion and introversion”, which is a central dimension of human personality theories. We often make mistake of judging a person introvert if the individual doesn’t mingle much within a group. Introversion is manifested in more reserved and solitary behavior. But Mr Jung provided a different perspective; he suggested that that everyone has both an extraverted side and an introverted side, with one being more dominant than the other. The same suggestion was also provided in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator study. We also learned about the big five personality traits also known as five factor model. The five factors have been defined as openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, often represented by the acronyms OCEAN or CANOE. Each of the Big Five personality traits contains two separate, but correlated aspects reflecting a level of personality. The most important aspect of this class was learning the technique of Johari window. The four quadrants of the window are open, hidden, blind and unknown. We were mainly intrigued about the blind room, which reflects the personality traits which are not known to us but known to others. It shows us how other people perceive us, we often misjudge ourselves and through this exercise we can understand our strengths and weaknesses in a better way. Our teacher also emphasised on the fact that we have the right to reject the negative strokes, which again brought a different perspective to the whole matter.