What´s this?
This is a test site about mind patterns, interests and human motivations. Find out more at my web page Mattias Östmar.

I get different results on different blogs and it doesn´t match my score at a test I did?
The typealyzer is NOT to be confused with trying to figure out your type by doing a conventional type inventory such as the MBTI. This is about exploring social roles (or personas) that are expected to be different in different situations. The intention is to extend the research and look for emergent patterns in what interests people depending on their psyche rather than their demographics (e.g. news stories, brands, pieces of entertainment, web pages etc).

Any writer might think it is important to sound “serious”, “personal” or “fun” or be under a lot of stress or feeling relaxed. This text analysis gives a snapshot of the persona by looking at the communication style of the text in the moment it was written. Looking on the results over a period of time will, however, tell you something about how a blogger “normally” prefer to communicate, but it might still be a blog that more reflects a role than how the blogger feels inside.

What´s the theoretical approach?
It´s all more or less based on Jungian type theory. He, in turn, based it on very old ideas from different traditions about the human psyche.

I have been collecting sample texts from blog text over the course of 2 years based on research about personality type and writing style. Jon Kågström, AI-developer and founder of uClassify, has used a naive bayesian classifier to run a statistical analysis of the texts thus creating a word frequency algorithm for the different functions. Those can in turn be combined into different personality types (Temperaments, Myers-Briggs, possibly Enneagram) as well as translated into motivations, desires, fears etc.

Main theoretical inspiration:

Personality type and writing style: John K. DiTiberio and George H. Jensen.

C.G. Jungs type theory: Isabel Myers-Briggs, Naomi L. Quenk (type dynamics), Carol S. Pearson and David Keirsey (temperament theory).

For further understanding about, often connecting, views on the human psyche I´ve had a lot of inspiration from Richard Riso and Don Hudson (Enneagram), the ayurvedic doshas, the theory of the four elements, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and a lot of other very interesting schools and traditions.

Is this scientifically validated?
No. I haven´t yet had the opportunity to look for statistically significant correlations between Jungian functions and objectively verifiable (online) behaviour such as mentions and links. It requires classification of a lot of aggregated data.

One hypothesis that has been partly validated is that bloggers tend to link to (and probably read) other blogs of similar psychographic segment. This makes it possible to predict how ideas or memes spread in social media thorugh psychographically defined networks.

Note: I am not looking for correlations between conventional survey-based personality inventory score and writing style. I believe that our use of different social roles (orpersonas) as reflected through writing style provides an possibly even richer picture of human dynamism.

What is psychographics?
From Wikipedia:

In the field of marketing, demographics, opinion research, and social research in general, psychographic variables are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. They are also called IAO variables (for Interests, Attitudes, and Opinions)…

Psychographics can also be seen as an equivalent of the concept of “culture” as used most commonly in national segmentation. “Psychographics is the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles” “Who Is Your Next Customer?“. Booz Allen Hamilton Inc, Strategy+Business. 28 September 2007. http://www.strategy-business.com/press/enewsarticle/enews092807.

Is this ethical?
We do NOT collect data about peoples identities, but their pseudo-identities. A pseudo-identity is for instance the nick-name used persistent over time when a person is using social media such as a blog. We DO collect the URL´s and classifications results to build new cool apps. That way we hope to bring something back to the blogging community.

What type is best to be?
No specific. Psychological type is about talent. And all people have a mix of different talents. Some of them are more apparent than others, though. Scientists such as Martin Seligman and Katherine Benziger say that the most important thing is to live according to your strongest talents – whether it’s at school, at work, in their relationship, etc.

In real life you need to adapt to the situation and we all do – more or less successfully. But the fact remains that we still have a disposition to be in a certain way – with talents and weaknesses that make us unique.

Further questions? Send an e-mail!