The MBTI is regularly used as an irrefutable gold standard by non-scientific types who don’t know better and have been caught up in the hype. The MBTI being infallible could only ever be the case if everyone who completed it actively played along with their personality diagnoses. But they won’t. The fact that it would be helpful for managers if people conformed to limited and easily understood categories doesn’t mean it’s what happens.
Overall, personality tests would be more useful if our personalities didn’t get in the way.
Do blow your fuse
(How anger works and why it can be a good thing)
Bruce Banner has a famous catchphrase: “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” When Banner becomes angry, he turns into the Incredible Hulk, world-famous comic-book character beloved by millions. So the catchphrase is clearly untrue.
Also, who does like someone when they’re angry? Granted, some people display “righteous fury” when they get fired up about an injustice, and those who agree will cheer them on. But anger is generally seen as a negative, largely because it produces irrational behavior, upset and even violence. If it’s so harmful, why is the human brain so keen to produce it in response to even the most irrelevant-seeming occurrence?
What exactly is anger? A state of emotional and physiological arousal, typically experienced when some sort of boundary is violated. Someone collides with you in the street? Your physical boundary has been violated. Someone borrows money from you and won’t give it back? Your financial or resource boundary has been violated. Someone expresses views you find incredibly offensive? Your moral boundary has been violated. If it is obvious that whoever has violated your boundary has done so on purpose, this is provocation, and results in even greater levels of arousal, thus more anger. It’s the difference between spilling someone’s drink and actively throwing it in their face. Not only have your boundaries been violated; someone did it deliberately, for their benefit at your expense. The brain has been responding to trolls since long before the Internet.
The recalibration theory of anger, put forward by evolutionary psychologists,9 argues that anger evolved to deal with scenarios like this, as a sort of self-defence mechanism. Anger provides a quick subconscious way of reacting to a situation that has caused you to lose out, making it more likely you’ll address the balance and ensure self-preservation. Imagine a primate ancestor, painstakingly making a stone axe via his newly evolved cortex. It takes time and effort to make these new-fangled “tools,” but they are useful. Then, once completed, someone comes and takes it for himself. A primate that responds by quietly sitting and mulling on the nature of possession and morality may seem the smarter one, but the one that gets angry and punches the thief in the jaw with his ape-like fists gets to keep his tool and is far less likely to be disrespected again, thus increasing his status and chances of mating.
That’s the theory, anyway. Evolutionary psychology does seem to have a habit of oversimplifying things like this, which itself angers people.
In a strictly neurological sense, anger is often the response to a threat, and the “threat-detection system” is strongly implicated in anger. The amygdala, hippocampus and periaqueductal gray, all regions of the midbrain responsible largely for fundamental processing of sensory information, make up our threat-detection system, and thus have roles in triggering anger. However, the human brain, as we saw earlier, keeps using the primitive threat-detection system to navigate the modern world and considers being laughed at by colleagues because a co-worker keeps doing unflattering impressions of you as a “threat.” This doesn’t harm you in any physical sense, but your reputation and social standing are at risk. End result, you get angry.
Brain-scanning studies, such as those conducted by Charles Carver and Eddie Harmon-Jones, have shown that subjects who are angered demonstrate raised levels of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region often associated with the control of emotions and goal-orientated behavior.10 This basically means that when the brain wants something to happen, it induces or encourages behavior that will cause this thing to happen, often via emotions. In the case of anger, something happens, your brain experiences it, decides that it’s really not happy about it, and produces an emotion (anger) in order to respond and effectively deal with it in a satisfactory manner.
Here’s where it gets more interesting. Anger is seen as destructive and irrational, negative and harmful. But it turns out anger is sometimes useful, indeed helpful. Anxiety and threats (of many sorts) cause stress, which is a big problem, largely because it triggers release of the hormone cortisol, producing the unpleasant physiological consequences that make stress so harmful. But many studies, such as that done by Miguel Kazén and his colleagues for Universit?t Osnabrück,11 show that experiencing anger lowers cortisol, thus reducing the potential harm caused by stress.
One explanation for this is that studies* have shown anger causes raised activity in the left hemisphere of the brain, in the anterior cingulate cortex in the middle of the brain, and the frontal cortex. These regions are associated with producing motivation and responsive behavior. They are present in both brain hemispheres, but do different things on each side; in the right hemisphere they produce negative, avoidance or withdrawal reactions to unpleasant things, and in the left hemisphere produce positive, active, approach behavior.
To put it simply, when it comes to this motivational system being presented with a threat or a problem, the right half says, “No, stay back, it’s dangerous, don’t make it worse!,” causing you to recoil or hide. The left half says, “No, I’m not having this, it needs to be dealt with,” before metaphorically rolling up its sleeves and getting to work. The metaphorical devil and angel on your shoulder are actually lodged in your head.
People with a more confident, extroverted personality probably have a dominant left side, while for neurotic or introverted types it’s likely to be the right. But the right side’s influence doesn’t lead to anything being done about apparent threats, so they persist, causing anxiety and stress. Available data suggests that anger increases activity in the left hemisphere system,12 potentially prompting someone into action in the manner of someone shoving a hesitant person off a diving board. Lowering cortisol at the same time limits the anxiety response that can “freeze” people. Eventually dealing with the stress-causing thing lowers cortisol further.? Similarly, anger has also been shown to make people think more optimistically, so rather than fearing the worst from a potential outcome, it encourages people to think any issue can be dealt with (even if that’s wrong), so any threat is minimized.
Studies have also shown that visible anger is useful in negotiations, even if both parties are showing it, as there’s more motivation to obtain something, greater optimism as to the outcome, and an implied honesty to all that is said.13