An ambivert, as I think they’re called. Better term than an introextrovert, which sounds like it could be painful.
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I think people who spend a lot of time on the internet (and aren’t social media influencers or the type who love constant, screaming internet arguments) are going to skew introverted in general, and iNat members would just be a subset of that.
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Did this as part of a team building exercise 35ish years ago. I came out INFP, pretty extreme on all four axes. As it was explained to us, this is not a test about who people are but a means of describing how they are most comfortable in their social interactions. Not sure whether that’s the official word or somebody’s opinion. I’d rather be hip deep in a swamp in any kind of weather than at most social events but over time I learned how to operate outside my comfort zones. Now I’m retired and I’m working my anti-social, grumpy old man chops.
All of these sorts of things are limited in various ways but I felt at the time that the person described in my results sounded a lot like me.
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As far as Myers’s Briggs goes, I’ve never really gotten it. I can sort of see it in a few friends, but not really. I’ve taken it several times and had somewhat different results (always IN but the last two letter varied - dunno - cannot recall what they meant now).
I took a different sort of personality test that instead presented mental/emotional strengths on an axis (each point on a 4-sided figure related to strengths such as thinking, feeling, artistic, organizing). Made much more sense to me, but I do not recall the name of the test.
One thing I am aware of is that introversion is not necessarily a constant. I have been more or less introverted at different stages in my life since childhood. I am not bipolar; but looking back, I have noticed differences in my - what, affect?
There were times in childhood when I was more gregarious and there was a time in my 40-50s when I felt pretty extroverted. That period lasted about 10-15 years. It was fun. Still, I am not unhappy to be back to being pretty introverted, though.
I assume most of us have somewhat mutable personality traits?
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I was kind of notorious for climbing trees during family reunions; usually with at least one paperback in hand. One time in particular, I made it through six chapters of The Two Towers, and nobody had noticed I’d slipped away.
The irony was that my closest cousin had also wandered off to explore and goof around with some of the extended herd of pre-teens, and I was watching the search for him and the group from 15 feet or so over the adults’ heads.
Hear, hear. I’m not sure that there’s enough bail money to get me to go back into retail. I’m also not certain which was worse: corporate / retail, or running my own jewelry business. On the one hand, I couldn’t be fired for telling a customer where to step off. On the other hand, there wasn’t anyone to whom I could hand off a problem child.
I like the phrase “selectively sociable”.
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I would say that between the totally introverted and the totally extroverted people that are almost infinite nuances and combinations and that this is commnly seen among people, not only among naturalists. Maybe, the distribution of personalities among naturalists could be somehow slightly skewed and not necessarily normal.
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I’m an INTJ myself, so seeing the prevalence of them in this thread is pretty interesting!
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They only make up around 1-4 percent of the total population. But on Inaturalist its like 50%.
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For anyone who doesn’t want to take a quiz but wants to decode this topic, source: Wiki - Myers Briggs Type Indicator:
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I found the results of the Gallup StrengthsFinder much more thought-provoking. That one might also amount to “astrology for HR,” but it gives me more to work with.
What I find a little interesting is the lack of iNFj’s in the thread. I would wager that they are just as suited to iNat as INTJ’s but perhaps less suited to posting much on the forum. Referencing that guide posted elsewhere in the thread, taking a look at the difference between T and F suggests why that might be. I’ve learned I’m much better as a lurker than a poster here. (said using the self-understanding that MB gives me) :-)
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Yeah, personally I just go with genus IN. Based on the evidence, can the Personality Taxon still be confirmed or improved? No, it’s as good as it can be.
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Good one 
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That’s how I feel about it. It’s a lot of rubbish used to validate prejudices.
I scored INTJ when I took it, but I have to wonder if the test wasn’t skewed by my choosing options that looked more “intelligent” to me. I think a more realistic score would be “eggs for brains” or “mentally a donkey”.
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I always seem to switch back and forth between INTP and ISTP depending on if I’ve had breakfast. I can easily switch from P to J if too many things outside my control descend into chaos. So I guess that means I think these personality profiles are pretty situational.
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@blue_celery I think you made up a wonderful new personality type: NNN (“not necessarily normal”). :-)
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Going off of this, E/ISTP, which I guess is near opposite of a lot of people here…
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The Myers Briggs approach is drawn directly from Carl Gustav Jung’s work on Psychological Types. Early to mid-20th Century thinking about psychology and psychonanalysis was not strictly scientific generally so its not exactly a surprise that MB is criticized for that. It is a way of asking questions and thinking about what matters to a person. When I participated we were all given clear caveats about it being A way to think about things, not THE way. My graduate work was in the field of animal behaviour, a very distant cousin of psychology. I was a grad student at the time I did the test. As I recall, my reaction was that it was kind of quaint but interesting as a heuristic device.
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I[N]T[J] 
The test gave INTJ, but the descriptions of INTP & ISTJ would fit just about as well. None others do, though.
Without knowing anything of psychology I’d think that binary option in each category can’t really describe much. It would take at least five levels for each axis for better description.
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