Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Disclosure and Panic

This image is a sad reflection, it would seem, of who I really am. Publishing it is the ultimate self-disclosure, perhaps thus moving the ominously small purple rectangle southwards. It's the result of a Johari window test which I did on myself when in a dark, brooding, Heathcliff - type frame of mind, which accounts for the pitifully small rectangle in the top left which is the bit that represents 'known by self and by others'. Moving clockwise the northeastern quadrant is 'unknown by self, known by others' - the blind spots, if you will. Does everyone imagine, like me, that there aren't any? I seem to have squadrons of them, just waiting to trip me up. In the southeast is the 'unknown by both self and others' quadrant - presumably the bits nobody knows (or cares) about, where the amygdala does pretty much its own thing. Finally, the southwestern quadrant represents 'known by self, unknown by others'. The sheer acreage is bloody terrifying suggesting me to be devious and secretive, probably with serial rapist tendencies. This kind of self-diagnosis is almost certainly frightfully unhelpful for people like me, so I won't do it any more, and just admire my graphic instead. I put in the 4-4 quadrants as markers, but I do wish someone could tell me where 'normal' is, like a bell curve of 'normal areas', with confidence intervals. I found myself scrutinising the graphic rather peevishly, and felt tempted to actually cheat - how sad is that - to extend the purple area to a place more consonant with my own expectations of myself. I seem to have nothing to look forward to except years of expensive therapy.


By way of postscript,

I attempted a crude error analysis on the results - each question can be self-weighted so that the result is skewed by up to 20% and discovered that a more generally benevolent approach to the questions - such as one might give after, say, four gins and tonic, changed the profile significantly, shifting the rectangle of self markedly to the south-east. H'm...

1 comment:

  1. It's only a "sad reflection" if one assumes any particular result is a static, rigid truth about the 'real' you.
    I'm sure there's a whole research project in the Johari Window a la Melancholia; the Johari Window post gin & tonics; and the Johari Window done for me by someone else. Maybe somewhere in the average a sorta-kinda-little-bit- accurate picture might emerge. Of course, the Johari Window isn't intended to measure normal...
    You seem as normal as anyone MathMan, save for your predilection for those wretched formulas.
    Normal is as normal does. I think. :-)

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