Personality Test Results, Part 2: Analysis and Discussion

NOTE: I know it’s been almost a month since I posted the first part of the Personality Test Results, but with Cataclysm, another deadline to complete, and Christmas in the way, it’s taken a while to finish this! Sorry for the delay. But hey! Maybe this will be interesting reading as you grind mats for your new raiding gear…? :)

 

So did you know that back in medieval times we used to have some quirky ways of determining personality types? They fell into four major types (humours or temperaments): choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic and sanguine. Here, check this link and tell me what face you have! :)

 

So even though the test we took is a bit more modern and perhaps less prone to show us scary images of our faces, looks like trying to put people into categories is nothing new....

 

So what do these data mean? Do they tell us anything about raiders and raiding? And do we have a “raider personality”?

 

I’m dividing my analysis and discussion into a few different areas:

 

1.    Demographics (geography, gender, guild types)

2.    Personality test results and a few interesting links

 

I’ll wrap things up with a few thoughts and, hopefully , a conclusion.

 

Analysis

Demographics

The test itself gave us an interesting snapshot of raiders, at least when we look at the demographic results.

 

Geography and language of the respondents: I need to point out here that the vast majority of respondents were from either US or EU servers—so we can’t call this an accurate view of all WoW raiders. (Of course, even if we had lots of respondents from other servers, one can argue that without a 100% response rate it’s not really a valid sample….) This slanted response is most likely due to the fact that we advertised this test primarily on English language sites like Paragon, manaflask, mmo-champion, etc. And I just did not have time to locate a viable personality test in different languages (Chinese, Korean, Russian, French, German, etc.) and then advertise it on the WoW-related non-English sites that non-English users probably visit more often (due to language limits or preference).

 

That’s not to say that all respondents were from exclusively English language servers, though. Almost 4% were from German language EU servers and almost 10% were from other non-English servers, including Taiwanese, Russian, Spanish, and French. So while the test results may give us a snapshot of raiders on predominantly English language US and EU servers, I’m less confident about these results correlating to other non-English servers as the percentages were quite small in comparison.

 

What we do have, however, with the responses from the EU servers at least is a cultural and linguistic mix as the EU English servers include gamers from lots of different language and national backgrounds. Even the US servers have linguistic and regional variety—not all are from the States (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc.) and not all have English as their first language. But, the scope of the test did not allow us to break that down though more demographic issues would be interesting to explore in another test!

 

Gender lines among raiders are probably not a huge surprise, with only 15.26% of respondents (of those who identified themselves) being female. This generally correlates with other studies done in other MMOs. In fact, Williams et al (2008) found in a survey of 7,000 Everquest gamers that 80.80% were male, while 19.20% were female. Of course, this was gamers in general, not raiders, and a study of another game—but it does tell us something. If we look at our own guilds (and my own work studying a few hard core, casual, and elite guilds correlates with this) we’ve definitely got a significant male majority when it comes to raiding. And the male majority tends to increase the more “hard core” the guild becomes.

 

I’d suggest that the casual or hard core guilds tend to have more women in them than the elite ones, for example. I know from my discussions with Paragon that less than 10% of their guild are female raiders (and other elite guilds have even less), while the serious casual raiding guild I’ve been studying over the past year has around 15% female raiders.

 

So I think there is no huge surprise here to anyone who’s actually gotten to know the members of the raiding guilds they are in—women are rarer among raiders, though they are definitely existent.

 

Guild typesresponses were a bit more interesting and I’d love to see if there is a way for us to correlate this with the bigger picture of WoW raiding. Firstly I know the definitions of guild type were problematic. Some of you ended up self-defining your guild (“focused casual”, “semi-hard core”, “hard core, aiming for elite”, etc.) and some of you did select your guild type per my definitions. Choosing guild type was not all that well received by everyone. Some were concerned about how we chose to self-identify ourselves since some of us might lie or exaggerate. It is always possible that the responses are inaccurate, but I think it’s interesting to see how we self-define even if it’s not something we can base in reality. I suggest, however, that most of us were honest in our guild definition because many of you offered new guild type designations beyond what I listed.

 

I should add that probably one of the most responsive guilds as a whole was Paragon (I reckon they felt more obliged to do the test since they co-sponsored it, of course!), with 21 respondents from their guild alone, and I am guessing that it helped boost the proportion of elite guild raiders in the overall percentage. I think that means that the percentage of elite guild respondents in this test (9.46%) does not actually correlate with the actual raiding community. I would say that elite raiding guilds (and raiders) represent less than 1% of raiding guilds worldwide.

 

With regards to the remaining respondents, I imagine these percentages are potentially accurate, with the majority of respondents belonging to hard core, casual or hybrid raiding guilds. I believe this means that the majority of us rely on an adaptable or varied approach to raiding.

 

 

Personality test results

Well, shock of shocks, the INTJ personality type appears to be the dominant personality response, with staggering 23.26% of respondents having that result! And this was quite universal amongst respondents, geographically. INTJs are the predominant personality type from both US and EU servers, for all types of guilds, and on almost all types of servers (the only exception was the respondents from RPPVP servers, where the predominant type was INTP). In addition, it does seem to cross over into the classes we raid with. All classes had INTJ as the most predominant personality type, with some—like priests and rogues—being above the overall average (of 23.36%).

 

The main area of variation was between gender lines. For women, the most common personality types were:

 

INFJ      17.35%

ISFJ      14.04%

INTJ     12.40%

ISTJ      11.57%

ENTJ    7.43%

 

While for men they were:

 

INTJ     24.96%

ENTJ    13.39%

ISTJ      9.09%

INTP     8.59%

ENFJ     7.27%

 

So while men reflect the overall listings, women have quite different results, with INFJ and ISFJ being ahead of INTJ.

 

And the list goes on. If we look at the top 8 personality types (representing 75.86% of respondents) we seem to be more significantly “introverted” then “extroverted”, more “intuitive” than “sensing”, more “judging” than “perceiving”, more “thinking” than “feeling.”

 

We also don’t match the available data on what the general population (at least the general American population, from what I could find) seems to be, personality wise. The respondents had these as their top 8 personality types:

 

INTJ    23.26%

ENTJ   12.77%

ISTJ     9.61%

INTP   8.47%

ENFJ   6.70%

INFJ    5.82%

ISTP    5.18%

ESFJ    4.05%

 

The data on a few sites (CAPT, 2011) seems to suggest slightly more evenly spread percentages, though these are all estimates and appear based on the American population:

 

ISTJ   11-14%

ISFJ   9-14%

ESFJ  9-13%

ESTJ  8-12%

ENFP6-8%

ISFP  5-9%

ESFP4-9%

ISTP  4-6%

 

So this would seem to suggest that the predominant identified personalities in our raider culture—or at least the ones among our respondents—don’t correlate with the predominant ones in the broader culture.

 

Conclusion

So we do have a predominant personality type? I suppose the quick answer to that is yes. But I don't think that means that we should have only one type raiding. Clearly raiding appeals to more than one type of person and I think that reflects the variety of "jobs" on a raid team and the wide range of people who play MMOs.

 

At the end of the day, I am not positive that our personality type often drives where and how we raid. I also don’t know if it will be a guarantee of success in raiding. Although the numbers seem to suggest that it can help. Look at our elite raiding guild respondents: 30.67% of them are INTJs (and a whopping 47.83% of Paragon are INTJs!) as compared to the approximate 22% in casual and hard core guilds. But that may have less to do with the specific personality type and more to do with the like-mindedness of the group.

 

And I’ll qualify all of this by saying that out of the possible 16 personality types designated on these tests, we had representations of every single type among respondents, so that must mean there’s a place for all of us—even in the most successful guilds. After all, a raid group often requires class and role mix. I’d have to say that relates to personalities too.

 

So while I do think personality can be a contributing factor, there is more to it than just that. I believe how we raid and where we raid is largely about situational factors, too: skills, networking, time/access. For example, some may raid in a lower ranked guild because our friends are in that guild, or some may raid with a more hard core one because we have the time and skill. As a result, so while we may have the dominant raiding personality type, this does not always mean they’re going to be in the hard core or elite raiding guilds.

 

 

References

CAPT. Estimated Frequencies of the Types in the United States Population. (2011) http://www.capt.org/mbti-assessment/estimated-frequencies.htm. Last accessed Jan 1, 2011.

Williams D., Yee N., and Caplan, SE. (2008) Who plays, how much, and why? Debunking the stereotypical gamer profile. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2008) 993–1018.