Mensan
Personality
Discovery

Adapted from an article by Patricia Hedges in Mensa Magazine, January 1990

This questionnaire was part of a project to discover more about the personalities of people who belong to Mensa. By answering the questionnaire and the questions at the end, members helped me base the statistics on as large a number of people as possible. But more important than just gathering statistics was to make use of them and I did this through articles in the Magazine and through Personality Discovery Workshops. There is much to be gained from understanding these ideas, and an introduction to this was given in my article that month.

Carl Jung suggested that an individual's apparently random behaviour is not really random at all but has a pattern to it. This pattern indicates whether we are more comfortable with the outer world of people and action, or the inner world of quiet and reflection; it shows too, our particular way of taking in information about the world and the way we go about making decisions about that information.

The pattern also indicates how we carry out these decisions and the way we use our time. It is helpful for us to find and understand our own patterns and the patterns of other people, in particular those with whom we live and work.

There were no right or wrong answers to the questions, each answer had a valuable and positive use.

An excellent way of doing the questionnaire was to have someone read it out to the person taking it, allowing half a minute for each question. The immediate response should have been given and, if possible, all the questions should have been answered.

The results were fascinating. They clearly showed that members of MENSA have unusually high scores on their introvertion and intuition scales. This makes them quite different from most members of the general public, where INs are relatively rare. To be precise, 5% of people are INs, but in MENSA this figure rises to nearly 40%! INs have strong skills in dealing with abstract ideas and theories, and abstract reasoning is required to pass the MENSA test. I also found that the conferences were dominated by INs which is, again, most unusual. These results have been written up in more detail in the June, 1990 issue of the MENSA magazine.

When the project was repeated five years later, many new members took part in the research so that nearly 3000 people were involved with the project. The results from this second project were even more fascinating, as they were virtually identical to the first project. These results, together with a number of graphs and  tables, were published in the January, 1997 issue of the MENSA magazine. One of the graphs, which clearly illustrates the differences between MENSA members and members of the general population, is repeated below. Note especially the I/E and S/N split.

Site layout by SynTax