Johari musings

[eclectic_boy]

This is my first LJ discussion-post; normally I think Chat is the place for posting things I want to have conversations about, but this time LJ seemed the obvious choice because it's about the hottest fad in LJ, the Johari Window.

The more of these I fill out for my friends, the more I wonder how those particular adjectives made it into the 55 words you're allowed to describe someone with. It seems like they're missing some pretty widespread and fundamental traits that can define a personality. For instance, where's 'loyal'? 'Enthusiastic'? Where's something to describe a born leader? Why are things as similar as 'ingenious' and 'clever' both on there? 'Caring' and 'sympathetic'? Why is 'tense' there, if it's supposed to be positive or neutral qualities only?

Seems to me this sieve is too fine-meshed in some places, and has gaps in others. What strikes you as being missing or quasi-redundant from the list, if you have 55 adjectives to assess all personalities?

Comments

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

I think it also suffers seriously from the fact that picking M out of N options is a lot harder than answering N yes/no questions, such that, under a reasonable model of the choices involved, the former can be computationally intractable — er, can leave people confused — because the choices aren't independent.

[gerbilicious85.livejournal.com]

I agree, there's too many words that mean practically the same thing with a lot of both good and bad traits missing even though they're important. For some of them it gives you the option then to really emphasize that you see someone as smart (and not much else) by choosing all those words. Or if they tend to flake out on commitments, you can hit them with "unreliable", "irresponsible", and probably a few others too.

I don't like that "child-like/fun" isn't on the johari window, so one must for that choose "childish" on the nohari window. And there's no "immature" selection, so it ends up meaning that instead.

[sinsofthedove.livejournal.com]

I didn't think about this in the context of Johari, but Nohari is missing "annoying". Seriously! Sometimes people are just annoying!

I can discuss this in more length later, but I think the whole thing is much more interesting for what it tells you about the people who fill it out. Compare, for example, the responses you and I had on ccommack's window. Same guy, but in some ways...not. My art teacher has told us several times about the strange phenomenon of figure drawing: namely, that tall stringy people tend to draw the model looking kind of tall and stringy, and short stocky people draw them as being short and stocky - this irrespective of what the person looks like. I have no idea whether this experiment is meant to show that kind of pattern, but I think I see it in the results.

Also, I really really like that it logs the order in which you clicked the adjectives. Delicious feature!

[foxfour.livejournal.com]

yes.

[metasilk.livejournal.com]

I think it would be much more interesting if you could, in setting up your own "window", choose your own 55 adjectives -- just typing them in, and letting the window alphabetize them. You could then let the visitors choose their 5-6. This might highlight your consistency/dynamism in interaction (as jere7my pointed out) in an interesting way. It also lets you work around some of the issues of positive/negative connotations, perhaps.