o_19kdfsn0q18e31dfraas1esh19vta.pdf

around on the road. The police investigated, and there was Harrelson. But he would not go quietly
—a six hour standoff commenced in which Harrelson (still high) shoved his gun up his nose and
threatened to commit suicide as the police tried to talk him down. At this point he confessed to
killing both the judge and President Kennedy. Finally, a woman he had been acquainted with
managed to get him to surrender.
Harrelson is dead as of 2007, and the world is not poorer for it. We are, however, left with a puzzle.
Harrelson's behavior outside of prison is ESTPlike at all points, while his behavior inside prison is
INTJlike at all points. Here we have a man who hits on total strangers (Extraversion) and yet loves
silence (Introversion). His rather erratic lifestyle would seem to point towards Perceiving, but he
claims to be a neat freak (Judging). He also seemed happier in prison, particularly in solitary
confinement.
The case is certainly an anomaly, and I don't have an explanation. There are a few theories, but
none of them quite seems to do a good job of explaining the case. I'll toss some out there, so you
can ponder them.
A prison is sort of like a cult. One MBTI study of cults (read here) found that cult leaders gradually
change their followers into their own type, which is typically ESFJ, ESTJ, or ENFJ. 311 Indeed,
"personality shift" is one of the defining marks of cults. The victims of personality shift are
typically in an unhealthy mental state, and the more shift they undergo the worse off they get.
Could it be that prison, with its harsh, unbending rules, its atmosphere of total control, its
consistent, unvarying routine, and its dense populations of Thinkers produces a cult-like
environment that shifted Harrelson into an INTJ? But this theory has two problems, namely that
most prison guards (the posited cult leaders) are probably SJs, a guess I base on the fact that most
of the military and police are SJs. But Harrelson didn't turn into an SJ, and nobody forced him to
keep his cell clean—many prisoners have messy cells. Another problem with this theory is that
MBTI studies on populations of prisoners do not find evidence of personality shift. A final blow is
that if Harrelson's prison personality was artificially created, then he would be less happy and
healthy in prison rather than the reverse.
Another possibility is that Harrelson's dad, a prison guard, had something to do with his behavior.
As one might guess from the results of the Stanford prison experiment (read here), being a prison
guard can have a nasty effect on one's family relationships. A journalist who infiltrated Sing Sing as
a corrections officer for just a year noted that he had begun to treat his young son like an inmate. 312
Harrelson's freewheeling behavior when outside could be some kind of reaction against this sort of
treatment, though it's hard to explain why. Perhaps he was happy "inside" because the prison
literally felt like home? There's no way to say, and I have no information on Harrelson's dad.
Falsification of type can occur when a parent tries to Pygmalion their child into their own type—but
again, this typically results in an unhappy child, whereas Harrelson was happy in prison. It did not
strike me that Harrelson had become institutionalized.
In the end, it's a mystery. The MBTI has a tendency to encourage stereotypes about human
behavior, as though all members of a type "must" behave in a certain way and "can't" behave any
other way. But in reality people are complicated. The girlfriend Harrelson beat up recalled that
initially, "He was always very sweet and gentle with me at this time and I had no idea of his
profession." Jack Dean, a Texas ranger who knew Harrelson well, noted that he "had a conman's
personality, and you would like him if you met him." Think before you type?
Whatever type Harrelson may be, it is interesting to find a person who was able to "shapechange"
311 Yeakley, Norton, Vinzant & Vinzant, 1988
312 Conover, 2000