No statistical measurement or actual attempt at a scientific investigation was done.
The classification was purely validated by Isabel Briggs Myers' own free interpretation of what a particular trait should be.
That's self-deception, not science.
There's nothing wrong in trying to build an understanding of personalities but making things up just because you think your intuition is all you need to build theories, well, that doesn't inspire much confidence.
The Myers-Briggs Test smells like science -it has codes and categories!- but like most pseudo-sciences, no-one has really been interested in validating the assumptions with actual data.
Pseudo-Psychology is rife with these wishful-thinking theories that sound kind of right but have no solid data to support them.
Not bashing Psychology, I think it's a hugely interesting field, but the science behind a lot of it still remains fishy.
he original developers of the MMPI questionnaire went about choosing their "normal" control group. They compared test answers from patients in hospitals for the mentally ill with answers from people working in and visiting those hospitals.
Who’s to say those workers and visitors were mentally healthy?
It's well known that certain kinds of mentally ill people are drawn to working in the mental health industry. I know a psychiatrist who's a narcissist, and a psychiatric nurse who's probably BPD or NPD.
Bootstrapping a test from a hand-picked set of people is just bad methodology.
The covariance of the Big 5 and MBTI is high. This means that if you give both inventories to the same population you can do a factor rotation of one onto the other with much of the variance being preserved. This has been demonstrated multiple times in the academic literature. I have never read an article against the MBTI that mentioned this, and that's because the people who write these articles do not understand statistics. The MBTI is approximately as valid as the Big 5.
Interesting. Looks like extroversion is the best correlated (.74) which I suppose makes sense. But nearly as strong (.72) is intuition/sensing to openness to experience, which I would not have predicted. Conscientiousness to judging/perceiving is only .49 and agreeableness to thinking/feeling is only .44. MBTI has no good correlate for neuroticism.
I'm no statistician, but "is approximately as valid" looks to be overselling the situation.
0.5 correlation means it is maybe perhaps correlated given Emax view of the statistics. For normal variates you should aim for R=0.95 at least. Both MBTI and Big Five are approximately normal variates.
Also correlation is a linear operator which is not particularly sensitive to anything nonlinear.
Use a good statistical test instead.
That said, I don't think it's quite true that "The MBTI is approximately as valid as the Big 5". It seems to me that the Big 5 is a strict improvement on the MBTI. First, the discrete nature of the MBTI incorrectly suggests that the distributions are bimodal, when I don't think anyone thinks that's true. Second, I'm willing to bet that even if we just concentrate on the 4 factors of the Big 5 that correlate with the (non-discrete version of the) MBTI factors, we'd find significantly higher validity for the former, if only because there have been many more serious scientists studying and refining it over many years.
They both have strengths and weaknesses. Strengths of the MBTI include the text descriptions, which are very valuable, and that it focuses on positive psychology. Of course, if you rotate the MBTI onto the Big 5, you see that it does in fact measure neuroticism, although not that strongly.
What you have to understand is that statistically the models are very similar (you can compress them both into one unified model that does what both of them do quite well). However, the ways the models are constructed makes them useful for different things. The Big 5 is primarily useful for academics, and the MBTI is primarily useful for the rest of us.
If you are a logical positivist and scientific realist you'll never be able to grok this. As a utilitarian I understand that science is the process of making something that does something you want done.
I think I grok that some simplifications are more useful and teachable than others, and that it's possible to accomplish useful things by simplifying (and also by misleading). But I don't think you have to be a hardcore logical positivist to think these are distinct notions from "validity". My impression is that you have psychological or statistical training, so when you used the word in your original comment I assume you know what it meant.
> For example, in the category of extrovert vs introvert, you’re either one or the other; there is no middle ground.
That's not entirely true. The final answer that people wear as a badge is binary, but the result is calculated as a percentage, and usually presented to the test-taker as a percentage.
This is making light of a difficult problem. Personality is an interesting and relevant aspect of individual behavior and socialization that remains incompletely characterized by science. One of the most popular modern alternatives to Meyers-Briggs is the Five Factors model which also has limitations. Utility for corporate applications may not be the best metric for these early attempts to characterize personality.
This is not a new finding. MBTI has never really been a serious psychological tool. In fact, a lot of the personality assessments used in business are really just woo - MBTI isn't even the worst. It at least is internally consistent.
For a real personality exam with actual use in psych research, check out the Five Factor metric.
I'd characterize it as a pseudo-scientific horoscope.
It's marginally analogous to the Big Five personality traits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits - this is the personality paradigm recognized by academia), it just leaves out the tendency to experience negative emotions (probably because neuroticism is a negative thing, and businesses like their HR experiences and training to be as positive and feel-good as the bottom line allows.)
It is unfortunate that people like the false dichotomies and the Forer effect (the generic but positive descriptions that apply to just about everybody.)
I'm sure the Myers Briggs people would be selling the Big Five if they thought they could copyright it.
I think your missing the point. Do you know what flavor of ice cream you like? I think you do -- and why not know that about yourself?
Everyone is some range of introverted to extroverted, for example. It's their preference, such as the flavor of ice cream they like. It can change often, under circumstances, or even not be present, of course. It's not set in stone; it's just a preference. It doesn't define you; you define it.
Myers-Briggs is unfortunate in that it assigns that preference as letter. You like Chocolate. You're a C. There are some who have no problem with this sort of designation. They love chocolate always and in every circumstance. Many, however, are not one letter, and so it's a poor test.
The point is not the letter. The point is asking yourself the question: do you feel more energized after a dinner party or after a quiet day alone? The point is to know, not just what flavors your prefer usually, but what situations (in this case) you prefer. And why not know that about yourself?
I'd prefer a questionnaire which provides the benefits of self-questioning towards better self knowledge and actualisation. This can be done without MBTI which adds pseudo-science on top of any questioning it might provide, which falsely formalises bull and fossilises fake intellectual structures into public consciousness.
The scales are unsound. They actively direct people away from curiosity in discovering other structures which are less wrong.
My opinion is that the real value of tools like this is to give people a common vocabulary to talk about themselves and understand others. I think StrengthsFinder[0] does a particularly good job at this. The danger is when people assume they understand somone (or themselves) based on the letters/scores/etc. sans dialogue/reflection.
Yes, it seems BM is measure people in 4 axis and assign a name for each of the 16 types. That's it
By forcing people to think in these characteristics to evaluate someone it makes it easier to have a common vocabulary and to predict stuff along those lines
That is valuable and true. The problem is that people take them to mean "this is what I'm like" when it really means "this is how I responded to this test."
Sometimes, people strive to be different, perhaps to improve themselves. When answering a MB question, the answer could be understood in two possible ways: "I usually do that" and "My instinct is to do that". For example, she might keep the room clean but when she was younger, she was sloppy - her instinct is still to be sloppy by she is more disciplined now and keeps clean. How should she answer? These kinds of confusions could change a type.
Yep, personality indicators are a useful way to understand oneself and others in terms of personal interaction.
Sadly, these tests are misused by well-meaning HR departments who are in no position, as amateur psychologists, to make _any_ decisions based personality test results.
The Birkman Method is a far better tool that doesn't 'put you in a box' so to speak. We use it exclusively at Elaura and with our hoozyu and expresso apps.
It is well worth watching Derren Brown's demonstration of the Barnum / Forer effect [0].
If you've never heard of it, I recommend watching the video before you Google anything. It's only a short video (less than 4 minutes) and is a brilliant demonstration.
> the most obvious flaw is that the MBTI seems to rely exclusively on binary choices….For example, in the category of extrovert v introvert, you’re either one or the other; there is no middle ground
This is categorically false. Myers Briggs results are quite literally reported on a spectrum of 100 I - 0 - E 100, with your position on the spectrum shown. The 4 letter rollup is exactly that: a summary rollup of your test results.
Then why do we use the summary rollup when it completely loses any of the granular insights? It makes no sense for me to say I'm an E when it was 51E, 49I. For me personally, shouldn't I instead say something like 51E64N60F65J? Likewise, the "insights" you get into your 4 letters is based on whatever the majority letter was, even when your percentages are nowhere near 100% for each.
A lot of the tests will give you those granular numbers, but as a summary it's easy to see why they use only 4 letters compared to your example. Personally I'm surprised any reasonable person would think the test is strictly binary.
When I did this test, the trainer was pretty clear that it's not meant to be a 'spectrum'. You're either an E or an I and that was that. The only one they claimed might be a spectrum was P to J.
This isn't actually true. During construction of the test they throw out questions that don't categorize you. It has discriminative validity even when it looks close.
I get highly skeptical whenever I encounter things like this.
I've been subjected to "DiSC" profiling at a previous employer. After taking the test we were subjected to a 3 hour session where we slowly discovered and learned about our unique profile. The best part was I compared my strengths and weaknesses with someone who had an "opposite" personality and they were pretty close to identical.
Granted there is a lot to be gained by getting a group of people in a room to talk about the different ways they interact with the world and how they go about solving problems. However, as soon as you start providing formulas for how to interact with people my bull shit detector goes off.
And when your employer totally buys in to the bullshit, there's a strong incentive to game the system -- make sure you're classified as a DI (Dominance/Inducement) if you want to move up the management ranks.
This is good to know. It would probably be useful for someone to catalog the "desirable" categories for the various personality tests. We know the tests are used for screening, and it's a pretty safe bet that the screening is based on stereotypes.
I don't think it's necessary to precisely nail a specific set of quanta, but simply to avoid the symbols that are associated with negative stereotypes such as introverted, obstinate, or lazy. When I had to take one of these kinds of tests, I just put myself into a mind set of being outgoing, cheerful, agreeable, diligent, etc.
I wonder how MBTI would be perceived if instead of simply a binary EI/NS/FT/PJ, anyone within a standard deviation of the mean got an X, so you could be INXX if you were solidly introverted and intuitive, but not particularly strongly aligned on the later two axes.
Naturally most people would have at least an X or two, but it would be much more useful if people didn't have to advertise an F or T if it didn't really matter for describing them.
Though it probably wouldn't have caught on. Who wants to be the XXXX in a situation.
As an individual (INFJ) thoroughly interested in Myers-Briggs, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who tout Myers-Briggs as a comprehensive personality test fail to understand what the Myers-Briggs attempts to identify. While the "value-add" is more subjective, I'm going to go ahead and say it's not as useless as this article claims. While I don't think anyone (especially employers) should rely heavily on Myers-Briggs, I think it can provide a decent framework (or starting point) outlining basic facets of an individual's personality based on their own perspective. Though I often distrust individual claims about belonging a certain type, given my interest in understanding myself and facets of my own personality, I enjoy discussing why a person may claim to be a part of a certain type.
For me, Myers-Briggs tends to be little more than a starting point for discussing the finer parts of my own personality, values, and perspectives. I find that those who are equally interested in Myers-Briggs share similar values in self-understanding, thus a starting point for some interesting discussion.
That is a completely reasonable approach. Like astrology or tarot cards. Getting people thinking about big questions in a non threatening way can spark interesting conversations. There are a lot of cultural norms that prevent people from talking about themselves in that kind of way. A little hocus pocus can help cut through that.
In that same spirit alcohol is a pretty great social lubricant. A little bit of booze lowers people's inhibitions enough to have fun conversations.
When you say 'reasonable', you mean something orthogonal: rather it's 'rhetorically useful', or 'a social hack '. This does not make it scientific, nor based in reason, and more dangerous because it masquerades as reason much more truthily than tarot and other pretence magic
I don't mean it's rational, i mean good enough, at least it's in the same ballpark of getting someone drunk.
It's not scientific, it's totally based in reason. It's reasonable to deny global warming because winters are getting colder than ever. It's not reasonable to deny climate change because winters are getting colder than ever.
There's nothing wrong with someone drawing a conclusion from their personal experience, that's going to be full of emotion, opinion and hopefully some logic.
I get your concern, but the same folks who make hiring decisions based on Myers Briggs will tell you angels were watching over them when they narrowly avoided a car crash. Or their relative visited them a month after they passed away. it's mostly benign. When it's not benign, they're unreasonable. Only then is it possibly worth the effort to persuade them to be a bit more rational.
But, yes. I mean 'rhetorically useful' or 'a social hack'
Because those mentioned deal with random events, where X and Y are uncorrelated (being X a date of birth or card drawn from Tarot and Y is some personality characteristic)
MB do ask you questions from which you can predict - to some degree - some outcomes (how do you think a strong Extrovert changes from a strong Introvert)?
Just don't do something stupid like "this job requires a INTJ only" or think that the distribution is bimodal or that their behaviour will follow a strict pattern.
(It's not like the rest of "behavioral science" can make repeatable predictions and reproduce papers compared to other scientific branches)
I don't think about M-B or Tarot or astrology as predictive, they are mindfulness prods: interesting frameworks to break up and reframe the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are. A horoscope that tells me "this week will present challenges at work about money" is likely to prod me into mindfulness about work and money than I would be otherwise. Similarly, my ESTJ M-B type is more likely to make me mindful about where I get my energy and the ways in which rigorously analytical thinking may not be the way lots of other humans approach decisions.
It correlates poorly with any of the competing empirically-supportable models; e.g., as I recall, the I-E axis seems to be a blend of the extraversion and neuroticism axes shared by the EPQ (3 factor) and Big Five (5 factor) models. Better to use one of the scientific models directly than MBTI.
My primary concern with even cursory usage of Myers-Briggs is that retest consistency isn't as high as I'd like. Plenty of people retest very solidly, of course, but there's a large-percentage chunk of the population that walks or more boundaries and doesn't put up consistent tests. That makes it hard to say anything about the results, at least in simple "my type" terms.
A nuanced discussion would probably accept that these are continuous axes, but instead they get treated as clusters, distorting even casual analysis.
The goal of the test is just to give an approximation. The test is not accurate (and is not claiming to be).
The core of the theory is to highlight natural preferences in the way we use cognitive functions. It's a pretty good and useful model. It's not a definite one though, like all the models we have it's meant to be improved and replaced over the years (like in physics).
99% of the critics about MBTI are focusing on the tests (which I agree are not accurate) and the authors don't understand the theory behind it - which is the really useful part. (Carl Jung's work, cognitive functions preferences, etc)
I think there's a cross-purposes argument happening here.
I, for one, am totally alright with MBTI-style questions as a tool for analysis/introspection. RibbonFarm has some great writing about identifying 'dominant' cognitive functions based on magnitude data from MBTI.
Strictly accurate? No. A useful framework for planning? Absolutely.
MBTI is also an organization, though. It charges money for training, issues education materials, and gives trainers strict guidelines on what assessments are ok to make. That system is hideously inaccurate and deserves criticism. It asserts that the test is accurate to reality, that the personality types are 'opposed', and that people are bimodal on the four axes. Many of those claims explicitly contradict the Jungian theories that inspired them.
So it's easy to overreach when criticizing the MB model, and most articles like this aren't clear about their target. But the actual MBTI organization - which is still popular with big companies in its original form - is wrong in terms of its own theoretical foundations, defended with bad data, and deserves extensive criticism.
Which is the fundamental failure. Picking E v. I says little about relative magnitude. 'E' might be slightly larger than 'I' but below the test's noise floor so you show up 'I' slightly more frequently. Or 'E' might significantly higher than 'I' so it's a consistent result.
Further, it says nothing about the fluctuations in magnitude over time, some days 'E' might be more important than 'I' and it really can swap on other days. Or even how accurately people self report.
Actually, a type (e.g. INFP) does say a lot about the magnitude of different cognitive processes. Take a look at this website (INFP linked as an example): http://www.cognitiveprocesses.com/16Types/INFP.cfm
There are only 4 bits of information. E v I, S v N, T v F, J v P.
So, if you are 'strongly' I and weakly P that does not change the order to show P is more dominate over J than I is over E. AKA, magnitude is literally not part of the test.
Notably, all the good secondary analysis of MBTI I've seen worries about magnitude. The RibbonFarm bit on it focuses almost exclusively on magnitude, discussing 'primary' traits rather than four-letter type clusters. A lot of the worst analysis, by contrast, insists on using non-magnitude, 16-case typing.
Which, of course, means that we're abandoning the actual test to get a substantive measurement.
When I took the MBTI as part of a college psych course, our test results came back with magnitude scores: moderately I, very N, barely T (ie, almost X), and very P. (The actual scores were numeric, but I only remember the relative strength years later.)
When discussing the results as a class, the strength of a type seemed to correlate reasonably with behavior, and explain more than the clusters on their own, eg, all the strong NPs had similar epistemological views and styles, fading towards an SJ style as the scores people had changed.
What a lot of people seem to forget, though, is the MBTI doesn't account for effects from disorders only healthy variation and it's about who you are right now, not who you are permanently. People vary over time.
And the MBTI doesn't imply or assume axes. A type (e.g. INFP) is a label for your cognitive processes.
e.g. INFP leads with a primary Introverted Feeling (judging), an auxiliary Extroverted Intuition (perceiving), then Introverted Sensing, and finally Extroverted Feeling.
> A nuanced discussion would probably accept that these are continuous axes, but instead they get treated as clusters, distorting even casual analysis.
As far as I understood the test, it results in your brain's _dominant_ mode on four axes. So you are either predominantly introverted or extraverted. There is nothing in the theory stating that you are introverted 100%, all the time.
I'm not suggesting that MBTI claims we're 100% E or I. I'm saying that it assigns binary distributions on those axes, which would make it meaningful to talk about "E dominant" and "I dominant" people. Every study I've seen of the actual data, though, says that these are normally distributed traits.
So there are some people with distinctive, meaningful dominant modes on these axes. But the bulk of the population is at the center of the distributions, where marginal differences are being talked about like high-significance bimodal results.
This isn't inevitably the case, but we live in a world where MBTI results are still being used to determine who's suited to which jobs. If you're hiring sales guys who are 51% extroverted and refusing ones who are 49% extroverted, that supposed binary distribution is misleading you badly.
I thought the MBTI gave an X if you were actually at the middle?
So you'd get an I at less than 45%, an E at more than 55%, and an X if you were on the border.
Further, you said they were normally distributed, but didnt talk about the variance. It's possible that people who are just a little from the middle by % of population are meaningfully different than the average -- a quarter standard deviation could be a meaningful amount of change in the real world.
So your argument doesn't actually support your claim: with the inclusion of an X band, it's possible the gap between E and I is meaningful in real world situations. We can't know merely by knowing it's normally distributed, we need to analyze the standard deviation size versus the minimal meangingful difference in the real world.
Several instances I've seen of MBTI didn't offer X, but that's definitely an improvement. The one I got for high school career services actually crashed if you 'tied', because that hadn't been accounted for at all.
Without the X band, "normal distribution" is enough to say things are broken. It means that you're consistently dividing similar people while grouping dissimilar people, which isn't what I like in a cluster.
With the X band, SD becomes important and a wide distribution might provide good results. Anecdotally, this could match the high attention given to E/I versus F/T - high SD axes would be relevant to more people.
Having said that, I'm still skeptical of much of the MBTI literature. It definitely deals in bimodal distributions, asserting that these clusterings are features of the territory rather than the map. If the peak frequency is a value the test can't inform about, I think that still invalidates much of the literature even if the test has some predictive power.
> Several instances I've seen of MBTI didn't offer X, but that's definitely an improvement. The one I got for high school career services actually crashed if you 'tied', because that hadn't been accounted for at all.
While I get the criticism of those tests as poorly implemented pop-psych, it only seems fair to attack the MBTI itself as a concept if you criticize the actual written, send-in-and-evaluate official version. The version I took of that (which came with a ton of propaganda from the testing company) featured both an X band and numeric strength scores for each category. It also featured a lot more questions than the typical online free ones, and had redundant questions the way that standard psych evals do. So at least some of the "professional" MBTI people are providing that kind of test, even if their analysis is all about bimodals and nonsense.
> With the X band, SD becomes important and a wide distribution might provide good results. Anecdotally, this could match the high attention given to E/I versus F/T - high SD axes would be relevant to more people.
My main point was that the joint distribution increases the spread away from XXXX to things like XXFX or XNXX, where even if you're still near the exact middle, there's less people exactly at average, and so the test is more likely to relay at least one fact in one category about the test taker than any particular category is to say something useful.
So even though the test can't say anything about the hyperbox in the middle of the range, it is relatively small because getting a little way away from the exact center likely says something about at least one category, even if the majority still can't have anything useful said about them.
Think of it this way: assume that the test can't say anything about the middle 20% of people for a given trait, and that the traits are independent (ie, how you score on one has nothing to do with the others). The odds that you're XXXX is (0.2)^4 = 0.0016. So only ~1 in 500 people would get nothing out the MBTI, even though ~1 in 5 has at least one category with an X.
And that's assuming a relatively large X band. Drop the X band to 5%, and it's only ~1 in 200,000 that would get XXXX.
> Having said that, I'm still skeptical of much of the MBTI literature.
I threw out the marketing booklet mostly unread after the statistical nonsense of the first few pages was too much when I paid to take the professional version of the test in school.
The test is alright, but not great and modern data analysis can probably do a much better PCA than the MBTI is, but the company is outright moronic in what they say. And others can be much worse.
I've retested several times, and while I'm normally I (strong), my other values were weaker, and fluctuated some (sometimes F, sometimes T, for example).
Amazingly, I've had arguments about this with folks. (probably E folks). They claimed that "it never changes", which is just patently untrue. Perhaps E folks don't introspect enough to re-evaluate their views on things? I know I tested different 5 years ago compared to when I took it 20 years ago.
I don't really see how you couldn't retest at least somewhat differently.
I've flipped at least two letters over time, and at least one letter on next-morning retest. J/P in particular has never seemed clear or significant to me.
I think this is actually the most common experience. The data I've seen says that scores on all four 'axes' are normally distributed. So it's actually fairly exceptional to have strong, predictable positions for every letter; cutting a bunch of normal distributions down the middle means most of us are on a boundary.
And yes, it's probably those silly E folks saying they never change. God forbid we wake up tomorrow testing as E, we'll have a paradox on our hands.
The folks who have argued that point with me over the years all happened to be strong E. I'm talking perhaps 3-4 people over 20 years - not a huge number to go on, but it was the only consistent I saw (male/female/old/young/etc).
Me: "Wow, I took this a few years ago and was a moderate F, but now I'm a slight T".
Them: "That's just not possible. It doesn't work that way. You just don't remember what you had before. It doesn't change".
The big problem of MBTI is the axes aren't well aligned with supportable dimensions of personality, though they have some correlation with them. Models like EPQ (3 factors), Big Five (5 factors), and HEXACO (6 factors) have better methodology behind them (though each still has strengths and weaknesses).
MBTI is a just-so story with a lot of marketing behind it.
Without the clusters, the tests would generate no interest. Imagine if most of us got the same results: "You are within a standard deviation of average. Go ahead and keep doing what you're doing." It would be like the typical middle-of-the-road performance review. We'd file it in the drawer and forget about it. The binary extremes provide the entertainment value needed to perpetuate the product, and also to justify the traits attached to the symbols.
What about considering other starting points and comparing the added value of them with MBTI? How differs "So, you are INFJ, let's talk about your personality" from "So, you are Captain America/Hobbit/Sith Lord, according to this online test. Let's talk about your personality"?
If you have a reasonable methodology to generate the comparison, I think being able to tell someone they are a Sith Lord can be helpful. I think tests can help provide a different perspective to people. I think tests are an issue when they present traits as concrete and unable to be changed, or only present the positive aspects of your personality.
I expect you get about the same utility out of any 4-dimensional, 16-choice bucketing strategy.
The MBTI is mostly just useful in that it's one of the few things that actually sorts humans in a hyperdimensional way, which is really how we're best categorized.
We're all slight wobbles (well, statistically speaking) around the center of a like 20-100 dimension distribution.
MBTI is basically just PCA on that space in to a 4-dimensional one, and while we can argue how evenly its bucketing split the actual distribution of people (not ideally, but not terribly), or how much information was lost in that downcasting (a lot!), I think the basic premise of viewing people as a composite of slight differences across many dimensions is a useful viewpoint we don't normally engage in.
So if you could pick 16 LotR characters that form a hypercube of traits, then assigning LotR characters is the same as the MBTI. The problem is usually that LotR quizzes and the like are a) much smaller than that (4-8 characters) and b) not laid out in a hypercube (ie, there's not 4+ dimensions of wobble, there's 2 or 3).
Well, sure. But it's also exactly the contention of its proponents: that the categories represent orthogonal concerns about how we process information, but that our variation across those categories explains the larger trait distribution we experience.
My point wasn't to argue about how well they did that (not particularly), but rather that it's useful to approach issues of understanding personality in those terms at all. That's the real innovation of things like the MBTI: that we should analyze the distribution of personalities in terms of PCA, and that we should probably use a few components, rather than like 1 or 2.
Of course, we could do the actual analysis much better than the MBTI did.
MBTI is not that. It is marketed as if it was, but it's an a priori model not based on analysis of actual data. EPQ, Big Five, HEXACO, etc. are closer to what you present MBTI as being.
I think the M-B is useful, but I only apply it in the area of communication styles. As an INTP engineer, I run into a lot of ISTJ engineers. ISTJ and INTP viewpoints are markedly different in what information is considered critical, how and when to make decisions, and how they like information summarized. So I use M-B to help understand the audience I am writing for or presenting to.
When I first encountered M-B it rescued a sour relationship with an ISTJ boss who thought I wrote content-free status reports, where I thought I wrote well-summarized round-ups that avoided meaningless minutia. Later, the table was reversed when I had an ISTJ report who drowned me in more details than I could (or needed to) process. I used M-B to help us workout guidelines for talking with each other so that we were productive instead of both frustrated.
So M-B has been useful to me. But it should not be used for making hiring/placement decisions. I really see it as an information processing styles inventory and little more.
Your assertion that it is good for anything is based on the idea that the data is valid in any way. It isn't. When people are retested the results are very inconsistent.
Results being independently reproducible is the foundation of science. Meyers-Briggs fails that simple metric.
If the test is judging mindset, something that changes very regularly, of course the results will change as well. This is akin to saying testing blood sugar is worthless because the result varies throughout the day.
Well sure, but the point is that saying "I am INTJ" is like saying "My blood sugar is X." It may be true at the moment, but it's not a useful statement about the general prevailing conditions.
But people take the test once, and then use the results for a long period of time. Guess what? At night, blood sugar level goes down. it's no longer X. And likewise with this test.
True, but by noting your blood sugar readings over a long period of time, taking note of the spikes, drops, and so forth, you gain some insight into your health and diet.
Same thing, here. I wouldn't put much stock into a single result on a single test, but I think there's some broader value to be gained by examining the trend, the fluctuations, and what you wind up as more often than not.
C'mon man. It purports to test personality, not mindset. It doesn't say "Run this after meals and first thing in the morning between meals to get an idea of your mindset throughout the day." Sheesh.
I read your first paragraph and there is absolutely no information in those 851 characters (!). I actually had to go through your comment history to see that your account is not some sort of Markov generator.
On a more productive point, your post gave no evidence at all about why M-B is useful
I used MBTI in a similar way when I was younger. I identified strongly with the INTP type and wanted to become more outgoing and confident so I studied the descriptions of the ENTP type and deliberately cultivated some of those behaviours. It actually worked fairly well (though admittedly this was also around my 18th birthday so maybe it was just alcohol), nowadays I don't find it particularly useful nor the descriptions at all accurate but as a starting base for self analysis and improvement it's great.
Myers-Briggs is incredibly useful for people who fall into INFJ because the categorization is relatively rare and can help them place a few of their more socially maladaptive tendencies in context.
Admittedly, the test is arbitrary in many ways, but you can't deny the questions -- about introversion, how logical, emotive, and judgmental you are, etc -- represent the subjective experience we have of others' personalities, even if the categories are incomplete, nonlinear, redundant, or transient.
yes, I always score very very strongly in INTJ. It may not be as useful as a full psychological evaluation for describing my personality, but unlike Tarot/astrology, if you know what INTJ means, you can understand how I function and how I see myself. (not very social/emotional, very logical, stubborn, aptitude for systems-building)
As an individual (Taurus) thoroughly interested in astrology, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who tout astrology as a comprehensive personality test fail to understand what astrology attempts to identify. While the "value-add" is more subjective, I'm going to go ahead and say it's not as useless as this article claims. While I don't think anyone (especially employers) should rely heavily on astrology, I think it can provide a decent framework (or starting point) outlining basic facets of an individual's personality based on their own perspective. Though I often distrust individual claims about belonging a sign, given my interest in understanding myself and facets of my own personality, I enjoy discussing why a person may claim to be a part of a certain sign.
For me, astrology tends to be little more than a starting point for discussing the finer parts of my own personality, values, and perspectives. I find that those who are equally interested in astrology share similar values in self-understanding, thus a starting point for some interesting discussion.
Your comment can be distilled to "it's fun to talk about".
No, that doesn't work at all. OP is saying that he draws conclusions about someone's personality based on the Meyers-Briggs type with which they identify. That logic doesn't apply to the zodiac because your star-sign is based on your birthday. People don't lie about their birthday to become a Virgo. But they might fudge the answers to the Meyers-Briggs survey so they appear more "introverted" and "thinking". If you compare someone's self-view ("I'm an introvert!") with their behavior (definitely an extrovert), you can draw conclusions. This is more than "fun to talk about". It's standard practice in psychology.
Sure it does. I've met people who will say things like "My sun sign is Virgo, but my personality is dominated by my Sagittarius moon", and then later say something like "I'm going through Saturn return, no wonder Pisces is such an influence".
If you compare someone's self-view ("I'm an Aries!") with their behavior (definitely a Gemini), you can draw conclusions. It's standard practice in astrology.
maybe it's easier to be existential over essential with Myers-Briggs style systems? less rooted in the stars, though i guess overall humanity is now in a position to be getting smart about mixing and matching which references and metaphors work and which don't, depending on context. all abstractions are leaky, though it's easier with some to frame a flow of change.
e.g. later Wittgenstein, process relational, integral theory, chaos magic
They are not remotely comparable, Meyers Briggs is descriptive, Astrology is prescriptive and it's the prescriptive part that is nonsense. There is no connection to your personality and your birth date. Meyers Briggs is a classification system that groups similar personalities, it does not prescribe what your personality is or should be.
If you disregard the people who claim astrology is prescriptive, and pay attention to only those aspects of it that describe tendencies - all the most convincing astrology nuts I've met do this - it can be quite... warming.
Those tendencies are still linked to a birthdate which makes them prescriptive, you cannot ignore the prescriptive element of astrology without ignoring astrology entirely.
Myers-Briggs has a type label then assigns traits based on that label.
It's not clear to me how that's different.
Sure, you can choose your type by responding differently to the questions, or finding a "practitioner" who assigns a type you prefer, but the same applies to astrology: shop around until you hear what you want to here.
> Myers-Briggs has a type label then assigns traits based on that label.
False. It's exactly the opposite, the label doesn't assign the traits, rather the traits create the label; if your traits change so does the label, it's nothing more than a description of who you are now according to your own answers to those traits questions. And it aids greatly in think about yourself and others and how people differ and exactly in what ways they can differ.
Being linked to your birthday has absolutely nothing to do with being prescriptive. Perhaps horoscopes are only prescriptive, but astrology as a whole is much broader than that.
I don't put faith in or know much about astrology, but I do know there are many different types and areas of astrology and not all of them have to do with telling you how to pick your lotto numbers tomorrow.
A lot of people talk about signs and astrology in terms of being able to read people and determine personality traits of others.
It has everything to do with it, and it doesn't matter how or what a lot of people talk about astrology in terms of, it's absolute horseshit regardless of how they try and justify it. The stars, planets, etc have no relationship to your personality in any way.
> don't put faith in or know much about astrology
You're right, you don't, so perhaps don't sit here and defend this pseudo-scientific nonsense that you know nothing about.
Meyers Briggs is meant to be descriptive, but the preponderance of evidence shows that it is not, at all. In the corporate world discussion of MBTI very quickly becomes idiotically prescriptive. In my line if I see someone discuss MBTI with any level of passion or enthusiasm I have learned to distrust their evaluations of personalities and strengths/weaknesses, whether they refer to themselves or others.
And yet, misuse of a tool does not invalidate the tool; MBTI can do something the big 5 can't, assign a category which aids in thinking about and understanding another person which as someone else in this discussion points out can be statistically mapped directly to the big 5 making it not at all a useless tool.
This is also true of astrology and MBTI has as much scientific validity and predictive value.
No one's disputing that a useless tool can be misused. They're questioning the use of useless tools at all. They give the illusion of understanding to those not interested in evidence.
'Too Idealistic – INFPs often take their idealism too far, setting themselves up for disappointment as, again and again, evil things happen in the world.'
The sites you list (and a lot of discussion on MBTI) take the judgments way too far. That's when a lot of people conclude MBTI is junk -- when they see these conclusions based on type.
MBTI is basically this: You have a set of observed traits, and from that set we can tell you other traits you likely have based on observing many others that share the same traits.
Or in other words...
-Observe trait A
-Observe trait B
-Observe trait C
-Extrapolate trait D
-Extrapolate trait E
What those sites are doing is...
-Observe trait A
-Extrapolate traits C, M, Q, X, Z
Oh dear, there seems to be an epidemic of people's comparators not working. You might want to start small: try comparing two oranges, then an orange and an apple. Before long you'll be comparing supernovas to salamanders!
(Or perhaps you meant the rather less categorical "I think they're very different". I harp on this because I find "not remotely comparable" excessively dismissive. It's fine to disagree, just don't act like there's no possible way the other person might have a valid point)
There are a lot of worthless measures we use out there. Body Mass Index (BMI) is another one. This scale was developed in the mid 1800s and you can do a simple search to find tons of criticism on it. If you're overweight/obese, you will have a high BMI, but not everyone with high BMI is overweight (especially if you're very tall or very short).
Measuring Cholesterol is another one, since you can't actually change cholesterol via diet and it has no relation to heart disease either (source: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/panel-suggests-stop-warni... ). But the pharmaceutical industry still wants doctors to prescribe Statins and pours tons of money into advertising them to people and doctors, even though they're terrible for you and worthless.
It's troubling when industry grasps onto these measures and makes business models out of them. Wide spread acceptance of measures like these moves them out of the realm of homeopathy or astrology and into the realm of what people believe as relevant scientific measure. They benefit industry, but not the individual. Advertising allows that industry to continue to grow at the expense of good relevant data.
Invisibilia ran a great episode on "the personality myth"[1] and I think it shows the difference between BMI and "personality tests". BMI might be worthless but it measures something that objectively exists. Is it useful? Maybe not. Personality tests measure something that we don't even know exists, personality.
The episode talks about research showing how we can understand ourselves better as sets of behavior that we exhibit in different contexts, more than as having a single personality.
Put in simple words, you maybe introvert in some contexts and extrovert in others, and theses behaviors can change over time. You ARE not AN introvert, you exhibit introvert behaviors in context.
> Personality tests measure something that we don't even know exists, personality.
This sentence strikes me as odd, because subjectively, the one thing that shines through the most with people, even people I haven't seen in 20+ years, is a distinct (and possibly largely immutable) personality. In fact, a large part of why I was so shy growing up is because people's personalities were so "bright" that I felt intimidated. Not of course "bright" in a literal, measurable sense, but in an irrational qualitative sense. And therein lies the problem with trying to discuss it rationally.
To this day I perceive distinct personalities in every child and pet I encounter. Not sure if related, these exact same entities seem drawn to me for some reason. I have often heard a pet owner say "my pet has never acted this way before" around me (such as sitting in my lap when it has never done so with anyone).
I wonder if it simply reflects what I see in them. Anyway. My point is that the inability to discuss something rationally is not evidence for its nonexistence.
My argument is then that we will never have evidence that it exists because evidence is rational and objective and its very reality and/or value is trapped in the irrational subjective eye of the beholder.
Trying to boil it down into, say, patterns of neuron activations would be like trying to boil down or derive the "value reality" of the Mona Lisa by analyzing and cataloguing the light wavelengths reflecting off of it.
The claim that we will never have evidence that it exists says more about your need to not have your belief in its existence questioned than it does about the actual likelihood of evidence being found in the affirmative or negative.
> There are a lot of worthless measures we use out there. Body Mass Index (BMI) is another one. This scale was developed in the mid 1800s and you can do a simple search to find tons of criticism on it. If you're overweight/obese, you will have a high BMI, but not everyone with high BMI is overweight (especially if you're very tall or very short).
The metric system was developed in the 1800s and you can do a simple search to find tons of criticism on it.
Being tall or short is accounted for by BMI, as it's a component of BMI. So that is not a problem.
The actual problem with BMI is that it attempts to measure body composition, but it assumes that fat is the only variable component of body composition. It's not--muscle can also vary. So people with a lot of muscle mass can have a very high BMI even if they have very little fat.
However, in practice this isn't a problem--nobody looks at a body builder and says they're fat because they have a high BMI. It's obvious when a high BMI is caused by fat and when it's caused by muscle.
BMI is a pragmatic way to measure body composition, which is effective for estimating body composition when body composition isn't obvious, such as in the case of a body builder. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed, or has political reasons for saying otherwise.
This is not to disagree with your overall point--industry does grasp into measurements and make business models out of them. But in the case of BMI, political interests have become invested in discrediting the BMI measurement, not in overcrediting it.
The difference is that astrology is a starting point with zero correlation with who you are, while Myers-Briggs is a starting point with positive correlation with who you are. The positive correlation can be surprisingly helpful to understand differences between people.
However you don't need anything so complex for such a starting point. A classic demonstration that I saw was a large group of people who marked where they were on two lines. The first was how organized you were. The second was how extroverted you were. Based on this we divided into 4 groups, and began talking. It was surprising how much people in each group had in common. And how differently the groups behaved. The groups were:
Introverted and disorganized: Supporter. Good shoulder to cry on.
Introverted and organized: Analyst. They make good accountants.
Extroverted and disorganized: Promoter. High energy, lots of ideas, not a lot of carry through.
Extroverted and organized: Controller. They generally relate to, "My way or the highway."
I was in the Promoter quadrant. One of the things we had in common was that our spaces look like a tornado just tore through it, but please don't clean up because then we won't know where anything is. :-)
>"astrology is a starting point with zero correlation with who you are"
I would really doubt that it is zero, the relative position of the celestial bodies correlates with season. All sorts of human activities follow a yearly cycle, including birth rates and mortality rates. I have no doubt there is some correlation between astrological sign and personality.
I would take it further and say a good principle is that "everything is correlated with everything else", it is just a matter of the strength of the relationship. I will probably get downmodded for that, because it is in direct conflict the "null hypothesis" testing paradigm that has dominated data analysis for the last half century or so.
I don't know much about astrology, but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right? From my understanding, it is basically a way of binning together sets of birthdays. There will probably be various artifacts and noise introduced by the binning process, but I am sure with large enough sample size you will see the correlation.
Well, I tried searching "Myers Briggs season", etc. I didn't find any data on it all. It is one of those topics... too many low quality (unscholarly: not citing references , etc) sources popped up so I won't waste any further time on it.
I assure you with large enough sample size you will find some correlations though.
> I assure you with large enough sample size you will find some correlations though.
I can correlations the drop in pirates with a rise in global temperature, so what... correlations don't mean a damn thing by themselves, that's just data-mining bias.
The correlation with pirates is real too, that's my point, correlations don't mean anything. Only causation is meaningful. The only use of a correlation is as a starting point for finding causation.
Actually... I think causation may largely be a red herring as well. Our most successful models really do not incorporate it at all. They are in the form of F=ma or PV=nRT. There is no causality there.
There are indeed measured weak correlations between seasons and personality. Things like your odds of being bipolar are higher if you were born in late winter, and lower for summer/early fall. (The same correlations exist in the Southern hemisphere, but with the obvious 6 month shift.)
However there aren't correlations between those known correlations and the traits that astrology says that you should have. Therefore there is no known correlation between your astrological description and your personality. And yes, people have attempted to measure this.
It all depends on the sample size. If sufficient money is put towards it you will find the correlation. People have also done studies on this for around 50 years, everything is correlated with everything else:
'The author once had occasion to use 700 subjects in a study of publie opinion. After a factor analysis of the results, the factors were correlated with individual-difference variables such as amount of education, age, income, sex, and others. In looking at the results I was happy to find so many "significant" correlations (under the null-hypothesis model)-indeed, nearly all correlations were significant, including ones that made little sense. Of course, with an N of 700 correlations as large as .08 are "beyond the .05 level." Many of the "significant" correlations were of no theoretical or practical importance.'
https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1960-nunnally.pdf
"One of the common experiences of research workers is the very high frequency with which significant results are obtained with large samples. Some years ago, the author had occasion to run a number of tests of significance on a battery of tests collected on about 60,000 subjects from all over the United States. Every test came out significant. Dividing the cards by such arbitrary criteria as east versus west of the Mississippi River, Maine versus the rest of the country, North versus South, etc., all produced significant differences in means. In some instances, the differences in the sample means were quite small, but nonetheless, the p values were all very low. Nunnally (1960) has reported a similar experience involving correlation coefficients on 700 subjects. Joseph Berkson (1938) made the observation almost 30 years ago in connection with chi-square"
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_PSY38...
"...it is regularly found that almost all correlations or differences between means are statistically significant. See, for example, the papers by Bakan [1] and Nunnally [8]. Data currently being analyzed by Dr. David Lykken and myself, derived from a huge sample of over 55,000 Minnesota high school seniors, reveal statistically significant relationships in 91% of pairwise associations among a congeries of 45 miscellaneous variables such as sex, birth order, religious preference, number of siblings, vocational choice, club membership, college choice, mother’s education, dancing, interest in woodworking, liking for school, and the like. The 9% of non-significant associations are heavily concentrated among a small minority of variables having dubious reliability, or involving arbitrary groupings of non-homogeneous or non-monotonic sub-categories. The majority of variables exhibited significant relationships with all but three of the others, often at a very high confidence level (p < 10–6)."
http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...
Yeah, everything is correlated with everything, and a principal component analysis will quickly sort out the source.
For example what songs you like is tied to what media you watch which is tied to what politics you have. And most of that is tied to how liberal vs conservative you are.
It doesn't take many principal components to make most of the remaining correlations very small.
But correlations between astrological descriptions and personality start off small. So small that astrology is not a useful starting point to understanding people.
>"astrology is not a useful starting point to understanding people."
I never said it was. My problem is with the prevailing philosophy of doing statistical tests on whether there is exactly zero effect/correlation, ie testing for deviation from noise/chance. It is the most destructive idea ever pushed by mathematicians.
I am an INTP, and while a lot do consider Myers-Briggs as glorified Barnum statements, I do consider it somewhat valuable for self-introspection.
The main reason I don't think Myers-Briggs can be a true-ism is that each dimension is actually a spectrum. For example I am about 60% "I" (and thus 40% "E") so the various "I" true-isms only slightly factor on my personality.
Self-introspection is also where I find the most value in M-B. It gave me perspective on my ISTJ personality preferences (preferences is the key word) that I didn't understand about myself prior to having these results.
As a conversation piece, sure, it is an interesting framework.
As a tool, though, its utility remains doubtful. Its test-retest reliability is very low, meaning that, if you give the same person the test at two different times, you're likely to get two different results. This strongly suggests that, while the test might capture aspects of a person's personality, it's also functioning like a glorified mood ring. Without some way to separate those two aspects, its utility as an indicator of anything useful about any one individual is highly suspect.
Seems like a great tool for a science that draws conclusions first and looks for evidence later, as I've been led to believe has been happening in psychology.
I wouldn't drop this one on psychology's doorstep - the MBTI has been pretty consistently critcized by the mainstream psychology community for decades.
If you feel that way, why not just go for a scientifically-developed personality test like the Big 5? It seems to me that there's an alternative that is real, but there's an almost astrological appeal to Myers-Briggs because (not in spite of) it is opaque.
This is so poorly thought out. I really don't get why some people can't seem to tell the difference between things like MBTIs and astrological signs/zodiacs/horoscopes in terms of their potential to classify people in a meaningful way...
One is an arbitrary mapping of a person's date of birth to an set of traits and prophesies.
The other is a brief summary of a person's personality/behavioral inclinations based on a survey of that person's stated behavior and inclinations. When you say MBTI can be "just as arbitrary," what you're claiming is that it might be true that there is zero correlation between how any individual person of a given personality type answers any of the 93 MBTI questions. Sure, there is variation in people's self-assessments (and personalities for that matter, but let's ignore that for the moment) over time, but it wouldn't be "just as arbitrary" unless it had no correlation at all with basically anything about the person. I find that claim to be completely implausible.
The only way it could be true that it is meaningless is if upon repeated testings, knowing a person's formerly reported MBTI provided no insight at all into what MBTIs are more likely than for the average person in subsequent testings. That's certainly not the case that's been found in the research, so at the very least, it provides insight into what a person thinks that they are like.
Even if it were the case that all the MBTIs are only related to positive traits (which isn't true), the idea that it is meaningless is just nonsense.
> I really don't get why some people can't seem to tell the difference between things like MBTIs and astrological signs/zodiacs/horoscopes
Then let me try to help clarify. MBTI has no predictive power ("I'm an INTP, so... ?") and is not falsifiable. Those are the delineators between science and pseudoscience, so that's why I bucket it with astrology.
That proves what? If you want to argue that people's MBTI fluctuates too wildly to be meaningful, the proper question is whether there's any information gain from knowing a person's previous MBTI results for subsequent tests, not whether it is exactly the same. And the answer to that is yes. If you know I scored INTP on my last test, am I equally likely to score say ESFJ on a subsequent test as opposed to INTP or something closer to it (there are four dimensions after all) than a randomly selected person? Nope.
If I ask you what your weight and height is today, it's indicative of what your weight and height will be a year from now even if the number doesn't fit into exactly the same rounded range. Doesn't mean weight and height are meaningless if the answers change classifications a bit.
Some people may score same results for the entire life, just as some unlucky molecula of oxygen can stay in same cubical centimeter of the room for a long time. Statistically it's possible. But it does not matter, when you need predictions for the entire ensemble. If real predictive power of MBTI is low, if the cost of mistake is high (e.g. when you do not hire a star because of this test or when you promote to management position a guy with promising test score), then this typology does not make sense and must be avoided. Since there's no scientific proof of predictive power of this theory, then it's garbage.
> whether there's any information gain from knowing a person's previous MBTI results for subsequent tests
That doesn't seem like the proper question. Specifically, it works only to predict future MBTI results, not anything further. That's fine for height and weight because those values are robust to small/moderate changes in value.
MBTI already has low predictive power about real-world content, and high sensitivity to change (on the margins; it also suffers from applying a clustered model to non-clustered data). So if retest reliability is anything less than excellent, I worry that our predictive power has been almost totally destroyed.
To provide a new analogy, this is like variance in number of fingers. The significance of 11 vs 10 vs 9 isn't proportional to magnitude, so we wouldn't accept "small" counting errors.
None of that says that "I'm an INTP" is meaningless, but I suspect that MBTI is no better, or even worse, than non-formalized personality summaries.
Essentially: Accuracy is not precision; precision is not accuracy.
(Of course, MTBI is neither accurate nor precise. It is not accurate because it does not provide us any useful information about personality. It is not precise because test results vary wildly.)
You're conflating two things here - the instrument, which is the survey, and the data it is measuring - the MBTI. Even if we assume the MBTI itself is accurate - that is, it is possible to categorize the entire human race into 16 distinct personality categories, the fluctuating survey results indicate that the instrument used to measure it is wildly imprecise, and using it to make any sort of important decision is irresponsible.
I was talking with my friend pretty extensively about personality recently. One way we came to view MBTI was as a clustering on 4 axes. We came away with an understanding that the letters don't mean much without a quantifier for each axis. For instance, my results have been consistent for a long time, but hers jumped around a lot and we realized she was probably on the borderline of the classifier on several dimensions while I was probably in a corner.
That said there are other criticisms, for instance: Are thinking and feeling really an axis or are they two independent traits? Are there other useful axes not included?
While I sort of cringe at the idea of using this for assigning people jobs, there area few people in my life that fit some of the type narratives fairly well and it helped me understand their motivations a bit better, which did legitimately help my relationships with them.
With all due respect your analogy with weight and height is a bad analogy.
A much better analogy would be blood sugar level. For many healthy people its sorta constant-ish. The fact that its not nearly constant for a subset of people doesn't prove the test is therefore worthless. It just proves some people have untreated diabetes. The test is not worthless because it can be used in diabetes screenings, unless the point of the test was to tap people like maple syrup trees or something really weird like that.
A major problem with the test is we know people are not terribly good at self introspection, we're all above average drivers and lovers and thinkers, all of us. I am good enough at self introspection to tell I'm pretty well introverted, yet I can imagine someone not so observant or self aware or perhaps neurotic about the whole topic, getting a fairly random score. Or I'm bad enough at self introspection to not realize I'm no good at it at all, and I'm actually a closet extrovert, although I find that rather unlikely (although I would, wouldn't I, if I failed at introspection).
In that way as a secondary measurement I'd propose theoretically that the wider the variation in test results, the worse the person would score in some kind of self introspection ability test. It seems a reasonable hypothesis. You'd need correction factors to deal with people having diagnosed or undiagnosed swings in brain neurotransmitters or use of addictive substances (including sugar and caffeine). But it could be run as a study.
If say some person knows two people and that one tested as INTP and other as ESFJ and doesn't know for a fact who had which test results. Are you really sure they won't have better than even odds at figuring out which is which based on their interactions with the people that don't involve asking for their MBTI test results? If so, based on what study? If you can't demonstrate that, on what do you base that it has no predictive power?
By "entirely different" you mean not the exact same classification or a classification independent of the previous classification? If the latter, the evidence does not support you.
You bring up an interesting case I think even you failed to consider:
Since mbti essentially neuters it's own usefulness in the "round those percentages down to binary" stage, you could end up with a situation where an INTP and an ESFJ have only an 8% total difference in mbti-measured personality between them.
Oh absolutely. In fact I think there are those situations. My argument isn't that MBTI is effective in all individual cases to gauge much about them. My argument is that the ineffectiveness of MBTI at providing useful information to people on average has not been established. It's not been well researched in the first place and the research I've seen has been quite awful in their setup and analysis.
The question isn't whether people who are in the middle of each criteria exist and could easily swap classifications to their polar opposite. The question is what percentage of people would do that and whether it's high enough that there's too little signal to noise to extract any meaningful information out of the classification system.
Well, since we know that 50% of people score different types upon retaking the test, that should be enough to identify the prevalence of these problem.
As for signal-to-noise, mbti is a useful tool for measuring the traits it measures, it just, for some reason, cuts the signal in half by removing the percentage from the label.
Without the percentages, you can never assume a persons traits don't hover at that middle ground. And thus, can never assume any part of their label is accurate.
If the occurrence of these hover cases were more like <4%, I'd be more inclined to agree with its usefulness, but as it is right now, the 4bit label, on its own, is just noise.
If 50% of people score the exact same type upon retaking the test, I consider that great evidence that there is relatively stable information in the indicator. As a baseline, remember that if the distribution of results was uniform, a null model would expect something on the order of 6.25% if the noise really drowned out all the signal.
absolutely agree with 0xfffafaCrash on this, just because a measure is imperfect and has varying levels of validity depending on the person doesn't mean it has no signal.
i'm pretty sure someone who has gotten INTP every single test in his life will behave differently on average than someone who has always gotten ESFJ
As an anecdote, I was able to predict my wife's results on the test, down to how strong her leanings were in each category.
I think its a mildly useful categorization which allows a simpler and more coarse view of personality than the full spectrum of data would normally allow.
MBTI is a subjective categorization. Astrology is more like your DNA. You're born with a specific set pattern. Just like we don't understand what most of our genetic patterns mean, we don't understand what most of our astrological patterns mean.
There are no data to support the magical thinking of astrology. You are unlikely to find supporters here for your assertions of pre-enlightenment pseudo science
That's meaningless unless you confirm that their fitness for that task was actually correlated to their MTBI, e.g. by mixing those "fit" and "unfit" (based on MTBI) on the same task and comparing their performance. I'm pretty sure most companies don't do this. They just assume MTBI has predictive power and use it anyway since it gives them something to go on besides gut instinct.
Well, I know for sure that a person with an INTJ personality type is not suited for marketing and sales (statistically speaking of course). Would you claim otherwise?
Yes I would. Given the inconsistency of results that the Myers-Briggs test outputs for individuals, the personality of that person who tested as an INTJ could be far from it normally.
Furthermore, your willingness to buy into the narrative (and others' willingness to also believe it) that by categorizing certain people into stereotypes and assuming that most of these people tend to excel at a particular set of tasks is most likely what limits them from excelling at tasks that lie outside of their respective sets just as much as their true predisposition to not excelling at them.
Because it is very hard for a test not to have predictive power.
For example, companies fruitfully extract predictive power from whether a user clicked a link or not. Facebook extracts predictive power from whether users like videos, et cetera. So why shouldn't an elaborate test that was developed to have meaning, not have any predictive power?
The fact that (some) companies may use it to test if a person is fit for certain tasks doesn't mean that it really indicates whether a person is fit for certain tasks.
Let me devise a test. The test is just "are you a man or a woman?".
Does this have predictive power? Yes. If I needed somebody to take care of small children, would this test be useful? Yes of course. If I had to pick people blindly for this task, except for the results of this test, then this test would be very useful. Now, MBTI is more sophisticated than this simple test. So to say that it has no predictive power is just silly.
According to your logic, sophistication implies better predictive power. You completely ignore the fact that someone could devise a very elaborate system for judging e.g. fitness for a certain job, make very good assumptions and work very hard and still achieve poor predictive power.
Strictly speaking you are right, my logic was flawed (hidden assumption). But let's stick with the orignal issue here, which is whether the test is predictive.
Yes, but the point I'm trying to make is that the claim that any test has zero predicitive power is actually pretty bold.
For example, the simple test of whether a user clicks a certain link or not already has predicitive power (companies are using this, fruitfully). So a more sophisticated test like MBTI certainly has some predictive power.
A lot of Israeli companies use handwriting tests in their hiring decisions. Don't ask me why, it's a meme that has hung on there for some reason. Does that mean graphology has predictive power? After all, companies are using it!
Of course not. All the companies are simply wrong. They're falling for management/hiring fads, or relying on old superstitions. This happens all the time. "Companies are using it" says nothing about whether it's actually reliable.
Specifically, many studies and meta-studies have failed to show correlation between MBTI results and job performance. Here is one such summary: http://www.opd.net/abstracts5.html
You're saying that, because companies use it to test employees, that means it has predictive power? Or is it that companies BELIEVE it has predictive power, so companies use it?
That kind of makes sense, in a kafkan way, in a society so full of preparatory courses that will teach you how to do a test (instead of the contents of the test), or how to perform in interviews.
I suppose that demonstrates that MBTI had predictive power as to whether one will be hired by one of those companies, but it doesn't demonstrate anything beyond that.
When I talk about external validity, what I mean is that the MBTI does not predict how people actually behave. What it says about you, and what you actually are, do not line up often enough or non-trivially enough for it to be valuable.
The problem is not variation over time - that's fine. The problem is that when someone gets a result, that result doesn't say what it claims to about them. It's similar to astrology because while it has a series of well-defined rules for making a decision, that decision does not reflect reality. It is therefore effectively arbitrary.
Both MBTI and astrology are internally valid - that is, the same person will get the same or similar results the majority of the time. That doesn't mean they mean anything.
Do you have any serious evidence that shows that it doesn't have external validity?
If say some person knows two people and that one tested as INTP and the other as ESFJ and this person doesn't know for a fact who had which test results. Are you really sure they won't have better than even odds at figuring out which is which based on their interactions with the people that don't involve asking for their MBTI test results? If so, based on what study?
It's clear I wouldn't be able to tell them apart based on their birthday (unless they were super young or something), but it's not at all clear that it's the case for MBTI.
That's not how science works. The burden is not on me to prove MBTI does not have external validity, the burden is on the MBTI to prove it does have it. You have the chain of cause and effect backwards.
If you say "the sky is green," it's not my job to prove to you it's not. It's your job to prove it is. You're the one making the claim.
But here is a (more politely worded than I) paper on the MBTI's ineffectiveness for your perusal: http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... - simply googling "mbti external validity" will also give you plenty of explanation. I also recommend looking at the many studies that review cites, since its whole purpose is amassing information on whether the MBTI is effective.
I'm a scientist, so I kind of know how science works.
There's a difference between saying the extent of something's effectiveness hasn't been established by existing research and saying that it is ineffective. I've read the publication you are linking to before and it is saying the latter without the evidence necessary to back up the claim.
I'm sorry, but I don't believe you. You are lacking a basic understanding of how the research process works in social sciences.
I don't want to be "credentials guy," but I have a degree in cognitive science and I've conducted human subjects research. What you are saying is simply wrong.
That publication cites dozens of studies to back up its claims. Are you suggesting they are all invalid? If so, why?
Did you read the same linked article I did? There were not cites to "dozens of studies;" rather, there were quotes from the Guardian and something called Skeptoid, plus a quoted but uncited "researcher."
Combined with the fact that this is basically a listicle ("quoticle?") clickbait from a mid/low-brow popsci website, with no analysis or synthesis, and you can pretty much throw TFA away, regardless of your side of what's shaping up to be a religious war here on HN.
Apologies, I missed that. The review paper you linked was indeed deeply researched and had a good synthesis of what it discussed. Decided not a pop Sci listicle :)
Science works another way. You have to prove that the theory works, not that it does not work (no sense in asking for evidence of that). Your personal observation does not matter if it's not confirmed by others, so for this theory to be confirmed, a) it shall be falsifiable, b) there shall be a reliable proof, c) there shall be independent confirmation, d) other possible explanations of observed results must be considered and rejected
> Do you have any serious evidence that shows that it doesn't have external validity?
I can't prove a negative, all that a study can do is say "no results observed", but there's plenty of that. From the researcher cited in the article: "Many very specific predictions about the MBTI have not been confirmed or have been proved wrong." "Finally, there is no evidence that the MBTI measures anything of value."
This aligns with all of the other at-all-convincing research I've seen on MBTI: it assigned binary distributions to normally distributed data, and has very low predictive power. The majority of people will be near the middle of those distributions, where MBTI is at its least useful.
Further, I think your example is unfair: MBTI is a one-way function. I can meet people and anticipate their scores to with 1-2 errors (a huge margin, but we talk like it's 'close'!) I can't go from an MBTI score to useful predictions about the person though, because it's so massively information-destroying. Even on the things it purports to measure, the normal-to-binary problem means that it has awful predictive power. MBTI defines a somewhat-consistent function from people to letters, but since it's an arbitrary clustering system it doesn't actually allow new predictions or efficiently compress information about people.
So yes, I could probably tell some people apart by MBTI, but you could also assemble 10 different ESFJ's who are more dissimilar than the ESFJ and the INTP. It's like a compression algorithm that can't be reversed, and about as useful.
I don't disagree with the fact that it's not necessarily super effective because the distributions of personalities of people are not bimodal, as would be ideal for this simplistic sort of classification. It's also unlikely to be supremely effective at clustering in that way because the design of the metric wasn't really data driven in any systemic way. It's not even like someone used principal component analysis to really establish that the four classifiers are reasonably orthogonal. It's probably not super obvious/trivial to find human language-friendly orthogonal aspects of personality that are each bimodal, but I imagine the surveys could be improved informed by better data science.
It's certainly a compression algorithm, as are all classification based metrics based on answers to multiple questions, and I'm not arguing it's the most effective one around. However I think before making claims like it has no "external validity" the degree to which it might have it should actually be tested with reasonable methodology and I'm offering something that can absolutely be tested scientifically. There's nothing impossible about having some people take the test and having others who know them try to classify them without the results and see how well the two coincide. It's also possible to evaluate the degree to which people can decompress the data. You can set it up where people have equal time spent with two people of each MBTI and see how well they can guess their answers to the original survey questions with additional knowledge of the MBTI as opposed to without it. It won't establish an upperbound for how useful an MBTI is but it will help gauge a lower bound and I'm pretty confident the lower bound will be higher than that of a zodiac.
I imagine we can design a better classification, probably with even the same survey questions, but just because a metric wasn't well-designed doesn't mean the information it provides is meaningless.
This is by far the clearest methodological explanation of the problem so far from someone who understands statistics and the problems of empirical research. Thank you. It's amazing how many people are too wedded to the truthiness of it, and are unable to let go of something they did once and believed because it was plausible.
I believe the "arbitrary zodiac" claim is made toward people that attempt to extrapolate behavior out of mbti types. For example,
"INFJs are strong leaders" is as arbitrary as saying "aquarius's are strong leaders"
The problem i, and many other people find with the mbti is that most of its users, and even scientific apologists, can't help but fall into the trap of categorizing people into perceived behavioral trends based on their types, which is at best, scientifically invalid, and at worse, harmful.
To be fair, the comparison to horoscopes was in a very specific context: the results are presented in general terms that people will be more likely to self-identify with. That particular excerpt doesn't really say much about the predictive power of MBTIs, aside from pointing to a study that suggests that the predictive power doesn't really matter when individuals assess their own results.
Of course other parts of the article talk about the predictive power of the personality test. On the other hand, those excerpts don't talk about horoscopes.
You are correct, but I predict you will not have much success arguing this point in this forum. Hacker News already made up its mind that psychological tests don't predict anything.
>> a brief summary of a person's personality/behavioral inclinations based on a survey of that person's stated behavior and inclinations.
I'm really a very nice person. I'm magnanimous, full of goodwill and compassion and everyone I meet immediately likes me. I am intelligent and brave and very gregarious. I am the best person to be around when you need a shoulder to cry on because I have a deep understanding of human nature, thanks to my very high emotional intelligence.
That is the problem with taking into account people's stated behaviour and inclinations.
I hear this and I'm a huge man of Science, but I can't ignore the similarities I have with my designated type ISTP and the lack of with the other types. Very interesting either way.
The point of these IMO, isn't to pigeonhole people, it's for many practical reasons:
- Engender some self awareness. It's astonishing how many people lack critical self-awareness about how they approach problems , handle change, communicate with others, or deal with their emotions. MBTI might be nonsense or unverifiable but for many people it's their first exposure to any written form of objective introspection. The belief that these are immutable traits somehow isn't usually dwelled on.
- Help team members recognize that there are different styles/preferences of thinking and reasoning. You'd be amazed how many inter-office conflicts get resolved just through spending time getting to know one another. MBTI or HBDI workshops (not just the test) are helpful for this
On a final note, there is a fairly popular executive MBA program where I took a one week survey course on leadership about a decade ago. In both this course and the program, they were pretty stoked about the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrmann_Brain_Dominance_Ins...
With the hope it was a bit more rooted in science than MBTI. It focuses more on cognitive preferences than on personality.
For me, I appreciated obtaining and knowing my MBTI result for exactly this self-awareness. It allowed me to recognize in myself when certain behaviors and patterns were occurring, and how others might perceive me in those moments. Scientific or not, having a way to codify my personal introspection helped me in many ways career-wise.
Agree completely. Furthermore, the article falsely states that the MBTI asserts people are either 100% introvert or 100% extrovert or whatever other letter. Every time I've been exposed to any sort of MBTI material, it's been very clear that the individual letters are a continuum. Some people fall further out along the continuum than others for each letter pair. The goal is not to pigeon-hole people, but to provide a framework for discussing why people approach situations or react the way they do.
We recently took the Kolbe Index test and I found it WAY more useful than the Myers-Briggs. It's much more intuitive and the results, at least to me, seemed to be much easier to relate to. It's a great process to put higher level execs and team members to learn how best to draw from their strengths and weaknesses.
Except for what you put into it. The conceptualization of meaning as being located only in quantifiable scientific measurement is a denigration to the immense benefits and resilience a person can derived from the places they choose to locate meaning, rather than only the places that any formalized worldview insists are the acceptable ones.
I've found that Meyers Briggs feels accurate to people whose classifications don't fall right on the margin. If two of the letters fall close to the margin, parts of the description will feel a bit inaccurate.
In my opinion, the Meyers Briggs is useful mainly because it can help people become more self-aware and more empathetic toward others.
I've observed that in a group of 15 people who just got their Meyers Briggs results, several usually think it was uncannily accurate, and a few are immediately defensive because the result does not jive with their self-perception (usually because the personality type is described as similar to some unsavory characters from history). When I read articles criticizing Meyers Briggs, I always assume it was written by one of these people.
If you are in a relationship, one interesting game to play with your significant other is to take the Meyers Briggs test and then read some of the stuff that has been written about relationship compatibility through the Meyers Briggs lens. I've found it to be quite accurate for many couples I know. There is also a very amusing book called Please Understand me II which has detailed write-ups about the characteristics of each type. It's great for parties to read out loud everyone's results over a glass of wine.
IMHO Personality tests are useful mainly to encourage self-awareness, introspection and empathy. As a Meyers Briggs ENTP I find the descriptions of an ENTP personality flattering and desirable. I suspect nearly any type would find their own type description equally flattering and desirable.
The problem here is that since the MBTI only collects your own perceptions, it is only as accurate as your own perceptions--it isn't going to tell you anything you don't already think. There's some value in bringing what you think of yourself into your conscious awareness, but I don't think that can be represented as increasing self-awareness--it only can cause you to think what you already think. There's even some risk that it may reinforce incorrect ideas you may have about yourself.
> As a Meyers Briggs ENTP I find the descriptions of an ENTP personality flattering and desirable.
Of course, they're your descriptions and therefore they're biased. (Incidentally, I'm an ENTP too).
> it isn't going to tell you anything you don't already think.
Well, if you take a 2000 word write-up about your own type, there may be some thought-provoking generalizations either about your own type or about patterns that are consistent when people of different types interact... things which derive from what you believed about yourself but are consequences of the MBTI's generalizations about human interactions.
But I agree, it would be interesting to incorporate the sort of information in the MBTI along with less subjective metrics and come up with a more rich analysis.
> Well, if you take a 2000 word write-up about your own type, there may be some thought-provoking generalizations either about your own type or about patterns that are consistent when people of different types interact... things which derive from what you believed about yourself but are consequences of the MBTI's generalizations about human interactions.
Right, but how many of those generalizations are actually verified? The specifics are studied to be consistent, but there are very few generalizations backed up by data.
I don't know whether they are verified. Not sure how much it matters though, if the goal is to foster self-understanding and communication between people with different personalities. Obviously it would be great if there were research offering a more robust version of all of that.
That comment was intended as a joke. No, I do not. Although I think I'd view MBTI less favorably if it said I had the same personality type as a variety of dictators, etc.
> I've found that Meyers Briggs feels accurate to people whose classifications don't fall right on the margin. If two of the letters fall close to the margin, parts of the description will feel a bit inaccurate.
Unfortunately, the traits investigated by the MBTI seem to be normally distributed. So as true as this is, it still means that people who are decisively placed on all four axes are the exception rather than the rule.
True, in my case I'm close to the P/J line and the E/I line, so there are aspects of the ENTJ, INTJ, and INTP that ring true to me, but in spite of that the ENTP description tends to feel more accurate.
Nonetheless, one meets a lot of ENTJs and INTPs and understanding some of the subtle differences between those and ENTP has helped me understand my differences and similarities with those people better.
In my opinion, the Meyers Briggs is useful mainly because it can help people become more self-aware and more empathetic toward others.
Could this be the placebo effect? I once read a comment, that all self-help methods are successful, simply because they make you self conscious. The personality test gives the impression of being a carefully developed machine that can peer into your soul. Does it need to be real, in order to be useful?
I've observed that in a group of 15 people who just got their Meyers Briggs results, several usually think it was uncannily accurate, and a few are immediately defensive because the result does not jive with their self-perception (usually because the personality type is described as similar to some unsavory characters from history). When I read articles criticizing Meyers Briggs, I always assume it was written by one of these people.
But isn't that an argumentum ad hominem? At the very least, it's a good reason why an individual's personal impression of the results is a poor source of validation. The ones who think it's accurate could be wrong too.
On the other hand, in a workplace situation, the defensive ones are simply not thinking tactically.
> On the other hand, in a workplace situation, the defensive ones are simply not thinking tactically.
Haha absolutely true. It puzzles me that anyone would react that way.
Your points are totally valid. For me, the interesting part was reading my own results and thinking about my reaction to them, and watching people I know pretty well reading and reacting to theirs.
Also, the way the results are framed teases apart some of the more "identity-oriented" aspects of peoples' personalities and validates them as legitimate rather than (perhaps) annoying quirks. I think this can lead to empathy.
So I don't really think it matters how psychologically real the assessment is, so long as it's interesting, relatively repeatable, and useful in the sense I mentioned. Just my opinion though. In the workplace I've used it before alongside a few other metrics (like DISC and one other private one) as part of a fun "learn about each other" exercise. I would not use it for hiring decisions or as part of any kind of official HR oriented policy.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadyou're all idiots.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365294
I've never bought into the test. IMO, it's much too simplistic to describe human behavior. People don't fit cleanly into one of just a few categories.
The classification was purely validated by Isabel Briggs Myers' own free interpretation of what a particular trait should be.
That's self-deception, not science.
There's nothing wrong in trying to build an understanding of personalities but making things up just because you think your intuition is all you need to build theories, well, that doesn't inspire much confidence.
The Myers-Briggs Test smells like science -it has codes and categories!- but like most pseudo-sciences, no-one has really been interested in validating the assumptions with actual data.
Pseudo-Psychology is rife with these wishful-thinking theories that sound kind of right but have no solid data to support them.
Not bashing Psychology, I think it's a hugely interesting field, but the science behind a lot of it still remains fishy.
This is like saying that somebody who claimed that 1+1=2 is wrong because they came up with the left hand side of the equation themselves.
Yes, the MBTI is arbitrary to a large extent, but that does not make it meaningless.
https://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2009/08/fascinating-...
he original developers of the MMPI questionnaire went about choosing their "normal" control group. They compared test answers from patients in hospitals for the mentally ill with answers from people working in and visiting those hospitals.
Who’s to say those workers and visitors were mentally healthy?
It's well known that certain kinds of mentally ill people are drawn to working in the mental health industry. I know a psychiatrist who's a narcissist, and a psychiatric nurse who's probably BPD or NPD.
Bootstrapping a test from a hand-picked set of people is just bad methodology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
Correlations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi... 0.44 / -0.49 is not correlation.
Thanks!
I'm no statistician, but "is approximately as valid" looks to be overselling the situation.
Also correlation is a linear operator which is not particularly sensitive to anything nonlinear. Use a good statistical test instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
That said, I don't think it's quite true that "The MBTI is approximately as valid as the Big 5". It seems to me that the Big 5 is a strict improvement on the MBTI. First, the discrete nature of the MBTI incorrectly suggests that the distributions are bimodal, when I don't think anyone thinks that's true. Second, I'm willing to bet that even if we just concentrate on the 4 factors of the Big 5 that correlate with the (non-discrete version of the) MBTI factors, we'd find significantly higher validity for the former, if only because there have been many more serious scientists studying and refining it over many years.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-myers-briggs-pe... Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
You're describing salesmanship and/or popularizing techniques, not scientific validity.
If you are a logical positivist and scientific realist you'll never be able to grok this. As a utilitarian I understand that science is the process of making something that does something you want done.
That's not entirely true. The final answer that people wear as a badge is binary, but the result is calculated as a percentage, and usually presented to the test-taker as a percentage.
For a real personality exam with actual use in psych research, check out the Five Factor metric.
More articles
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/go...
Edit: http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/2014/09/29/the-mysteri...
And the Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/mar/...
It's marginally analogous to the Big Five personality traits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits - this is the personality paradigm recognized by academia), it just leaves out the tendency to experience negative emotions (probably because neuroticism is a negative thing, and businesses like their HR experiences and training to be as positive and feel-good as the bottom line allows.)
It is unfortunate that people like the false dichotomies and the Forer effect (the generic but positive descriptions that apply to just about everybody.)
I'm sure the Myers Briggs people would be selling the Big Five if they thought they could copyright it.
Everyone is some range of introverted to extroverted, for example. It's their preference, such as the flavor of ice cream they like. It can change often, under circumstances, or even not be present, of course. It's not set in stone; it's just a preference. It doesn't define you; you define it.
Myers-Briggs is unfortunate in that it assigns that preference as letter. You like Chocolate. You're a C. There are some who have no problem with this sort of designation. They love chocolate always and in every circumstance. Many, however, are not one letter, and so it's a poor test.
The point is not the letter. The point is asking yourself the question: do you feel more energized after a dinner party or after a quiet day alone? The point is to know, not just what flavors your prefer usually, but what situations (in this case) you prefer. And why not know that about yourself?
The scales are unsound. They actively direct people away from curiosity in discovering other structures which are less wrong.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now%2C_Discover_Your_Strengths
By forcing people to think in these characteristics to evaluate someone it makes it easier to have a common vocabulary and to predict stuff along those lines
Sadly, these tests are misused by well-meaning HR departments who are in no position, as amateur psychologists, to make _any_ decisions based personality test results.
https://hoozyu.com https://expresso.elaura.com
Disclaimer: I work for Birkman
If you've never heard of it, I recommend watching the video before you Google anything. It's only a short video (less than 4 minutes) and is a brilliant demonstration.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bCjzLij54k
This is categorically false. Myers Briggs results are quite literally reported on a spectrum of 100 I - 0 - E 100, with your position on the spectrum shown. The 4 letter rollup is exactly that: a summary rollup of your test results.
So, no, she was not a doofus.
I've been subjected to "DiSC" profiling at a previous employer. After taking the test we were subjected to a 3 hour session where we slowly discovered and learned about our unique profile. The best part was I compared my strengths and weaknesses with someone who had an "opposite" personality and they were pretty close to identical.
Granted there is a lot to be gained by getting a group of people in a room to talk about the different ways they interact with the world and how they go about solving problems. However, as soon as you start providing formulas for how to interact with people my bull shit detector goes off.
I don't think it's necessary to precisely nail a specific set of quanta, but simply to avoid the symbols that are associated with negative stereotypes such as introverted, obstinate, or lazy. When I had to take one of these kinds of tests, I just put myself into a mind set of being outgoing, cheerful, agreeable, diligent, etc.
Naturally most people would have at least an X or two, but it would be much more useful if people didn't have to advertise an F or T if it didn't really matter for describing them.
Though it probably wouldn't have caught on. Who wants to be the XXXX in a situation.
For me, Myers-Briggs tends to be little more than a starting point for discussing the finer parts of my own personality, values, and perspectives. I find that those who are equally interested in Myers-Briggs share similar values in self-understanding, thus a starting point for some interesting discussion.
In that same spirit alcohol is a pretty great social lubricant. A little bit of booze lowers people's inhibitions enough to have fun conversations.
Depending on where you are from I suppose.
Edit: I believe "pretense" was the incantation you were after.
It's not scientific, it's totally based in reason. It's reasonable to deny global warming because winters are getting colder than ever. It's not reasonable to deny climate change because winters are getting colder than ever.
There's nothing wrong with someone drawing a conclusion from their personal experience, that's going to be full of emotion, opinion and hopefully some logic.
I get your concern, but the same folks who make hiring decisions based on Myers Briggs will tell you angels were watching over them when they narrowly avoided a car crash. Or their relative visited them a month after they passed away. it's mostly benign. When it's not benign, they're unreasonable. Only then is it possibly worth the effort to persuade them to be a bit more rational.
But, yes. I mean 'rhetorically useful' or 'a social hack'
Because those mentioned deal with random events, where X and Y are uncorrelated (being X a date of birth or card drawn from Tarot and Y is some personality characteristic)
MB do ask you questions from which you can predict - to some degree - some outcomes (how do you think a strong Extrovert changes from a strong Introvert)?
Just don't do something stupid like "this job requires a INTJ only" or think that the distribution is bimodal or that their behaviour will follow a strict pattern.
(It's not like the rest of "behavioral science" can make repeatable predictions and reproduce papers compared to other scientific branches)
A nuanced discussion would probably accept that these are continuous axes, but instead they get treated as clusters, distorting even casual analysis.
The core of the theory is to highlight natural preferences in the way we use cognitive functions. It's a pretty good and useful model. It's not a definite one though, like all the models we have it's meant to be improved and replaced over the years (like in physics).
99% of the critics about MBTI are focusing on the tests (which I agree are not accurate) and the authors don't understand the theory behind it - which is the really useful part. (Carl Jung's work, cognitive functions preferences, etc)
I, for one, am totally alright with MBTI-style questions as a tool for analysis/introspection. RibbonFarm has some great writing about identifying 'dominant' cognitive functions based on magnitude data from MBTI.
Strictly accurate? No. A useful framework for planning? Absolutely.
MBTI is also an organization, though. It charges money for training, issues education materials, and gives trainers strict guidelines on what assessments are ok to make. That system is hideously inaccurate and deserves criticism. It asserts that the test is accurate to reality, that the personality types are 'opposed', and that people are bimodal on the four axes. Many of those claims explicitly contradict the Jungian theories that inspired them.
So it's easy to overreach when criticizing the MB model, and most articles like this aren't clear about their target. But the actual MBTI organization - which is still popular with big companies in its original form - is wrong in terms of its own theoretical foundations, defended with bad data, and deserves extensive criticism.
Further, it says nothing about the fluctuations in magnitude over time, some days 'E' might be more important than 'I' and it really can swap on other days. Or even how accurately people self report.
So, if you are 'strongly' I and weakly P that does not change the order to show P is more dominate over J than I is over E. AKA, magnitude is literally not part of the test.
Which, of course, means that we're abandoning the actual test to get a substantive measurement.
When discussing the results as a class, the strength of a type seemed to correlate reasonably with behavior, and explain more than the clusters on their own, eg, all the strong NPs had similar epistemological views and styles, fading towards an SJ style as the scores people had changed.
What a lot of people seem to forget, though, is the MBTI doesn't account for effects from disorders only healthy variation and it's about who you are right now, not who you are permanently. People vary over time.
e.g. INFP leads with a primary Introverted Feeling (judging), an auxiliary Extroverted Intuition (perceiving), then Introverted Sensing, and finally Extroverted Feeling.
Some of the better tests will help identify these cognitive processes and then attempt to find the best fitting type based on them. You can read more about the cognitive functions here: http://www.cognitiveprocesses.com/Cognitive-Functions/index....
It's too bad that so many people see the types as diametrically opposed (e.g. Feeling vs Thinking -- you do both!)
As far as I understood the test, it results in your brain's _dominant_ mode on four axes. So you are either predominantly introverted or extraverted. There is nothing in the theory stating that you are introverted 100%, all the time.
I'm not suggesting that MBTI claims we're 100% E or I. I'm saying that it assigns binary distributions on those axes, which would make it meaningful to talk about "E dominant" and "I dominant" people. Every study I've seen of the actual data, though, says that these are normally distributed traits.
So there are some people with distinctive, meaningful dominant modes on these axes. But the bulk of the population is at the center of the distributions, where marginal differences are being talked about like high-significance bimodal results.
This isn't inevitably the case, but we live in a world where MBTI results are still being used to determine who's suited to which jobs. If you're hiring sales guys who are 51% extroverted and refusing ones who are 49% extroverted, that supposed binary distribution is misleading you badly.
So you'd get an I at less than 45%, an E at more than 55%, and an X if you were on the border.
Further, you said they were normally distributed, but didnt talk about the variance. It's possible that people who are just a little from the middle by % of population are meaningfully different than the average -- a quarter standard deviation could be a meaningful amount of change in the real world.
So your argument doesn't actually support your claim: with the inclusion of an X band, it's possible the gap between E and I is meaningful in real world situations. We can't know merely by knowing it's normally distributed, we need to analyze the standard deviation size versus the minimal meangingful difference in the real world.
Several instances I've seen of MBTI didn't offer X, but that's definitely an improvement. The one I got for high school career services actually crashed if you 'tied', because that hadn't been accounted for at all.
Without the X band, "normal distribution" is enough to say things are broken. It means that you're consistently dividing similar people while grouping dissimilar people, which isn't what I like in a cluster.
With the X band, SD becomes important and a wide distribution might provide good results. Anecdotally, this could match the high attention given to E/I versus F/T - high SD axes would be relevant to more people.
Having said that, I'm still skeptical of much of the MBTI literature. It definitely deals in bimodal distributions, asserting that these clusterings are features of the territory rather than the map. If the peak frequency is a value the test can't inform about, I think that still invalidates much of the literature even if the test has some predictive power.
While I get the criticism of those tests as poorly implemented pop-psych, it only seems fair to attack the MBTI itself as a concept if you criticize the actual written, send-in-and-evaluate official version. The version I took of that (which came with a ton of propaganda from the testing company) featured both an X band and numeric strength scores for each category. It also featured a lot more questions than the typical online free ones, and had redundant questions the way that standard psych evals do. So at least some of the "professional" MBTI people are providing that kind of test, even if their analysis is all about bimodals and nonsense.
> With the X band, SD becomes important and a wide distribution might provide good results. Anecdotally, this could match the high attention given to E/I versus F/T - high SD axes would be relevant to more people.
My main point was that the joint distribution increases the spread away from XXXX to things like XXFX or XNXX, where even if you're still near the exact middle, there's less people exactly at average, and so the test is more likely to relay at least one fact in one category about the test taker than any particular category is to say something useful.
So even though the test can't say anything about the hyperbox in the middle of the range, it is relatively small because getting a little way away from the exact center likely says something about at least one category, even if the majority still can't have anything useful said about them.
Think of it this way: assume that the test can't say anything about the middle 20% of people for a given trait, and that the traits are independent (ie, how you score on one has nothing to do with the others). The odds that you're XXXX is (0.2)^4 = 0.0016. So only ~1 in 500 people would get nothing out the MBTI, even though ~1 in 5 has at least one category with an X.
And that's assuming a relatively large X band. Drop the X band to 5%, and it's only ~1 in 200,000 that would get XXXX.
> Having said that, I'm still skeptical of much of the MBTI literature.
I threw out the marketing booklet mostly unread after the statistical nonsense of the first few pages was too much when I paid to take the professional version of the test in school.
The test is alright, but not great and modern data analysis can probably do a much better PCA than the MBTI is, but the company is outright moronic in what they say. And others can be much worse.
Amazingly, I've had arguments about this with folks. (probably E folks). They claimed that "it never changes", which is just patently untrue. Perhaps E folks don't introspect enough to re-evaluate their views on things? I know I tested different 5 years ago compared to when I took it 20 years ago.
I don't really see how you couldn't retest at least somewhat differently.
I think this is actually the most common experience. The data I've seen says that scores on all four 'axes' are normally distributed. So it's actually fairly exceptional to have strong, predictable positions for every letter; cutting a bunch of normal distributions down the middle means most of us are on a boundary.
And yes, it's probably those silly E folks saying they never change. God forbid we wake up tomorrow testing as E, we'll have a paradox on our hands.
The folks who have argued that point with me over the years all happened to be strong E. I'm talking perhaps 3-4 people over 20 years - not a huge number to go on, but it was the only consistent I saw (male/female/old/young/etc).
Me: "Wow, I took this a few years ago and was a moderate F, but now I'm a slight T".
Them: "That's just not possible. It doesn't work that way. You just don't remember what you had before. It doesn't change".
Me: "WTF??"
MBTI is a just-so story with a lot of marketing behind it.
The MBTI is mostly just useful in that it's one of the few things that actually sorts humans in a hyperdimensional way, which is really how we're best categorized.
We're all slight wobbles (well, statistically speaking) around the center of a like 20-100 dimension distribution.
MBTI is basically just PCA on that space in to a 4-dimensional one, and while we can argue how evenly its bucketing split the actual distribution of people (not ideally, but not terribly), or how much information was lost in that downcasting (a lot!), I think the basic premise of viewing people as a composite of slight differences across many dimensions is a useful viewpoint we don't normally engage in.
So if you could pick 16 LotR characters that form a hypercube of traits, then assigning LotR characters is the same as the MBTI. The problem is usually that LotR quizzes and the like are a) much smaller than that (4-8 characters) and b) not laid out in a hypercube (ie, there's not 4+ dimensions of wobble, there's 2 or 3).
My point wasn't to argue about how well they did that (not particularly), but rather that it's useful to approach issues of understanding personality in those terms at all. That's the real innovation of things like the MBTI: that we should analyze the distribution of personalities in terms of PCA, and that we should probably use a few components, rather than like 1 or 2.
Of course, we could do the actual analysis much better than the MBTI did.
When I first encountered M-B it rescued a sour relationship with an ISTJ boss who thought I wrote content-free status reports, where I thought I wrote well-summarized round-ups that avoided meaningless minutia. Later, the table was reversed when I had an ISTJ report who drowned me in more details than I could (or needed to) process. I used M-B to help us workout guidelines for talking with each other so that we were productive instead of both frustrated.
So M-B has been useful to me. But it should not be used for making hiring/placement decisions. I really see it as an information processing styles inventory and little more.
Results being independently reproducible is the foundation of science. Meyers-Briggs fails that simple metric.
But people take the test once, and then use the results for a long period of time. Guess what? At night, blood sugar level goes down. it's no longer X. And likewise with this test.
Same thing, here. I wouldn't put much stock into a single result on a single test, but I think there's some broader value to be gained by examining the trend, the fluctuations, and what you wind up as more often than not.
The only assertion I have to disprove here is that the test is "worthless".
On a more productive point, your post gave no evidence at all about why M-B is useful
Admittedly, the test is arbitrary in many ways, but you can't deny the questions -- about introversion, how logical, emotive, and judgmental you are, etc -- represent the subjective experience we have of others' personalities, even if the categories are incomplete, nonlinear, redundant, or transient.
As an individual (Taurus) thoroughly interested in astrology, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who tout astrology as a comprehensive personality test fail to understand what astrology attempts to identify. While the "value-add" is more subjective, I'm going to go ahead and say it's not as useless as this article claims. While I don't think anyone (especially employers) should rely heavily on astrology, I think it can provide a decent framework (or starting point) outlining basic facets of an individual's personality based on their own perspective. Though I often distrust individual claims about belonging a sign, given my interest in understanding myself and facets of my own personality, I enjoy discussing why a person may claim to be a part of a certain sign. For me, astrology tends to be little more than a starting point for discussing the finer parts of my own personality, values, and perspectives. I find that those who are equally interested in astrology share similar values in self-understanding, thus a starting point for some interesting discussion.
Your comment can be distilled to "it's fun to talk about".
Sure it does. I've met people who will say things like "My sun sign is Virgo, but my personality is dominated by my Sagittarius moon", and then later say something like "I'm going through Saturn return, no wonder Pisces is such an influence".
If you compare someone's self-view ("I'm an Aries!") with their behavior (definitely a Gemini), you can draw conclusions. It's standard practice in astrology.
e.g. later Wittgenstein, process relational, integral theory, chaos magic
If you disregard the people who claim astrology is prescriptive, and pay attention to only those aspects of it that describe tendencies - all the most convincing astrology nuts I've met do this - it can be quite... warming.
It's not clear to me how that's different.
Sure, you can choose your type by responding differently to the questions, or finding a "practitioner" who assigns a type you prefer, but the same applies to astrology: shop around until you hear what you want to here.
False. It's exactly the opposite, the label doesn't assign the traits, rather the traits create the label; if your traits change so does the label, it's nothing more than a description of who you are now according to your own answers to those traits questions. And it aids greatly in think about yourself and others and how people differ and exactly in what ways they can differ.
> It's not clear to me how that's different.
Then learn more.
I don't put faith in or know much about astrology, but I do know there are many different types and areas of astrology and not all of them have to do with telling you how to pick your lotto numbers tomorrow.
A lot of people talk about signs and astrology in terms of being able to read people and determine personality traits of others.
> don't put faith in or know much about astrology
You're right, you don't, so perhaps don't sit here and defend this pseudo-scientific nonsense that you know nothing about.
Misuse of a tool does not invalidate the tool.
No one's disputing that a useless tool can be misused. They're questioning the use of useless tools at all. They give the illusion of understanding to those not interested in evidence.
False.
> and MBTI has as much scientific validity and predictive value.
As it can be mapped directly to the big 5, this is also false.
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personalit...
It's impossible to describe personalities without implying value judgments.
I randomly took the first Google link found under 'Myers Briggs' and ended up here:
https://www.16personalities.com/intj-personality
'Ironically, it is often best for them to remain where they are comfortable – out of the spotlight...'
https://www.16personalities.com/infp-strengths-and-weaknesse...
'Too Idealistic – INFPs often take their idealism too far, setting themselves up for disappointment as, again and again, evil things happen in the world.'
MBTI is basically this: You have a set of observed traits, and from that set we can tell you other traits you likely have based on observing many others that share the same traits.
Or in other words... -Observe trait A -Observe trait B -Observe trait C -Extrapolate trait D -Extrapolate trait E
What those sites are doing is... -Observe trait A -Extrapolate traits C, M, Q, X, Z
I interpreted 'prescriptive' as making 'should' rather than 'is' statements.
Oh dear, there seems to be an epidemic of people's comparators not working. You might want to start small: try comparing two oranges, then an orange and an apple. Before long you'll be comparing supernovas to salamanders!
(Or perhaps you meant the rather less categorical "I think they're very different". I harp on this because I find "not remotely comparable" excessively dismissive. It's fine to disagree, just don't act like there's no possible way the other person might have a valid point)
Measuring Cholesterol is another one, since you can't actually change cholesterol via diet and it has no relation to heart disease either (source: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/panel-suggests-stop-warni... ). But the pharmaceutical industry still wants doctors to prescribe Statins and pours tons of money into advertising them to people and doctors, even though they're terrible for you and worthless.
It's troubling when industry grasps onto these measures and makes business models out of them. Wide spread acceptance of measures like these moves them out of the realm of homeopathy or astrology and into the realm of what people believe as relevant scientific measure. They benefit industry, but not the individual. Advertising allows that industry to continue to grow at the expense of good relevant data.
The episode talks about research showing how we can understand ourselves better as sets of behavior that we exhibit in different contexts, more than as having a single personality.
Put in simple words, you maybe introvert in some contexts and extrovert in others, and theses behaviors can change over time. You ARE not AN introvert, you exhibit introvert behaviors in context.
[1]: http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/482836315/the-person...
This sentence strikes me as odd, because subjectively, the one thing that shines through the most with people, even people I haven't seen in 20+ years, is a distinct (and possibly largely immutable) personality. In fact, a large part of why I was so shy growing up is because people's personalities were so "bright" that I felt intimidated. Not of course "bright" in a literal, measurable sense, but in an irrational qualitative sense. And therein lies the problem with trying to discuss it rationally.
To this day I perceive distinct personalities in every child and pet I encounter. Not sure if related, these exact same entities seem drawn to me for some reason. I have often heard a pet owner say "my pet has never acted this way before" around me (such as sitting in my lap when it has never done so with anyone).
I wonder if it simply reflects what I see in them. Anyway. My point is that the inability to discuss something rationally is not evidence for its nonexistence.
They claimed there's simply an absence of unambiguous evidence that it exists.
My argument is then that we will never have evidence that it exists because evidence is rational and objective and its very reality and/or value is trapped in the irrational subjective eye of the beholder.
Trying to boil it down into, say, patterns of neuron activations would be like trying to boil down or derive the "value reality" of the Mona Lisa by analyzing and cataloguing the light wavelengths reflecting off of it.
So what of the unmeasurables?
The metric system was developed in the 1800s and you can do a simple search to find tons of criticism on it.
Being tall or short is accounted for by BMI, as it's a component of BMI. So that is not a problem.
The actual problem with BMI is that it attempts to measure body composition, but it assumes that fat is the only variable component of body composition. It's not--muscle can also vary. So people with a lot of muscle mass can have a very high BMI even if they have very little fat.
However, in practice this isn't a problem--nobody looks at a body builder and says they're fat because they have a high BMI. It's obvious when a high BMI is caused by fat and when it's caused by muscle.
BMI is a pragmatic way to measure body composition, which is effective for estimating body composition when body composition isn't obvious, such as in the case of a body builder. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed, or has political reasons for saying otherwise.
This is not to disagree with your overall point--industry does grasp into measurements and make business models out of them. But in the case of BMI, political interests have become invested in discrediting the BMI measurement, not in overcrediting it.
However you don't need anything so complex for such a starting point. A classic demonstration that I saw was a large group of people who marked where they were on two lines. The first was how organized you were. The second was how extroverted you were. Based on this we divided into 4 groups, and began talking. It was surprising how much people in each group had in common. And how differently the groups behaved. The groups were:
Introverted and disorganized: Supporter. Good shoulder to cry on.
Introverted and organized: Analyst. They make good accountants.
Extroverted and disorganized: Promoter. High energy, lots of ideas, not a lot of carry through.
Extroverted and organized: Controller. They generally relate to, "My way or the highway."
I was in the Promoter quadrant. One of the things we had in common was that our spaces look like a tornado just tore through it, but please don't clean up because then we won't know where anything is. :-)
I would really doubt that it is zero, the relative position of the celestial bodies correlates with season. All sorts of human activities follow a yearly cycle, including birth rates and mortality rates. I have no doubt there is some correlation between astrological sign and personality.
I would take it further and say a good principle is that "everything is correlated with everything else", it is just a matter of the strength of the relationship. I will probably get downmodded for that, because it is in direct conflict the "null hypothesis" testing paradigm that has dominated data analysis for the last half century or so.
There's no evidence of this, so you should have doubts.
EG: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27310922 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25132151
I don't know much about astrology, but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right? From my understanding, it is basically a way of binning together sets of birthdays. There will probably be various artifacts and noise introduced by the binning process, but I am sure with large enough sample size you will see the correlation.
Then please kindly don't defend it.
but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right?
I have actually studied astrology. Serious astrologers loathe sun sign astrology.
> I don't know much about astrology,
Now we agree.
I assure you with large enough sample size you will find some correlations though.
I can correlations the drop in pirates with a rise in global temperature, so what... correlations don't mean a damn thing by themselves, that's just data-mining bias.
However there aren't correlations between those known correlations and the traits that astrology says that you should have. Therefore there is no known correlation between your astrological description and your personality. And yes, people have attempted to measure this.
'The author once had occasion to use 700 subjects in a study of publie opinion. After a factor analysis of the results, the factors were correlated with individual-difference variables such as amount of education, age, income, sex, and others. In looking at the results I was happy to find so many "significant" correlations (under the null-hypothesis model)-indeed, nearly all correlations were significant, including ones that made little sense. Of course, with an N of 700 correlations as large as .08 are "beyond the .05 level." Many of the "significant" correlations were of no theoretical or practical importance.' https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1960-nunnally.pdf
"One of the common experiences of research workers is the very high frequency with which significant results are obtained with large samples. Some years ago, the author had occasion to run a number of tests of significance on a battery of tests collected on about 60,000 subjects from all over the United States. Every test came out significant. Dividing the cards by such arbitrary criteria as east versus west of the Mississippi River, Maine versus the rest of the country, North versus South, etc., all produced significant differences in means. In some instances, the differences in the sample means were quite small, but nonetheless, the p values were all very low. Nunnally (1960) has reported a similar experience involving correlation coefficients on 700 subjects. Joseph Berkson (1938) made the observation almost 30 years ago in connection with chi-square" http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_PSY38...
"...it is regularly found that almost all correlations or differences between means are statistically significant. See, for example, the papers by Bakan [1] and Nunnally [8]. Data currently being analyzed by Dr. David Lykken and myself, derived from a huge sample of over 55,000 Minnesota high school seniors, reveal statistically significant relationships in 91% of pairwise associations among a congeries of 45 miscellaneous variables such as sex, birth order, religious preference, number of siblings, vocational choice, club membership, college choice, mother’s education, dancing, interest in woodworking, liking for school, and the like. The 9% of non-significant associations are heavily concentrated among a small minority of variables having dubious reliability, or involving arbitrary groupings of non-homogeneous or non-monotonic sub-categories. The majority of variables exhibited significant relationships with all but three of the others, often at a very high confidence level (p < 10–6)." http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...
For example what songs you like is tied to what media you watch which is tied to what politics you have. And most of that is tied to how liberal vs conservative you are.
It doesn't take many principal components to make most of the remaining correlations very small.
But correlations between astrological descriptions and personality start off small. So small that astrology is not a useful starting point to understanding people.
I never said it was. My problem is with the prevailing philosophy of doing statistical tests on whether there is exactly zero effect/correlation, ie testing for deviation from noise/chance. It is the most destructive idea ever pushed by mathematicians.
The main reason I don't think Myers-Briggs can be a true-ism is that each dimension is actually a spectrum. For example I am about 60% "I" (and thus 40% "E") so the various "I" true-isms only slightly factor on my personality.
As a tool, though, its utility remains doubtful. Its test-retest reliability is very low, meaning that, if you give the same person the test at two different times, you're likely to get two different results. This strongly suggests that, while the test might capture aspects of a person's personality, it's also functioning like a glorified mood ring. Without some way to separate those two aspects, its utility as an indicator of anything useful about any one individual is highly suspect.
One is an arbitrary mapping of a person's date of birth to an set of traits and prophesies.
The other is a brief summary of a person's personality/behavioral inclinations based on a survey of that person's stated behavior and inclinations. When you say MBTI can be "just as arbitrary," what you're claiming is that it might be true that there is zero correlation between how any individual person of a given personality type answers any of the 93 MBTI questions. Sure, there is variation in people's self-assessments (and personalities for that matter, but let's ignore that for the moment) over time, but it wouldn't be "just as arbitrary" unless it had no correlation at all with basically anything about the person. I find that claim to be completely implausible.
The only way it could be true that it is meaningless is if upon repeated testings, knowing a person's formerly reported MBTI provided no insight at all into what MBTIs are more likely than for the average person in subsequent testings. That's certainly not the case that's been found in the research, so at the very least, it provides insight into what a person thinks that they are like.
Even if it were the case that all the MBTIs are only related to positive traits (which isn't true), the idea that it is meaningless is just nonsense.
Then let me try to help clarify. MBTI has no predictive power ("I'm an INTP, so... ?") and is not falsifiable. Those are the delineators between science and pseudoscience, so that's why I bucket it with astrology.
If I ask you what your weight and height is today, it's indicative of what your weight and height will be a year from now even if the number doesn't fit into exactly the same rounded range. Doesn't mean weight and height are meaningless if the answers change classifications a bit.
That doesn't seem like the proper question. Specifically, it works only to predict future MBTI results, not anything further. That's fine for height and weight because those values are robust to small/moderate changes in value.
MBTI already has low predictive power about real-world content, and high sensitivity to change (on the margins; it also suffers from applying a clustered model to non-clustered data). So if retest reliability is anything less than excellent, I worry that our predictive power has been almost totally destroyed.
To provide a new analogy, this is like variance in number of fingers. The significance of 11 vs 10 vs 9 isn't proportional to magnitude, so we wouldn't accept "small" counting errors.
None of that says that "I'm an INTP" is meaningless, but I suspect that MBTI is no better, or even worse, than non-formalized personality summaries.
(Of course, MTBI is neither accurate nor precise. It is not accurate because it does not provide us any useful information about personality. It is not precise because test results vary wildly.)
That said there are other criticisms, for instance: Are thinking and feeling really an axis or are they two independent traits? Are there other useful axes not included?
While I sort of cringe at the idea of using this for assigning people jobs, there area few people in my life that fit some of the type narratives fairly well and it helped me understand their motivations a bit better, which did legitimately help my relationships with them.
A much better analogy would be blood sugar level. For many healthy people its sorta constant-ish. The fact that its not nearly constant for a subset of people doesn't prove the test is therefore worthless. It just proves some people have untreated diabetes. The test is not worthless because it can be used in diabetes screenings, unless the point of the test was to tap people like maple syrup trees or something really weird like that.
A major problem with the test is we know people are not terribly good at self introspection, we're all above average drivers and lovers and thinkers, all of us. I am good enough at self introspection to tell I'm pretty well introverted, yet I can imagine someone not so observant or self aware or perhaps neurotic about the whole topic, getting a fairly random score. Or I'm bad enough at self introspection to not realize I'm no good at it at all, and I'm actually a closet extrovert, although I find that rather unlikely (although I would, wouldn't I, if I failed at introspection).
In that way as a secondary measurement I'd propose theoretically that the wider the variation in test results, the worse the person would score in some kind of self introspection ability test. It seems a reasonable hypothesis. You'd need correction factors to deal with people having diagnosed or undiagnosed swings in brain neurotransmitters or use of addictive substances (including sugar and caffeine). But it could be run as a study.
Since mbti essentially neuters it's own usefulness in the "round those percentages down to binary" stage, you could end up with a situation where an INTP and an ESFJ have only an 8% total difference in mbti-measured personality between them.
The question isn't whether people who are in the middle of each criteria exist and could easily swap classifications to their polar opposite. The question is what percentage of people would do that and whether it's high enough that there's too little signal to noise to extract any meaningful information out of the classification system.
As for signal-to-noise, mbti is a useful tool for measuring the traits it measures, it just, for some reason, cuts the signal in half by removing the percentage from the label.
Without the percentages, you can never assume a persons traits don't hover at that middle ground. And thus, can never assume any part of their label is accurate.
If the occurrence of these hover cases were more like <4%, I'd be more inclined to agree with its usefulness, but as it is right now, the 4bit label, on its own, is just noise.
Don't invert the burden of proof. It's up to the proponents of MBTI to demonstrate its effectiveness.
i'm pretty sure someone who has gotten INTP every single test in his life will behave differently on average than someone who has always gotten ESFJ
I think its a mildly useful categorization which allows a simpler and more coarse view of personality than the full spectrum of data would normally allow.
MBTI is a subjective categorization. Astrology is more like your DNA. You're born with a specific set pattern. Just like we don't understand what most of our genetic patterns mean, we don't understand what most of our astrological patterns mean.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/magazine/is-most-of-our-dn...
Furthermore, your willingness to buy into the narrative (and others' willingness to also believe it) that by categorizing certain people into stereotypes and assuming that most of these people tend to excel at a particular set of tasks is most likely what limits them from excelling at tasks that lie outside of their respective sets just as much as their true predisposition to not excelling at them.
Saying that any profiling technique has zero predictive value is a very bold claim.
Even one's astrological sign has predictive value: [1]. And yes, this has been scientifically proven.
[1] http://www.medicaldaily.com/how-birth-month-influences-perso...
For example, companies fruitfully extract predictive power from whether a user clicked a link or not. Facebook extracts predictive power from whether users like videos, et cetera. So why shouldn't an elaborate test that was developed to have meaning, not have any predictive power?
There are results that show MBTI has no predictive power against job performance. It has not been tested against any other measure.
That said, MBTI shows bad orthogonality in the factors in its response. This suggests the factors are ill defined.
Could you provide a reference?
Does this have predictive power? Yes. If I needed somebody to take care of small children, would this test be useful? Yes of course. If I had to pick people blindly for this task, except for the results of this test, then this test would be very useful. Now, MBTI is more sophisticated than this simple test. So to say that it has no predictive power is just silly.
I'm saying that the fact that some people are using it for some purpose doesn't mean that it's actually useful for that purpose.
As for your response, the burden of proof really lies with its proponents - is there any proof of its alleged predictive power?
Without this, I don't think it's reasonable to assume that it is in fact predictive.
For example, the simple test of whether a user clicks a certain link or not already has predicitive power (companies are using this, fruitfully). So a more sophisticated test like MBTI certainly has some predictive power.
Additionally, the added (relative) complexity doesn't imply anything about its qualities.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
Of course not. All the companies are simply wrong. They're falling for management/hiring fads, or relying on old superstitions. This happens all the time. "Companies are using it" says nothing about whether it's actually reliable.
Specifically, many studies and meta-studies have failed to show correlation between MBTI results and job performance. Here is one such summary: http://www.opd.net/abstracts5.html
This is a null argument.
Unless you show that those predictions actually assess whether someone is fit for those tasks this is absolutely content free.
The problem is not variation over time - that's fine. The problem is that when someone gets a result, that result doesn't say what it claims to about them. It's similar to astrology because while it has a series of well-defined rules for making a decision, that decision does not reflect reality. It is therefore effectively arbitrary.
Both MBTI and astrology are internally valid - that is, the same person will get the same or similar results the majority of the time. That doesn't mean they mean anything.
If say some person knows two people and that one tested as INTP and the other as ESFJ and this person doesn't know for a fact who had which test results. Are you really sure they won't have better than even odds at figuring out which is which based on their interactions with the people that don't involve asking for their MBTI test results? If so, based on what study?
It's clear I wouldn't be able to tell them apart based on their birthday (unless they were super young or something), but it's not at all clear that it's the case for MBTI.
If you say "the sky is green," it's not my job to prove to you it's not. It's your job to prove it is. You're the one making the claim.
But here is a (more politely worded than I) paper on the MBTI's ineffectiveness for your perusal: http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... - simply googling "mbti external validity" will also give you plenty of explanation. I also recommend looking at the many studies that review cites, since its whole purpose is amassing information on whether the MBTI is effective.
There's a difference between saying the extent of something's effectiveness hasn't been established by existing research and saying that it is ineffective. I've read the publication you are linking to before and it is saying the latter without the evidence necessary to back up the claim.
I don't want to be "credentials guy," but I have a degree in cognitive science and I've conducted human subjects research. What you are saying is simply wrong.
That publication cites dozens of studies to back up its claims. Are you suggesting they are all invalid? If so, why?
Combined with the fact that this is basically a listicle ("quoticle?") clickbait from a mid/low-brow popsci website, with no analysis or synthesis, and you can pretty much throw TFA away, regardless of your side of what's shaping up to be a religious war here on HN.
I can't prove a negative, all that a study can do is say "no results observed", but there's plenty of that. From the researcher cited in the article: "Many very specific predictions about the MBTI have not been confirmed or have been proved wrong." "Finally, there is no evidence that the MBTI measures anything of value."
This aligns with all of the other at-all-convincing research I've seen on MBTI: it assigned binary distributions to normally distributed data, and has very low predictive power. The majority of people will be near the middle of those distributions, where MBTI is at its least useful.
Further, I think your example is unfair: MBTI is a one-way function. I can meet people and anticipate their scores to with 1-2 errors (a huge margin, but we talk like it's 'close'!) I can't go from an MBTI score to useful predictions about the person though, because it's so massively information-destroying. Even on the things it purports to measure, the normal-to-binary problem means that it has awful predictive power. MBTI defines a somewhat-consistent function from people to letters, but since it's an arbitrary clustering system it doesn't actually allow new predictions or efficiently compress information about people.
So yes, I could probably tell some people apart by MBTI, but you could also assemble 10 different ESFJ's who are more dissimilar than the ESFJ and the INTP. It's like a compression algorithm that can't be reversed, and about as useful.
I don't disagree with the fact that it's not necessarily super effective because the distributions of personalities of people are not bimodal, as would be ideal for this simplistic sort of classification. It's also unlikely to be supremely effective at clustering in that way because the design of the metric wasn't really data driven in any systemic way. It's not even like someone used principal component analysis to really establish that the four classifiers are reasonably orthogonal. It's probably not super obvious/trivial to find human language-friendly orthogonal aspects of personality that are each bimodal, but I imagine the surveys could be improved informed by better data science.
It's certainly a compression algorithm, as are all classification based metrics based on answers to multiple questions, and I'm not arguing it's the most effective one around. However I think before making claims like it has no "external validity" the degree to which it might have it should actually be tested with reasonable methodology and I'm offering something that can absolutely be tested scientifically. There's nothing impossible about having some people take the test and having others who know them try to classify them without the results and see how well the two coincide. It's also possible to evaluate the degree to which people can decompress the data. You can set it up where people have equal time spent with two people of each MBTI and see how well they can guess their answers to the original survey questions with additional knowledge of the MBTI as opposed to without it. It won't establish an upperbound for how useful an MBTI is but it will help gauge a lower bound and I'm pretty confident the lower bound will be higher than that of a zodiac.
I imagine we can design a better classification, probably with even the same survey questions, but just because a metric wasn't well-designed doesn't mean the information it provides is meaningless.
"INFJs are strong leaders" is as arbitrary as saying "aquarius's are strong leaders"
The problem i, and many other people find with the mbti is that most of its users, and even scientific apologists, can't help but fall into the trap of categorizing people into perceived behavioral trends based on their types, which is at best, scientifically invalid, and at worse, harmful.
Of course other parts of the article talk about the predictive power of the personality test. On the other hand, those excerpts don't talk about horoscopes.
I'm really a very nice person. I'm magnanimous, full of goodwill and compassion and everyone I meet immediately likes me. I am intelligent and brave and very gregarious. I am the best person to be around when you need a shoulder to cry on because I have a deep understanding of human nature, thanks to my very high emotional intelligence.
That is the problem with taking into account people's stated behaviour and inclinations.
- Engender some self awareness. It's astonishing how many people lack critical self-awareness about how they approach problems , handle change, communicate with others, or deal with their emotions. MBTI might be nonsense or unverifiable but for many people it's their first exposure to any written form of objective introspection. The belief that these are immutable traits somehow isn't usually dwelled on.
- Help team members recognize that there are different styles/preferences of thinking and reasoning. You'd be amazed how many inter-office conflicts get resolved just through spending time getting to know one another. MBTI or HBDI workshops (not just the test) are helpful for this
On a final note, there is a fairly popular executive MBA program where I took a one week survey course on leadership about a decade ago. In both this course and the program, they were pretty stoked about the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrmann_Brain_Dominance_Ins...
With the hope it was a bit more rooted in science than MBTI. It focuses more on cognitive preferences than on personality.
In my opinion, the Meyers Briggs is useful mainly because it can help people become more self-aware and more empathetic toward others.
I've observed that in a group of 15 people who just got their Meyers Briggs results, several usually think it was uncannily accurate, and a few are immediately defensive because the result does not jive with their self-perception (usually because the personality type is described as similar to some unsavory characters from history). When I read articles criticizing Meyers Briggs, I always assume it was written by one of these people.
If you are in a relationship, one interesting game to play with your significant other is to take the Meyers Briggs test and then read some of the stuff that has been written about relationship compatibility through the Meyers Briggs lens. I've found it to be quite accurate for many couples I know. There is also a very amusing book called Please Understand me II which has detailed write-ups about the characteristics of each type. It's great for parties to read out loud everyone's results over a glass of wine.
IMHO Personality tests are useful mainly to encourage self-awareness, introspection and empathy. As a Meyers Briggs ENTP I find the descriptions of an ENTP personality flattering and desirable. I suspect nearly any type would find their own type description equally flattering and desirable.
> As a Meyers Briggs ENTP I find the descriptions of an ENTP personality flattering and desirable.
Of course, they're your descriptions and therefore they're biased. (Incidentally, I'm an ENTP too).
Well, if you take a 2000 word write-up about your own type, there may be some thought-provoking generalizations either about your own type or about patterns that are consistent when people of different types interact... things which derive from what you believed about yourself but are consequences of the MBTI's generalizations about human interactions.
But I agree, it would be interesting to incorporate the sort of information in the MBTI along with less subjective metrics and come up with a more rich analysis.
Right, but how many of those generalizations are actually verified? The specifics are studied to be consistent, but there are very few generalizations backed up by data.
how dismissive of you. do you dismiss the science in those articles as well?
Unfortunately, the traits investigated by the MBTI seem to be normally distributed. So as true as this is, it still means that people who are decisively placed on all four axes are the exception rather than the rule.
Nonetheless, one meets a lot of ENTJs and INTPs and understanding some of the subtle differences between those and ENTP has helped me understand my differences and similarities with those people better.
Could this be the placebo effect? I once read a comment, that all self-help methods are successful, simply because they make you self conscious. The personality test gives the impression of being a carefully developed machine that can peer into your soul. Does it need to be real, in order to be useful?
I've observed that in a group of 15 people who just got their Meyers Briggs results, several usually think it was uncannily accurate, and a few are immediately defensive because the result does not jive with their self-perception (usually because the personality type is described as similar to some unsavory characters from history). When I read articles criticizing Meyers Briggs, I always assume it was written by one of these people.
But isn't that an argumentum ad hominem? At the very least, it's a good reason why an individual's personal impression of the results is a poor source of validation. The ones who think it's accurate could be wrong too.
On the other hand, in a workplace situation, the defensive ones are simply not thinking tactically.
Haha absolutely true. It puzzles me that anyone would react that way.
Your points are totally valid. For me, the interesting part was reading my own results and thinking about my reaction to them, and watching people I know pretty well reading and reacting to theirs.
Also, the way the results are framed teases apart some of the more "identity-oriented" aspects of peoples' personalities and validates them as legitimate rather than (perhaps) annoying quirks. I think this can lead to empathy.
So I don't really think it matters how psychologically real the assessment is, so long as it's interesting, relatively repeatable, and useful in the sense I mentioned. Just my opinion though. In the workplace I've used it before alongside a few other metrics (like DISC and one other private one) as part of a fun "learn about each other" exercise. I would not use it for hiring decisions or as part of any kind of official HR oriented policy.