> And that’s it—there’s simply very little data on how well the Myers-Briggs (and other type-based personality tests) measures personality and even less on how it might predict job performance.
I was surprised there wasn't any mention of a very interesting issue here, i.e. MBTI and other typological instruments come with user manuals, training, etc., and those materials specifically say "do not use this for hiring".
This is true even in marketing materials...Here's an example directly from the Myers-Briggs Company website:
Even as a personal growth tool the instrument itself is kinda meh, but the soft science behind it is pretty fascinating...
And if you are concerned your employer is going to misuse your MBTI type somehow, 1) know your type first, ideally before they do 2) learn the associated relational blind spots and decide how you'll work around them 3) call yourself a "reformed XXXX" because basically the deeper theory is that any given personality type is similar to an illness in a lot of ways. Oh and 4) this may not be a very good workplace, good luck out there.
Is that really what you would do when a prospective employer asks such a question?
I'd never ask about this, the number of bumps on someone's head, or if the candidate still beats their spouse. However, the best response would be a candidate who would laugh and say, "I think you know enough of my capabilities and personality from this interview process, already"
If they just ask you to spit it out during an interview? I'd move on to the next interview unless desperate. I wouldn't presume about what they know about me, I'd just say, look, my understanding is that personality type factors are not considered appropriate as hiring criteria, and so it wouldn't feel right to answer that.
I know some would give the type that they feel best matches the position, which, I guess they are also desperate for a job in that case.
Unfortunately from what I've seen some hiring teams will give a questionnaire to fill out and a) it's not labeled as any specific type of questionnaire, plus b) you don't get to know your results. One sales company administered a combined IQ test and personality instrument this way. Pretty cringe. They had no certification or corporate permission or anything, just a copy paste test done attitude.
Otherwise there's also the post-hire event in which a trainer offers insights, among which is some personality type sorting and theory, and even one on one coaching. Some of this kind of thing is absolutely worth it depending on the situation. For example you've identified someone you want to work more closely with in future projects, so you want to learn how they see themselves and their contribution.
So it's best to feel it out, see if you can find a good way to respond to the specific circumstances at work without raising the stakes for yourself. Or basically broadcasting your personal relational blind spots as part of a complaint-driven process. :-)
It's true that interviews aren't always easy to maneuver, but the interview process of today reflects the manager, teammates, and workplace of tomorrow.
So, are you saying that a sucky interview process at one place today predicts the general practices of the same workplace in the future? Or all workplaces? The first case seems kinda rational if not without exceptions; the second kind of less rational.
The first line about getting what I'm saying is typically used to telegraph disagreement beyond the point of consideration, which kind of weirdly raises the stakes for you, rhetorically. Humor is better, or feel free to tell me to pound sand because you are about to drop a truth bomb.
That depends. For example I was trained and tested to meet with a person and determine not only their MBTI type, but also their preferred cognitive processes, without ever talking about personality type with them. The testing was extremely difficult. But the skill is extremely valuable in knowing which questions to ask people as they try to navigate career and life change.
You might be surprised to find how easy it is to make a very good guess, after all there are 16 types and this usually narrows down to 3-4 common applicant types given the job and field. If you know how to differentiate between those types, or have friends who are of those types, it's going to be hard not to make a close guess.
If you want to take on the global MBTI cabal it's important to learn the game IMO. The obvious weaknesses will become your friend rather than a point of defense to get intense about. Less MBTI-sucks and more MBTI-meh.
It's also available in other disciplines, e.g. I once took a course on how to determine personality characteristics from texts and emails. Some obvious stuff, but also some really fascinating ideas in there.
physical health conditions, context of the meeting, significant recent events and naturally, drug use, can all skew these kinds of interview classification.. not to mention motive on your part.. lots of good reasons to discard this kind of human classification as psuedo-science IMHO
Who is trying to use it as a science? That wasn't mentioned anywhere. Of course there are millions of factors. Usually the interesting ones call for follow-up thinking or discussion, not outright classification...
Classifying humans into hire or no-hire is literally the point of every recruiting process. I’ve heard that random selection is as good as various interviewing techniques, but I have to admit I’m skeptical. Though I do agree that doing better than drawing lots should definitely be table stakes for any hiring or promotion process.
> If you know how to differentiate between those types, or have friends who are of those types, it's going to be hard not to make a close guess.
But it's still a guess. You don't actually know.
But it's irrelevant in a sense. As you say, there are so few types that it's not hard to make a better-than-chance guess for pretty much anybody you meet. As a job applicant, this is no different than what I expect -- the interviewer is going to be making a subjective assessment of me and how well I would fit into the team.
I wouldn't ever take an actual personality test for employment, though, because a company's willingness to engage in straight-up psuedoscience as a factor in making important decisions tells me something important, and unflattering, about that company.
Umm, three-letter agencies in the US will send you through personality/mental testing & psych evaluation. They don't want treasonous thinkers after-all.
Given that beliefs about personality types are so widespread, it shouldn't be too hard to guess which traits have positive and negative connotations, and learn to project the positive ones. This is not radically different than just making an effort to get along with people.
Context is king though. Traits or expressions have different good/bad connotations according to different types/type-informed contexts, that's the basic idea of how type works, how wars are started, etc.
Personality type theory shines exactly in those kinds of situations, where it works better to zoom in and look at group composition, isolating for specific perspectives and integrations, rather than zooming out to broader abstractions about humans or people in general.
It very often turns out that people have radically different ideas of what it means to get along, and who that should be done with, and when. Advising people to "make an effort to get along" can be extremely offensive when all parties have nearly exhausted their known resources for doing so.
I'm assuming that folk beliefs about personality typing are more widespread than actual constructive uses for it, so that if I ever encounter the latter, I can deal with it as an exception.
I just come out and say it? There’s nothing wrong with knowing you are a certain type.
At least it’s helpful for me to point at the ‘challenges’ section and tell people ‘I do this, please keep poking me until I give you attention’.
In the same way it’s helpful to have a literal definition of how other people think, because the idea that someone might deliberately go with a suboptimal idea because they value peace is absolutely foreign to me.
Recently in startups I’ve been a part of it’s become a bit of a fad to have a short write up called “how I work” which is basically a treatise consisting of that person telling everyone else how they interact with the world. I’ve found it refreshing, actually.
I only ever saw one of those being posted to hn quite some time ago. I must admit, that I found this specific example quite disturbing.
The implied undertone was that all others should accommodate the author and change themselves to better interact with the author so that his needs were met and he could be a productive member of the work force.
But what does that imply the other way around? If I were to write a play book like this, were this person to also adapt to my ways/wants? Or would this be too much to ask?
Working in any professional environment to me implies adapting to others around at least a bit (without loosing what makes out our personality). Out of respect to other human beings alone I think this is decent human behavior.
But as said, to me these writings sound like excuses to expect one sided adaption and I could say "pampering". But maybe that is just me.
I was using this style of enquiry with new hires 20+ years ago as a natural step to ensure we would get the best out of them - it just seemed like an obvious thing to do.
I don't like sticking square pegs in round holes so if by understanding, and being able to accommodate, personal characteristics, we can make the person more comfortable they'll generally contribute more, faster, and better.
You hate travelling in rush-hour? fine, set your own hours to fit in with the team requirements.
E.g. for myself I'd say: "No distractions - if I'm obviously focused on something do NOT disturb me - send an email" and "I'm productive when my brain gets intensely into something - when it doesn't I don't sit around I go do something else" and "I work better in darkness or dim light, or overnight" and "Sometimes I need to do intense random brain-storming sessions to clear the crap out my head".
Sure, I think it's OK to simply be of a type. You are also giving some simple affordances which is good. At the same time it's a pretty tricky and intriguing subtopic within personality type theory.
If you decide to stay on your type-script, your life will be more repetitive than it otherwise would. Many of the same problems, repeated. Your preferences will be less flexible by definition, so your scope of decision-making and even perceptual skill will be limited by subconscious pressure inputs, for example.
Also, you can more readily be manipulated by those who understand your blind spots better than you do. (This makes some people angry, but IMO it's better to embrace it and find a way to work on those)
However, to transcend one's own type requires intense learning, growth, and therefore stress. And the concepts here are so new that there is very little support available should you decide to really go in this direction.
Anyway. Personally I can understand either way. But the theoretical answer to "is having a personality type a problem" is both a hard no and a hard yes. This applies both for yourself and others as they interact with you.
Personally, I dislike having labels on myself that describe behavior whether it be pseudo-science or science-science because I find myself "role-playing" those labels and semi-consciously using them to guide actions. Even for medically diagnosed disorders I'll end up unconsciously thinking "Well of course, I'm going to do X because I have disorder Y/personality type Z".
Thank you!
I've never been much for acting save for a brief foray in elementary school, during which I found out that I don't particularly enjoy trying to act out a character.
> here’s nothing wrong with knowing you are a certain type.
Except the Myers-Briggs types are meaningless.
> the idea that someone might deliberately go with a suboptimal idea because they value peace is absolutely foreign to me.
That seems like you're lying to yourself. Everyone goes along with tons of suboptimal ideas or has enough money and power that everyone does what they want or is insufferable and everyone avoids. You could be in the latter two categories, but that doesn't seem likely.
The religious right embraces the doctrine of "original sin". The secular left focuses on the concept of "unconscious bias". It seems to be part of the human condition across all cultures and ideologies to view people as inherently flawed, and to see the path toward sanctification as being recognition and never ending struggle against those inherent flaws.
Myers-Briggs is just the LinkedIn counterpart to this. Fodder for "Tell me about your strengths and weaknesses, and a situation in which you've had to overcome the latter" interview questions. You're supposed to don your hairshirt, beat your breast, and talk about your struggle for salvation in order to demonstrate piety to the interviewer.
I appreciate it when a company asks about or tests my Myers-Briggs type early in the hiring process, because then I know that I don't want to work for them, and they wouldn't be happy with me either.
I remember in college I applied to over 100 internships and my friend said “I don’t understand how you wrote over 100 cover letters.” My response was “I didn’t. If they ask for a cover letter I don’t want to work for them.”
Cover letters are one of those things that are only really useful for the first few jobs. Once you've started working you will get most of your future jobs via your network and cover letters are pointless from then on.
If you're content to work within your network or and only care about the craft rather than the overall purpose of your company and tasks, then sure. Jobs your friends and colleagues get you don't require a cover letter.
Your professional network extends to every organization you'd aspire to work with, and you actually care about those organizations' goals? I assure you– that isn't the case for most people.
I've been involved in hiring at several tech companies, including two top 5. Cover letters were never considered in any part of the interview process. Our recruiters didn't even include them in the candidate packet. So, there definitely isn't any uniformity in the way cover letters are perceived.
I wish I could find the golden comment of an HN user realizing that he has used cover letters to exclude candidates, but he can't do that for those who didn't supply one - putting the latter at an advantage.
I never said you couldn't get a very prestigious job without a cover letter. In fact, I'm positive top 5 companies are far less likely to care about cover letters than many organizations. They want to hire people who are mostly excited about the code and solving exciting problems that come up while the company does its thing. Get a stack of resumes, sort by pedigree and experience, put them in front of a whiteboard to make sure they weren't lying, get them in some interviews to make sure they aren't total jerks, and you're off to the races.
If you want to work with a think tank, a nonprofit doing exciting and important work, a startup with an amazing idea that really captures your imagination, or any other org where the big picture needs to matter as much or more to everybody involved than the content of the PRs, then the cover letter likely matters more than the resume.
No judgement. I use those top 5 products. It's just pretty myopic to deem cover letters as unnecessary when that's only true for people with very specific goals and ideas about what matters in a job, even if they happen to be very common.
The only reliable component about getting a job is being a desirable candidate. That's it. Maybe you write some great cover letters. I have worked for both startup and non-profit without writing a cover letter. Sometimes a resume and a glass of whiskey with the CEO is enough to get these jobs. I could probably get a job just as easily with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses as I could with a cover letter. Although the whiskey is the only one of the two I've any experience with.
Well of course being a desirable candidate is a prerequisite-- this thread is about cover letters as a means of conveying that. I've interviewed hundreds of candidates for dozens of positions-- from internships to regular staff developers to post-doc roles-- in an organization that drew ambitious candidates that shared our specific interests from around the globe. Our organization, at large, immediately rejected resumes with search-and-replace template or missing cover letters, by the hundreds, because people's hard skills and experience weren't the primary factors in determining whether or not they would thrive in this organization. As I've repeatedly acknowledged, there are many jobs, candidates, and job searching scenarios where that's not the case. Surely, the glass of whiskey scenario makes sense in many contexts, but in ours, it's wholly inapplicable. I'm not really sure why you insistently present your own use case for job application materials as an argument against what I said, but I've stopped caring and I'm done engaging you about it.
> I never said you couldn't get a very prestigious job without a cover letter.
I didn't suggest this, at all. I suggested the value of a cover letter is not some constant across the tech sector, from startups (sample size = 2) to the big 5 (sample size = 2).
I agree. I'm not interested in software that will screen resumes for keywords or that kind of thing. Instead we ask a simple question right in our job postings, asking that an answer be included in the application, and that filters out 90% of applicants who don't bother. If someone additionally includes a decent cover letter, they go to the top of the pile. We want people who took the time to read our posting and want to work here, not those who are just spamming resumes everywhere.
Yeah. Filling a perfectly developer-shaped hole in your team? Sure... Sort a stack of resumes by experience and education and contact the top n applicants. Want more than dense pull requests, snide code reviews, and lots of "well actually" interjections even when discussing things outside their expertise? You might be disappointed with your options if you're only booking interviews based on resumes.
I hate cover letters so much. They're utterly ridiculous.. imagine applying for a lawnmower technician position or something and needing a cover letter. You'd have to write how you're great because ever since you were little you would read lawnmower catalogs to bed.
I feel the exact opposite. At least they are measuring something vaguely objectively. Interviewing with most potential employers, at least in software, is like when children guess at picking players for sports teams while wearing a blindfold. Everything always seems to come down to biases applied non uniformly.
Changing jobs is a big life investment. I would prefer it not be a blind date with one-way conversations from somebody likely abusive and neglectful looking for a surf to abuse. If the potential employer is instead interested in potential they are sending a signal they are willing to invest in you.
Myers Briggs gets a lot of hate due to low precision but it’s a cheap and fast assessment. There are much better assessments of personality but they take more time and are more invasive.
What if they were using astrology? Would that be better than nothing? I think it would be worse than nothing because it demonstrates the aren't competent enough to know when they fell for a scam.
Then it would be guessing just the same as using no metric at all. This is only worse if the candidate is so naive as to believe they are of superior consideration than the value of a simple measure.
Do we actually have any evidence that “when in the year you were born in” has worse statistical relevance than the admittedly weak relevance of personality tests?
If not (and I’ve not seen it) then the candidate is just stating a preference for not working with companies that are lazy intellectually. That’s not naive that’s sensible.
"It doesn't work and is junk science, but at least it doesn't work for everyone equally" is an interesting methodology.
I'd rather take the intuition of some interviewer because at least that's based on something real. I mean if objectivity is the only criterion you simply may want to roll a set of dice for the applicants because those are cheaper than Myers-Briggs consultants.
the attitude of replacing useful human judgements with useless metrics in the name of eliminating bias is one of the worst trends in modern hiring.
Discrimination is the entire point of the hiring process. Why else are you sorting people into Myers-Briggs categories? Are you sending nobody home? What we're arguing about isn't whether you're discriminating but what tool you're using to discriminate. Is craniometry not discriminatory just because it's objective?
the relevant question is whether astrology for nerds is better than human judgement just because the former is perceived as impersonal.
I don't, because it means people in less fortunate industries that can't be pickers, but also programmers if a downturn comes, would have more companies pulling this shit to deal with...
MBTI isn't scientific, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful.
If someone says a particular type fits them well, that helps you understand them quickly. And if they say the type they get doesn't describe them, then you don't need to use that information.
"McCarley and Carskadon (1983) replicated these findings and demonstrated that across a 5-week test-retest interval, 50% of the participants received a different classification on one or more of
the scales."
Each of the few times I've taken a Myers-Briggs test, I've gotten a completely different score each time. I don't think these tests measure any immutable attributes of personality, they measure preferences which can change with time and social circumstance. And getting a new job is obviously a change of social circumstance..
Agree. And people also tend to answer in different ways (how I am, how people think I am, how I want people to perceive me, how I want to be, etc), depending on the circumstances and environment of the test.
I don't think it has much value beyond some sort of throwaway catalyst for conversation.
I wouldn't work for someone who felt me up either, but by just walking out I'm not doing much to prevent that behavior from being normalized.
Worse, it's the Market for Lemons. The jobs nobody takes get seen by more people because they stay on the market, and so they are over-represented amongst observers. Then the horrible people at your company start saying things like, "everybody is doing it". Everybody does a lot of things that nobody should be doing.
The author says each of the big 5 is on a "sliding scale". I admit this is a bit pedantic, but isn't each just on a plain old scale? Wouldn't a sliding scale imply that one score could affect how another was graded?
I always thought "sliding scale" was a redundant phrase. If it does mean something beyond a continuous scale, then the author may be making the same mistake as me.
I learned the term WRT insulin for diabetes. I think the key is that the scale you use for determining something (fees, insulin dose) changes depending on other characteristics of the person
> Wouldn't a sliding scale imply that one score could affect how another was graded?
Not to me; I am actually not familiar with any clear meaning for the phrase "sliding scale". It's just a thing people sometimes say.
If you wanted to say that your score on one axis could affect how your answers to questions on another axis are interpreted, you'd need to call them something like "non-independent". Not much call for that kind of terminology.
Can you provide any examples of someone using "sliding scale" in the sense you suggest?
The article makes the mistake assuming that companies are using these tests to maximize for performance, when in fact they are trying to maximize internal culture fit.
Where said internal culture is either "people who'll believe in fortune tellers if they're wearing lab coats" or "people so desperate for employment and/or validation they'll cast aside their values to fit in".
People who study for the “correct” personality alongside the code quiz questions which all have very little to do with the actual job they will be doing.
No right minded person would hire me for an “energetic, outgoing go-getter” job.
It's a bit buried, but the gist appears to be (italics mine):
"And that’s it — there’s simply very little data on how well the Myers-Briggs (and other type-based personality tests) measures personality and even less on how it might predict job performance."
In Europe I've never seen these tests as an entrance exam; just yesterday I watched Persona and was surprised that McDonalds of all companies seems to require such testing.
What's the deal here? Companies are so desperate for any criterion to reduce the pile of applicants? Do they believe it helps? Do they look for a few of these profiles and never the others?
Hiring is hard, I know, but I only know of these models in the context of understanding existing teams, not hiring for individual positions.
>What's the deal here? Companies are so desperate for any criterion to reduce the pile of applicants? Do they believe it helps? Do they look for a few of these profiles and never the others?
Yes. They are looking for anything that lends credibility to their choices and that they believe objectively guides them toward the right candidates. Truth is, it's a total crapshoot but no one wants to acknowledge or believe that.
The dirty secret of recruitment software/processes is that recruiters are dealing with hundreds or thousands of resumes, the vast majority of which they will end up rejecting somewhere along the funnel, and they are eager for better ways.
It's actually pretty draining and difficult doing multi-way comparisons between so many candidates, let alone doing it day after day. And recruiters/HR are only human.
So any technology or approach that can attach a number/rank a job application is seen as hugely welcome. If Bob scored 56 out of 100, and Sue scored 87, then even if we have doubts about the methodology, surely we can still go ahead and reject Bob based on such a large difference! Then we don't need to spend a lot of time looking at Bob's resume, we can screen him out early on.
The dirty secret is that it doesn't even matter that much whether the scoring process has any real science behind it - the mere fact of attaching a number is so desirable that employers are wide open and begging for this kind of capability. At the end of the day, who really cares if Alice was better that Bob or not? Virtually no companies have the HR performance monitoring in place to even know this anyway.
That's why in the HR world, psych testing firms are not quite fly by night, but they are the kind of companies an entrepeneurial type can set up in a couple of weeks with very little tech but a lot of powerpoints, and immediately start selling to really big companies that will funnel a lot of money their way. Such companies normally make a big song and dance about the scientific verifiability of their technology/approach, even to the extent of having on-staff psychologists.
Many people would feel though that the process has little more validity than reading tea leaves, or drawing up astrology charts.
The analysis is, but "types" are just preferences/tendencies that everyone has, reflected back from the test. It says "I tend towards introversion or not, being detail-oriented or not" etc. That's it. Mind you, that's of no use to your employer who wants you to do your damn job whatever it happens to be. If you want the job, it's for you.
The types themselves are also nonsense. There's sixteen of them, and all sixteen have significant tendencies in all four axes. It seems extremely unlikely that someone would always have a tendency in every axis all the time, so the types themselves are set up wrong. They're not even acknowledging the possibility of an inconclusive result.
It's also easy to see the financial incentive of removing the possibility for someone to get an "unremarkable" result. Telling people that they're mostly average, even if for a lot of people it's the truth, doesn't convince them they're getting their money's worth.
- The types do not indicate the degree of tendency in each axis. That can vary within a type and isn't captured by the type code at all. The types just indicate the direction. There is some evidence that children tend to have more extreme preferences which balance out people mature.
- Have you seen Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow? The "fast" and "slow" thinking described there is very similar to what the MBTI calls "perception" (fast) and "judgement" (slow). And notably those categories do have strong evidence of an innate tendency which remains consistent over time (but only if you don't bias the participant by asking them to approach the task in certain way indicating that this tendency can be overridden by the appropriateness of certain thinking mode to the task at hand)
I don’t know how relevant it is to your particular point, but IIRC Kahneman realized a few years ago that some of /Thinking Fast and Slow/'s conclusions (specifically on priming) relied on underpowered studies: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-....
> It seems extremely unlikely that someone would always have a tendency in every axis all the time
It's a preference. You're making it out to be more than it is. It doesn't preclude that someone can have little preference for one tendency over another. Most times test results give you percentages.
> Telling people that they're mostly average, even if for a lot of people it's the truth, doesn't convince them they're getting their money's worth.
What money? Who pays for this shit? There's like a million free MBTI tests online.
I think "you're making it out to be more than it is" sort of surrenders the whole purpose of the test. If the test isn't consistent and doesn't have the power to predict outcomes, then it is effectively the same as the "which Harry Potter Character are you" Buzzfeed quizzes - e.g. amusing but meaningless.
As for who pays for this stuff: At least two of the FAANGs pay consultants thousands of dollars to run these tests as team building exercises. There's a thriving market for this stuff.
The purpose is reflecting back to the test-taker what they like and want. Whether it's incongruous with their actual behavior is irrelevant, but people don't tend to be dishonest to themselves about things like "introversion", not entirely. Self-therapy/exploration is one use-case alongside entertainment as you said. I don't think companies should bother with it, unless they plan to give employees what they want. On the other hand, the testing itself could be regarded as something that keeps the drones amused. It's hard to imagine another purpose.
To put it more mathematically, personality traits lie on a normal distribution. Most people are in the middle. Myers-Briggs turns traits into binary options, which does not match reality.
A friendly reminder that height is not normally distributed either. Within a population it has a bimodal distribution.
Also a friendly reminder that a quarter standard deviations above the mean vs. the same distance below the mean is quite often a trivial difference in population statistics. And it should be nonsense (pseudoscience if you will) to make the distinction. A much more interesting statistic are the outliers. And grouping an outlier with a person who is 0.05 SD from the mean is just confusing at best.
Partially yes. But a distinguished homogeneous population of a single gender probably has a normal distribution. Luckily humans usually don’t live in a distinguished homogeneous population of a single gender, so comparing your self to the average is at best fun. (unless you are an outlier, then it can be interesting or medically useful).
Thanks for illustrating what parent comment said: it would be ridiculous to categorise only between “tall” and “short” when most people would fall into “kinda average”
There is no proof that personality traits have any identifiable distribution, let alone normal distribution.
Heck we don’t even know what personalty is, or if it is even a useful scientific term. Evidence suggests that peoples behavior varies wildly between situations, way more then any preconceived notion of behavior dictated by personality.
If tests show a normal distribution of a personality trait, it is most likely because it has been standardized to do exactly that. Not because people’s behavioral patterns align neatly in our favorite distribution.
If preference does not correlate with behavior, you are effectively measuring nothing.
However it does correlate with behavior, otherwise personality traits would be completely dead as a science. But the effect is very weak next to the effect of the situation. Diverse personality traits will cheat if the environment is conducive to cheating behavior.
I would put personality in the same camp as religious believes or political leanings. An effect that mildly alters behavior, but not enough to actually matter in most circumstances.
> If preference does not correlate with behavior, you are effectively measuring nothing.
Preference is not nothing. It reflects what people like and want.
Preference for these traits, e.g. introversion, is a fairly reliable predictor of behavior, but it doesn't matter if it is or not, if someone lies to themselves entirely (however likely that is). The purpose is regurgitating to the test-taker what they like and want. I don't see how a company could make good use of it.
My company gave managers Clifton Strengths tests, and it was fairly interesting (and tracked with my own self-introspection). Wasn't used for hiring or performance, but more as a tool to people recognize their traits and how others may differ.
Does your self-introspection read something like this?
"
You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof.
You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
Security is one of your major goals in life.
"
It's saddled with a lot of the same issues as MBTI. Low repeatability, dubious extrapolations of what it might mean if you have one of those strengths, etc.
If they treated it like an exercise to make people talk to each other about styles of communication, I wouldn't hate it as bad. They usually treat it like something conclusive, science based, etc. Meaning it might drive what assignments you get, training, etc. That's...dumb.
The thing that has always amused me about the personality types is that everyone is all of these things and how much they are of one or the other depends on the circumstances. You can change the questions very slightly and get wildly different results. While interesting in a way to understand human interactions and some form of classification of that they aren't usually something fixed, they don't really measure personality because its a whole lot more complex than these measures.
Most people still believe that your peak heart rate is 220 - age when the paper that determined this showed no one actually met that at all and the variance was massive, the same is true of Myers Briggs we are a long way away from the original science with the use of these tests and since no one reads the papers they don't realise how badly its being applied.
> there’s simply very little data on how well the Myers-Briggs (and other type-based personality tests) measures personality and even less on how it might predict job performance.
Any personality test is bad in my opinion and I wouldn't like being tested in it but this statement and article feels like feel good pseudoscience. Is there any data on any kind of test that it works? At least for Myers-Briggs it has been tested and it hasn't been proved or disproved.
Apple went through the Myers-Briggs phase in the 90's, along with a lot of the other tech giants.
It was a half-day seminar. "Professionals" gave the tests and told everyone their type. That took only an hour. The rest of the time was spent doing role-playing, where you were supposed to use your coworkers' MB types to adjust your interaction with them in various settings.
It was a waste of time then and I bet it still is.
I never worked for Apple, but I went through a similar exercise in the late 1980's. I found the role-playing useful, and I found the techniques we were trained on to be enlightening. Not everybody thinks the same way, and even though it's not valid to categorize people into 16 personality groups, it's useful to understand that people prioritize things and think differently from each other. Here's a great example of that:
Do you need to spend $2000 plus $49.99 a head plus travel, catering and room hire to be told "It's useful to understand that people priorities things and think differently from each other?" If the specifics don't matter, what are you actually paying these consultants to do?
Is it worth $2k (or $20k) to communicate to a bunch of new managers that "we, as a company, feel that thinking about how your team of individuals thinks is worth spending money and time on"? The specifics aren't the point -- the demonstration that this is a priority, and part of your job that you're expected to spend time on, is the key. An e-mail saying "hey you're a manager now think about people!" doesn't have the same impact, inherently, and you end up with "managers" that think their job is still to be a tech lead.
> to communicate to a bunch of new managers that "we, as a company, feel that thinking about how your team of individuals thinks is worth spending money and time on"?
Interesting. It wouldn't have occurred to me that was the message at all until you said this. My takeaway would be "a really good salesman caught the ear of some executive somewhere."
Dear god I am glad they stopped this by the time I got there. I probably wouldn't have quit on the spot or anything, but I do not think that there exists a universe where it wouldn't taint the job in my eyes.
Though Apple did a pretty good job of doing that already.
Helen Fischer's work on personality types may hold some value that various hormones cause personality traits. Myers Briggs imho is just messed up thing no better than horoscopes.
It used to be used at a large company that I worked for. The preferred types were RED and BLUE around 2010. GREEN AND YELLOW I remember were overlooked for promotions. Everyone was trying to be the biggest idiot in the room to prove they were RED person. It propogated bullying and prevented good teamwork. Credit Stealing was legitimized with preference for RED. If Helen Fischer is correct and RED people are the closest to testesterone heavy people, the RED people have the shortest neural circuits.
When I was managing, I informally typed people during the interview process, which was very helpful in predicting both how they would interact with other team members and how they would do at particular tasks. However, I learned not to rely on self-reported personality types or tests, which are often answered aspirationally, not realistically.
To me, MBTI or Big 5 (not the actual tests, but their framing of aspects of personality) are mental tool kits for trying to make better predictions from limited data (i.e., the interview process). As a manager, I've found them incredibly helpful for avoiding problems (i.e., assigning the wrong task to a person).
Interestingly, in my personal experience, I've found logicians (ISTJs in MTBI) seem to be the most resistant to quantifying aspects of personality.
A stethoscope in the hands of a doctor is a useful, if limited, tool. Don't judge its value if you have never seen one except in the hands of the village idiot. (One could say the same about various programming languages.)
If measuring skull shape during the interview process was a) socially acceptable and b) actually predictive of outcomes, why not? The problem is that it is neither. The reason that it is not a) is because it was not b) and thus easily misused to justify stereotypes.
A galvanometer in a physician’s hand is even more dangerous than that of the village idiot. Just ask my late grandmother who was preyed on until the board de-certified that “doctor.”
> A stethoscope in the hands of a doctor is a useful, if limited, tool.
The MBTI is tea leaves reading. It has been experimentally shown to have no relationship to reality and no predictive power time and time again. Even the axis don’t make sense as some are heavily correlated.
The Big 5 is useful but far more complicated. It uses scale and has no pretty little boxes but at least it seems to consistently measure something.
MBTI is the rough equivalent of taking a Big 5 test, but then instead of presenting the scores, it arbitrarily classifies you as Yes/No for each trait based on whether you're above or below average. Even if the scores themselves would be informative, you're still getting basically randomly sorted on noise for the traits where you're just about average.
> MBTI is the rough equivalent of taking a Big 5 test, but then instead of presenting the scores, it arbitrarily classifies you as Yes/No for each trait
No, just no.
The Big 5 was statistically designed using factor analysis so that its axis are independent. The axis actually came before their description. It’s actual serious research. Psychologists found that some characteristics clustered together and then spent time understanding what these clusters actually measured.
The MBTI however is all over the place. It was designed "using" Jung theory - itself a heap load of garbage - and its axis are total chaos. They even correlate between each others. That’s part of why the distribution of MBTI types is actually so skewed.
Seriously the MBTI is a perfect exemple of what’s wrong with psychology nowadays. On the one hand you have academics trying to do serious research and the other hand you have people motivated by greed pushing random rubbish and gathering a following in the corporate world like a pseudo-cult. It’s both sad and maddening.
Look, the reality is that almost all interviewing is far from scientific. I'm sure there are worse heuristics many of us use than MBTI[1]. The comment being downvoted is being perceived as trying to appeal to an argument of extremes: It doesn't follow that if you're following some poor methodology that one should consider even crazier ideas.
If we had nailed interviewing down to a science, I could see the point in the comment. Instead it's coming off as "Hey if you're going to do something imperfect, you should consider something extremely wrong!" We all have mostly wrong approaches to interviewing.
[1] Stuff I've seen:
Rejecting a candidate because they read Chapters 1-4 but not 5 of a textbook when the interview prep material mentioned chapters 1-5. Note that chapter 5 is not used at all for the job.
Favoring a candidate because of a strong handshake (cliched, but happens!)
Gauging the enthusiasm a candidate by assuming everyone is an extrovert (fairly common).
I’ve been an ISTJ (but have moved closer to an ISFJ over the years) and am not resistant to quantifying personality aspects - as long as results are disclosed and I’m informed it’s being done. Still, I’m not going to do a 128 question personality test to get hired - interviews are already long enough.
>As a manager, I've found them incredibly helpful for avoiding problems (i.e., assigning the wrong task to a person).
it sounds like you're assigning tasks based on prejudicial categorization of genetic traits (as MTBI claims to be) instead of actual demonstrated job performance.
Some problems are very detail oriented, others are much more vaguely defined. As a manager, I assigned vague problems to one person because they weren't worried about the lack of structure to the problem. The devil-in-the-details problems I assigned to another person. Both people were happier and clearly more productive. Could I have made the same decisions without an explicit personality framework in my mental toolkit? Yes, but it would probably have required more experience than I had.
I've used strengthsfinder before (after hiring, haven't used it before) and it's helpful for team composition and for understanding who might be good AND also interested in certain things.
Not a huge sample size, but everyone has agreed on the output of their tests. Only in a few instances (like 1 of the strengths for a few people) were there surprises, (ex: Woo under Influencing) but they understood why it was a top strength and how it did make sense even though they wouldn't have chosen that for themselves if they were tasked with picking their top 5 strengths from the list instead of doing the test.
I don't like the personality tests at all. A strong team IMO should have a mix of personalities and strengths and I prefer to build teams based on just a few core values. From that approach, I've gotten a great mix of both personalities and strengths organically.
I could see maybe some teams using personality tests (ex: for sales) to architect a desired team type in a specific industry. Research is all over the place though on what's ideal. And can it be trusted as a hiring framework?
There are many other factors to consider. Let's say 5 specific personality traits perform the best in the aggregate in sales for one industry. But then people with those traits may be hard to retain. They may not get along with one another. They may create a toxic environment. There are too many things that are very hard to measure IMO to use that as your framework.
So I don't buy the personality test stuff in general. I suppose it may be a decent data point as your example of avoiding "assigning the wrong task to a person", but a strengths based approach makes more sense for that to me.
> To me, MBTI or Big 5 (not the actual tests, but their framing of aspects of personality) are mental tool kits for trying to make better predictions from limited data (i.e., the interview process). As a manager, I've found them incredibly helpful for avoiding problems (i.e., assigning the wrong task to a person).
I think of MBTI as a framework for categorizing human tendencies. But the real power of MBTI is in cognitive functions as vocabulary to classify how people will react in situations.
Given a person without major forcing functions changing their behavior, what tendencies do they have?
Cognitive functions defines a set of tendencies that you can have a discussion around, assuming you agree on what each cognitive function really means.
For instance, someone with Ti as a primary function subconsciously looks for correctness that can be validated. Whereas someone with Fi as a primary function subconsciously evaluates whether someone is expressing their true self or not. This can be used as a manager tool to do behavioral risk management.
But everyone has forcing functions that change their behavior, and people with enough practice can get good at anything. As an evaluation tool MBTI probably accounts for at most 10-25% of the outcome. And the older you get, the more well rounded your cognitive stack becomes, making it even less of a predictor of your behavior.
Additionally, cognitive functions are abstract enough to not correlate highly to specific tasks, although one can certainly argue a correlation (I've heard arguments where programming suits Ti and Ni the best).
You might be experiencing a confirmation bias. Without a double blind study there is no proof that your valuations—let alone your conclusions—are valid.
I’m sorry to say, but your methods are flawed, as are your predictions. Your methods may only be helpful in confirming your biases, nothing more.
"Interestingly, in my personal experience, I've found logicians (ISTJs in MTBI) seem to be the most resistant to quantifying aspects of personality."
There's an internal, voluntary, just-for-fun MBTI within Google that breaks down stats of the test-taking population. 75+% of takers are N's (vs. an estimated 25% in the general population). The number of INTJs (22%, vs. ~3% in the general population) itself outnumbers all S types combined.
While it's possible that Google is unrepresentative of the general population (something much more likely in 2005 than 2022, though), I think it's more likely that N's are just more drawn to completing a personality test and sharing their results with the company.
I was asked to take the StrengthsFinder test (imo kind of similar to Myers-Briggs) after being hired on at my current employer. The results basically said my strengths are ADHD, but in a really positive way. Nobody ever followed up with me on it or mentioned it again. Honestly it was pretty accurate. The job is extremely laid back, no hard deadlines, no emergencies, etc. It's been a huge challenge to maintain a similar level of output when compared to past jobs.
This sounds so similar to my experience at a prior employer that I have to hazard a guess. Does this company, by chance, have (or had at least, prior to the pandemic) an elaborate on boarding ceremony?
It's funny how defensive hn and other parts of the internet are about being put in made-up 'no-evidence' /psuedoscience boxes....
yet everyone here completely understands the dozens of archetypes and human personality portraits invoked by hundreds of ever changing memes and meme-speak...
"don't be that guy" "tell me youre x without telling me ..." ms-paint wojacks, etc
I think people who's pattern recognition works great on classifying others in the private (read:petty) freedom of their own mind are also the exact brittle, neurotically vulnerable hypocrites bristling about other's pattern recognition seeing them... (I'm all the latter but embrace it lol)
The same crowd that loves quantified self and concrete "evidence" would hate to be seen as they are by actual tally of what they do and how their time is spent, or especially to have their most common interpersonal reactions categorized into a dozen buckets, of gut-reactions, core values, status stuff, etc.
Any whiff that someone has figured you out and hark, all of a sudden you contain multitudes! Meanwhile, developing advertising software to build ever more accurate portraits of consumer types...
MBTI is as useful as you make it, as are harry potter groups, memes, vibes, DSM-mental illness groups, shakespeare's tragedies, etc.
They work great if you put them to work, shrug. It's just a word-substrate to better deal with the intuitions you already have going on about people subconsciously.
meh, I guess I'd just much rather know exactly what stereotypes / impressions I invoke in others with my looks/identity markers (age sex race etc), behaviors, class mannerisms, aesthetics, posture etc.... and then take it from there if I don't like what I see in the mirror.
(seeing people seeing us is always a mirror i think)
Myers-Briggs provides 4 bits of information. If Myers-Briggs was astrology, then it should not be possible to build a classifier that could predict the results of a Myers-Briggs test based upon attributes of a person that are not self-reported. I highly doubt this is the case. And though you could argue that self-selection is involved, at the tech company I work at, a large informal poll revealed ~70% of engineers to be INTJ and ~20% INTP. Whether people like it or not, MBTI is at least predictive of something. Whether that something is useful for some other purpose is a different debate, but the types are certainly not uniformly randomly distributed.
Knowing my MB category was amusing but not useful.
Knowing my Big 5 percentiles - very useful. Understanding where I land on disagreeableness and openness to ideas made my life a lot easier (both at home and work). At least because I have a framework to understand personality differences when dealing with teammates and what frustrates me (like people being close-minded or indecisive, or both).
My current company doesn't do it, but I would support mixing and matching people with complementary strengths. Like match someone with high openness to ideas to explore various angles on a particular problem and someone with high conscientiousness to get the project across the finish line.
That's funny. One of the biggest complaints about Big 5 is that it's too wishy-washy and doesn't have much to offer behind the scenes in soft theory.
For example the "generally people flip all their letters at the end of the work day" principle with four-letter type, or the way you can extract cognitive functionality from the four letters to explore potential cognitive gifts and blind spots.
I've arranged groups like you stated and found some interesting takeaways. Like one of the partners can perceive an annoyance with the work requirement and they become an effective interference machine team rather than a results-team. It's tricky because they are never really working in isolation and one partner will also be looking for outside opportunities and so on.
There is some interesting theory on this, which expresses that not only do some kinds of people work effectively together really well, but when they are also matched with the right project or field, they will carry the project out in a way that exceeds normal expectations. By definition they have more energy to spend and it replenishes quickly.
My MB letters tentatively are INTJ. I say tentatively because I took a couple of free online tests. Those might not be very accurate. Knowing those letters never aided me in anything. The only interesting that has come out of it is that I discovered a weird subculture of people who wish their MB letter were exactly those. Some kind of a weird obsession.
Big 5 - I took Jordan Peterson's paid test. Discovering that I was more disagreeable and more open to ideas than roughly 90% of population was helpful with self awareness and managing expectations when dealing with others. For example, I don't expect most of my colleagues to be as critical of the company leadership or company policies as I am. And I fully expect some of my colleagues to shut down my ideas for deviating too much from existing patterns.
Supposing these tests have any validity, using them for hiring is a terrible idea. People are likely to be very reluctant to hire people who they know they are likely to clash with. But in reality that's what you actually need to provide the variety of perspectives (one might call it diversity) necessary for resilient decision making.
The article title: "Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types"
The article's answer: "We just don’t know."
Whole bunch of words in that article and some interesting background, but zero effort to address the title of the piece. It's like they meant to be going somewhere, provided some interesting background information, and then just stopped. No hypotheses, no interviewing a company to ask them why, just a shrug.
If you wanted to say "Companies shouldn't use Myers-Briggs," you should have made that the title.
A previous company used Real Colors, an MBTI knock-off, and it was striking how attached people got to those results. People openly stereotyped whole groups of people because they appeared to cluster in one sector (e.g., SDEs must be Green). They disregarded all counter-examples because they conflicted with these biases. It was weird.
Anytime they start by rewinding to millennia ago, that's temperament theory. Keirsey's temperament theory that they mention is fundamentally different from typical MBTI in lots of ways. In fact they can both be used to complement each other.
So it's different, or not, depending on whether you want to be accurate, and true to details, or not. (Also someone should correct the way the Wikipedia article is written regarding MBTI)
Thank you for sharing this. That is so weird. Having been part of an MBA program meant that my profile was reviewed through multiple similar tests, but I have not heard of that one.
The thing that jumped at me is that it is not some small companies that are using these. US Banks apparently used it with its private capital customers[1] ( I am almost curious as to how it was applied ).
yw. There is a general shortage of this kind of exploratory activity-theory, so there are common usage patterns.
I'd imagine that in capital markets it's used to help keep things more objective, to lower the personal stakes for all parties, and demonstrate an interest in constructive partnership. One of the best relationship techniques is helping the other feel understood, and that is also where tools like this one will always stand out. If you can't connect with someone via the normal methods, it's usually worth trying to connect through their self-identified objective preferences.
People like boxes because it gives them an easy and reassuring way to approach complexity they are not equipped to grapple with. You see it all the time in the professional world: people who have to deal with others but are poorly trained and unconfident in their ability to handle human psychology relish these kinds of crutches. You see it even in this discussion: this type must be suited to this kind of job is simpler than thinking holistically about prerequisites.
Kinda tangential to your actual comment, but you might be interested in this recent episode of the Rational Reminder podcast on "Shared Identities and Decision Making".[1] Even groups more arbitrary than these influence our decision-making, problem-solving, cooperation, etc. It goes beyond who's suited for what job to who's suited to be right about what kind of topic. Wild stuff.
Those are opt-in communities, though, so there's selection bias. AFAIK, there wasn't anything in the company's hiring practices that self-selected for folks who would embrace this kind of stuff.
People are always imagining they have "debunked" Myers-Briggs. All they demonstrate is that they didn't understand what it's for.
What it's good for is to help you understand how people who think differently than you do are often not wrong. Other people are super great at things you can't hardly do at all, for reasons. Putting people good at X doing Y instead is a formula for dissatisfaction for those putting and those put. People naturally try to sort themselves into work that they are good at, where how they think works best.
Great actors, pilots, artists, surgeons, musicians and engineers would mostly do one another's jobs very, very badly.
That is not to say there aren't hucksters peddling it for what it is useless for, but that is on the hucksters and their pigeons.
it's a non-predictive meaningless classification that varies in time and has significant error bars. it is a horoscope applied by poorly trained, biased corporate managers. the only people that find it seemingly useful are inexperienced or incompetent managers
In other words, you don't understand it either. That is not surprising: you would need to learn something. That would involve work, so is understandably unpopular.
Saying "You just don't get it" isn't really an argument. The only times I've seen Myers-Briggs used are either as harmless entertainment ("Look at this meme. I'm such a INFP, tee hee.") or in Brazil-esque corporate settings where it could actually affect your employment ("Sorry, we were hoping for a XSTX person"). Sure, my experience is purely anecdotal much like most people here, but you could've shown us a counterexample, instead of wasting time implying that another user is a lazy moron.
You mention that hucksters peddle it for things that it's isn't useful for, but in what context is it useful? The realization that people have different ways of thinking, abilities and interest, which in turn means they are good at different kinds of work isn't the invention of the MBTI. Why does a 4-axis test help with this? Why should people take it seriously, especially considering it's highly commercialized?
Indeed, they undermine their own argument that it has utility: "People naturally try to sort themselves into work that they are good at, where how they think works best." So why then would an employer need to know your allegedly accurate MBTI, when your application for the job and presumably effort in developing and maintaining the necessary skills already indicates that you're applying to the work you're good at?
The linked article is about the use of Myers-Briggs in a workplace context, and the staggering lack of evidence of its efficacy for making useful predictions in that context. If Myers-Briggs is useful in your marriage, or your local PTA meetings or whatever, maybe there is evidence for its usefulness in that context, I don't know. As "a thing for employers," which is what this thread is about, there is no evidence that MBTI rises above the level of phrenology or other pseudo-scientific claptrap.
Anyways, you're just missing my point. You just don't get what my point is for. You don't understand it either.
Myers-Briggs did not discover the idea that people have different personalities and different strengths and weaknesses. Nobody is questioning this.
Like Astrology, Meyers-Briggs is a specific system of categorizing personality types with a lot of lore about how the types interacts. There is no evidence that MB is any better than astrology or the theory of humors or any other arbitrary categorization for this purpose.
Btw is your comment implying that only certain MBTI types are able to become musicians or pilots or engineers? Because that at lease a falsifiable statement which is quite interesting.
Yet, when somebody puts in work to systematize that understanding, you do. If you know a better way to organize the knowledge, publish that.
> evidence that MB is any better than astrology or the theory of humors
Better at what? Invariably whoever imagined they are debunking it shows how little predictive value it has about behavior, proving only that they have no conception of what it is for.
People have often imagined they were debunking astrology by showing that sun signs have no predictive value, and completely missing that the signs are purely a randomization device: if they had any predictive value, they would be a failure.
Interestingly, the CIA spy that Lex Fridman had on [0] his podcast said that all the spy agencies use MBTI and that he (interviewee) thinks they are of value.
It is an interrogation technique—nothing more. If you get stressed about lying as most people do you will probably get more stressed during a polygraph and your physical response will be measurable. This allows them to pressure you into admitting something you rather not admit. If you are a sociopath or practiced you will probably do just fine.
In fact, my pet theory is that some of our problems with policing in the US are a direct result of hiring practices such as the use of personality tests and the polygraph. I suspect you may inadvertently pass people who are experienced liars at a far greater than normal rate under normal interviewing practices.
But the problem is that (as far as I'm aware) most of the people running these tests also believe that polygraphs are magic lie detecting machines. So you get false negatives of people failing even though they're not being deceptive, while people who know what's up can lie and breeze past...
He says it's not a lie detector test, but a variance detector. /shrug
I expect the CIA polygraph detectors are super skilled and can detect if you're messing them around. Also I think there's a difference if you're trying to mess with a civilian polygraph detector (to cause confusion for a crime), verses one where you're trying to get a job at the agency.
Here's a secret. They don't really care about any readings. It's just a tool for interrogation and gaslighting you. If you're doing stuff like squeezing your sphincter, yea they have sensors on the chairs to detect that.
Polygraphers are skilled at reading people & telling stories. But them reading the machines? It's kinda nonsense - they'd only read results to find excuses to gaslight you. They pretend to rip off the polygraph sheets and yell. Playing good cop/bad cop and making up stories to try to build a rapport. It's really just an interrogation. If you can handle being yelled at for a week, then you'd pass.
Polygraphs are a deterrence against weak-willed people. If you're so weak to crack to a machine that measures sweat, heart rate and breathing - you'd probably break some foreign actors. It's basically govt LARPing, but for interrogating hires. The vast majority of people that do polygraphs believe it works, so it's not so useless.
The CIA also uses polygraphs which have been found "inaccurate, may be defeated by countermeasures, and are an imperfect or invalid means of assessing truthfulness"
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[ 1089 ms ] story [ 1023 ms ] threadI was surprised there wasn't any mention of a very interesting issue here, i.e. MBTI and other typological instruments come with user manuals, training, etc., and those materials specifically say "do not use this for hiring".
This is true even in marketing materials...Here's an example directly from the Myers-Briggs Company website:
https://www.themyersbriggs.com/en-us/company/press/press/202...
Even as a personal growth tool the instrument itself is kinda meh, but the soft science behind it is pretty fascinating...
And if you are concerned your employer is going to misuse your MBTI type somehow, 1) know your type first, ideally before they do 2) learn the associated relational blind spots and decide how you'll work around them 3) call yourself a "reformed XXXX" because basically the deeper theory is that any given personality type is similar to an illness in a lot of ways. Oh and 4) this may not be a very good workplace, good luck out there.
I'd never ask about this, the number of bumps on someone's head, or if the candidate still beats their spouse. However, the best response would be a candidate who would laugh and say, "I think you know enough of my capabilities and personality from this interview process, already"
I know some would give the type that they feel best matches the position, which, I guess they are also desperate for a job in that case.
Unfortunately from what I've seen some hiring teams will give a questionnaire to fill out and a) it's not labeled as any specific type of questionnaire, plus b) you don't get to know your results. One sales company administered a combined IQ test and personality instrument this way. Pretty cringe. They had no certification or corporate permission or anything, just a copy paste test done attitude.
Otherwise there's also the post-hire event in which a trainer offers insights, among which is some personality type sorting and theory, and even one on one coaching. Some of this kind of thing is absolutely worth it depending on the situation. For example you've identified someone you want to work more closely with in future projects, so you want to learn how they see themselves and their contribution.
So it's best to feel it out, see if you can find a good way to respond to the specific circumstances at work without raising the stakes for yourself. Or basically broadcasting your personal relational blind spots as part of a complaint-driven process. :-)
It's true that interviews aren't always easy to maneuver, but the interview process of today reflects the manager, teammates, and workplace of tomorrow.
The first line about getting what I'm saying is typically used to telegraph disagreement beyond the point of consideration, which kind of weirdly raises the stakes for you, rhetorically. Humor is better, or feel free to tell me to pound sand because you are about to drop a truth bomb.
A potential employer will never know what my MBTI type is, so they can't misuse it.
You might be surprised to find how easy it is to make a very good guess, after all there are 16 types and this usually narrows down to 3-4 common applicant types given the job and field. If you know how to differentiate between those types, or have friends who are of those types, it's going to be hard not to make a close guess.
If you want to take on the global MBTI cabal it's important to learn the game IMO. The obvious weaknesses will become your friend rather than a point of defense to get intense about. Less MBTI-sucks and more MBTI-meh.
It's also available in other disciplines, e.g. I once took a course on how to determine personality characteristics from texts and emails. Some obvious stuff, but also some really fascinating ideas in there.
But it's still a guess. You don't actually know.
But it's irrelevant in a sense. As you say, there are so few types that it's not hard to make a better-than-chance guess for pretty much anybody you meet. As a job applicant, this is no different than what I expect -- the interviewer is going to be making a subjective assessment of me and how well I would fit into the team.
I wouldn't ever take an actual personality test for employment, though, because a company's willingness to engage in straight-up psuedoscience as a factor in making important decisions tells me something important, and unflattering, about that company.
Personality type theory shines exactly in those kinds of situations, where it works better to zoom in and look at group composition, isolating for specific perspectives and integrations, rather than zooming out to broader abstractions about humans or people in general.
It very often turns out that people have radically different ideas of what it means to get along, and who that should be done with, and when. Advising people to "make an effort to get along" can be extremely offensive when all parties have nearly exhausted their known resources for doing so.
At least it’s helpful for me to point at the ‘challenges’ section and tell people ‘I do this, please keep poking me until I give you attention’.
In the same way it’s helpful to have a literal definition of how other people think, because the idea that someone might deliberately go with a suboptimal idea because they value peace is absolutely foreign to me.
The implied undertone was that all others should accommodate the author and change themselves to better interact with the author so that his needs were met and he could be a productive member of the work force.
But what does that imply the other way around? If I were to write a play book like this, were this person to also adapt to my ways/wants? Or would this be too much to ask?
Working in any professional environment to me implies adapting to others around at least a bit (without loosing what makes out our personality). Out of respect to other human beings alone I think this is decent human behavior.
But as said, to me these writings sound like excuses to expect one sided adaption and I could say "pampering". But maybe that is just me.
I was using this style of enquiry with new hires 20+ years ago as a natural step to ensure we would get the best out of them - it just seemed like an obvious thing to do.
I don't like sticking square pegs in round holes so if by understanding, and being able to accommodate, personal characteristics, we can make the person more comfortable they'll generally contribute more, faster, and better.
You hate travelling in rush-hour? fine, set your own hours to fit in with the team requirements.
E.g. for myself I'd say: "No distractions - if I'm obviously focused on something do NOT disturb me - send an email" and "I'm productive when my brain gets intensely into something - when it doesn't I don't sit around I go do something else" and "I work better in darkness or dim light, or overnight" and "Sometimes I need to do intense random brain-storming sessions to clear the crap out my head".
If you decide to stay on your type-script, your life will be more repetitive than it otherwise would. Many of the same problems, repeated. Your preferences will be less flexible by definition, so your scope of decision-making and even perceptual skill will be limited by subconscious pressure inputs, for example.
Also, you can more readily be manipulated by those who understand your blind spots better than you do. (This makes some people angry, but IMO it's better to embrace it and find a way to work on those)
However, to transcend one's own type requires intense learning, growth, and therefore stress. And the concepts here are so new that there is very little support available should you decide to really go in this direction.
Anyway. Personally I can understand either way. But the theoretical answer to "is having a personality type a problem" is both a hard no and a hard yes. This applies both for yourself and others as they interact with you.
BTW have you ever gotten into acting, even on the side? Asking because your comment reminded me of some people I've known with similar experiences.
Except the Myers-Briggs types are meaningless.
> the idea that someone might deliberately go with a suboptimal idea because they value peace is absolutely foreign to me.
That seems like you're lying to yourself. Everyone goes along with tons of suboptimal ideas or has enough money and power that everyone does what they want or is insufferable and everyone avoids. You could be in the latter two categories, but that doesn't seem likely.
Yet oddly enough just about everyone has at least one MB type.
The religious right embraces the doctrine of "original sin". The secular left focuses on the concept of "unconscious bias". It seems to be part of the human condition across all cultures and ideologies to view people as inherently flawed, and to see the path toward sanctification as being recognition and never ending struggle against those inherent flaws.
Myers-Briggs is just the LinkedIn counterpart to this. Fodder for "Tell me about your strengths and weaknesses, and a situation in which you've had to overcome the latter" interview questions. You're supposed to don your hairshirt, beat your breast, and talk about your struggle for salvation in order to demonstrate piety to the interviewer.
Win/win.
I remember in college I applied to over 100 internships and my friend said “I don’t understand how you wrote over 100 cover letters.” My response was “I didn’t. If they ask for a cover letter I don’t want to work for them.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934135
I wish I could find the golden comment of an HN user realizing that he has used cover letters to exclude candidates, but he can't do that for those who didn't supply one - putting the latter at an advantage.
If you want to work with a think tank, a nonprofit doing exciting and important work, a startup with an amazing idea that really captures your imagination, or any other org where the big picture needs to matter as much or more to everybody involved than the content of the PRs, then the cover letter likely matters more than the resume.
No judgement. I use those top 5 products. It's just pretty myopic to deem cover letters as unnecessary when that's only true for people with very specific goals and ideas about what matters in a job, even if they happen to be very common.
I didn't suggest this, at all. I suggested the value of a cover letter is not some constant across the tech sector, from startups (sample size = 2) to the big 5 (sample size = 2).
Changing jobs is a big life investment. I would prefer it not be a blind date with one-way conversations from somebody likely abusive and neglectful looking for a surf to abuse. If the potential employer is instead interested in potential they are sending a signal they are willing to invest in you.
Myers Briggs gets a lot of hate due to low precision but it’s a cheap and fast assessment. There are much better assessments of personality but they take more time and are more invasive.
Then it would be guessing just the same as using no metric at all. This is only worse if the candidate is so naive as to believe they are of superior consideration than the value of a simple measure.
If not (and I’ve not seen it) then the candidate is just stating a preference for not working with companies that are lazy intellectually. That’s not naive that’s sensible.
Do you have a citation?
I'd rather take the intuition of some interviewer because at least that's based on something real. I mean if objectivity is the only criterion you simply may want to roll a set of dice for the applicants because those are cheaper than Myers-Briggs consultants.
the attitude of replacing useful human judgements with useless metrics in the name of eliminating bias is one of the worst trends in modern hiring.
That something real is called discrimination.
the relevant question is whether astrology for nerds is better than human judgement just because the former is perceived as impersonal.
If someone says a particular type fits them well, that helps you understand them quickly. And if they say the type they get doesn't describe them, then you don't need to use that information.
"McCarley and Carskadon (1983) replicated these findings and demonstrated that across a 5-week test-retest interval, 50% of the participants received a different classification on one or more of the scales."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232494957_Cautionar...
I don't think it has much value beyond some sort of throwaway catalyst for conversation.
Worse, it's the Market for Lemons. The jobs nobody takes get seen by more people because they stay on the market, and so they are over-represented amongst observers. Then the horrible people at your company start saying things like, "everybody is doing it". Everybody does a lot of things that nobody should be doing.
... it's the same when someone asks what my horoscope is. Thanks for the red flag.
I learned the term WRT insulin for diabetes. I think the key is that the scale you use for determining something (fees, insulin dose) changes depending on other characteristics of the person
Not to me; I am actually not familiar with any clear meaning for the phrase "sliding scale". It's just a thing people sometimes say.
If you wanted to say that your score on one axis could affect how your answers to questions on another axis are interpreted, you'd need to call them something like "non-independent". Not much call for that kind of terminology.
Can you provide any examples of someone using "sliding scale" in the sense you suggest?
No right minded person would hire me for an “energetic, outgoing go-getter” job.
"And that’s it — there’s simply very little data on how well the Myers-Briggs (and other type-based personality tests) measures personality and even less on how it might predict job performance."
What's the deal here? Companies are so desperate for any criterion to reduce the pile of applicants? Do they believe it helps? Do they look for a few of these profiles and never the others?
Hiring is hard, I know, but I only know of these models in the context of understanding existing teams, not hiring for individual positions.
Yes. They are looking for anything that lends credibility to their choices and that they believe objectively guides them toward the right candidates. Truth is, it's a total crapshoot but no one wants to acknowledge or believe that.
It's actually pretty draining and difficult doing multi-way comparisons between so many candidates, let alone doing it day after day. And recruiters/HR are only human.
So any technology or approach that can attach a number/rank a job application is seen as hugely welcome. If Bob scored 56 out of 100, and Sue scored 87, then even if we have doubts about the methodology, surely we can still go ahead and reject Bob based on such a large difference! Then we don't need to spend a lot of time looking at Bob's resume, we can screen him out early on.
The dirty secret is that it doesn't even matter that much whether the scoring process has any real science behind it - the mere fact of attaching a number is so desirable that employers are wide open and begging for this kind of capability. At the end of the day, who really cares if Alice was better that Bob or not? Virtually no companies have the HR performance monitoring in place to even know this anyway.
That's why in the HR world, psych testing firms are not quite fly by night, but they are the kind of companies an entrepeneurial type can set up in a couple of weeks with very little tech but a lot of powerpoints, and immediately start selling to really big companies that will funnel a lot of money their way. Such companies normally make a big song and dance about the scientific verifiability of their technology/approach, even to the extent of having on-staff psychologists.
Many people would feel though that the process has little more validity than reading tea leaves, or drawing up astrology charts.
It's also easy to see the financial incentive of removing the possibility for someone to get an "unremarkable" result. Telling people that they're mostly average, even if for a lot of people it's the truth, doesn't convince them they're getting their money's worth.
- The types do not indicate the degree of tendency in each axis. That can vary within a type and isn't captured by the type code at all. The types just indicate the direction. There is some evidence that children tend to have more extreme preferences which balance out people mature.
- Have you seen Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow? The "fast" and "slow" thinking described there is very similar to what the MBTI calls "perception" (fast) and "judgement" (slow). And notably those categories do have strong evidence of an innate tendency which remains consistent over time (but only if you don't bias the participant by asking them to approach the task in certain way indicating that this tendency can be overridden by the appropriateness of certain thinking mode to the task at hand)
It's a preference. You're making it out to be more than it is. It doesn't preclude that someone can have little preference for one tendency over another. Most times test results give you percentages.
> Telling people that they're mostly average, even if for a lot of people it's the truth, doesn't convince them they're getting their money's worth.
What money? Who pays for this shit? There's like a million free MBTI tests online.
As for who pays for this stuff: At least two of the FAANGs pay consultants thousands of dollars to run these tests as team building exercises. There's a thriving market for this stuff.
Also a friendly reminder that a quarter standard deviations above the mean vs. the same distance below the mean is quite often a trivial difference in population statistics. And it should be nonsense (pseudoscience if you will) to make the distinction. A much more interesting statistic are the outliers. And grouping an outlier with a person who is 0.05 SD from the mean is just confusing at best.
Heck we don’t even know what personalty is, or if it is even a useful scientific term. Evidence suggests that peoples behavior varies wildly between situations, way more then any preconceived notion of behavior dictated by personality.
If tests show a normal distribution of a personality trait, it is most likely because it has been standardized to do exactly that. Not because people’s behavioral patterns align neatly in our favorite distribution.
However it does correlate with behavior, otherwise personality traits would be completely dead as a science. But the effect is very weak next to the effect of the situation. Diverse personality traits will cheat if the environment is conducive to cheating behavior.
I would put personality in the same camp as religious believes or political leanings. An effect that mildly alters behavior, but not enough to actually matter in most circumstances.
Preference is not nothing. It reflects what people like and want.
Preference for these traits, e.g. introversion, is a fairly reliable predictor of behavior, but it doesn't matter if it is or not, if someone lies to themselves entirely (however likely that is). The purpose is regurgitating to the test-taker what they like and want. I don't see how a company could make good use of it.
https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/253790/science-of...
" You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life. "
If they treated it like an exercise to make people talk to each other about styles of communication, I wouldn't hate it as bad. They usually treat it like something conclusive, science based, etc. Meaning it might drive what assignments you get, training, etc. That's...dumb.
Most people still believe that your peak heart rate is 220 - age when the paper that determined this showed no one actually met that at all and the variance was massive, the same is true of Myers Briggs we are a long way away from the original science with the use of these tests and since no one reads the papers they don't realise how badly its being applied.
Any personality test is bad in my opinion and I wouldn't like being tested in it but this statement and article feels like feel good pseudoscience. Is there any data on any kind of test that it works? At least for Myers-Briggs it has been tested and it hasn't been proved or disproved.
It was a half-day seminar. "Professionals" gave the tests and told everyone their type. That took only an hour. The rest of the time was spent doing role-playing, where you were supposed to use your coworkers' MB types to adjust your interaction with them in various settings.
It was a waste of time then and I bet it still is.
https://generallythinking.com/richard-feynman-on-thinking-pr...
Interesting. It wouldn't have occurred to me that was the message at all until you said this. My takeaway would be "a really good salesman caught the ear of some executive somewhere."
Though Apple did a pretty good job of doing that already.
HR was so patronizing, like, "I bet you wouldn't have known that about yourself if it wasn't for us!"
"Uhhmm... yeah I would. ENTJ every weekend and INTJ most other days."
It used to be used at a large company that I worked for. The preferred types were RED and BLUE around 2010. GREEN AND YELLOW I remember were overlooked for promotions. Everyone was trying to be the biggest idiot in the room to prove they were RED person. It propogated bullying and prevented good teamwork. Credit Stealing was legitimized with preference for RED. If Helen Fischer is correct and RED people are the closest to testesterone heavy people, the RED people have the shortest neural circuits.
To me, MBTI or Big 5 (not the actual tests, but their framing of aspects of personality) are mental tool kits for trying to make better predictions from limited data (i.e., the interview process). As a manager, I've found them incredibly helpful for avoiding problems (i.e., assigning the wrong task to a person).
Interestingly, in my personal experience, I've found logicians (ISTJs in MTBI) seem to be the most resistant to quantifying aspects of personality.
If measuring skull shape during the interview process was a) socially acceptable and b) actually predictive of outcomes, why not? The problem is that it is neither. The reason that it is not a) is because it was not b) and thus easily misused to justify stereotypes.
The MBTI is tea leaves reading. It has been experimentally shown to have no relationship to reality and no predictive power time and time again. Even the axis don’t make sense as some are heavily correlated.
The Big 5 is useful but far more complicated. It uses scale and has no pretty little boxes but at least it seems to consistently measure something.
No, just no.
The Big 5 was statistically designed using factor analysis so that its axis are independent. The axis actually came before their description. It’s actual serious research. Psychologists found that some characteristics clustered together and then spent time understanding what these clusters actually measured.
The MBTI however is all over the place. It was designed "using" Jung theory - itself a heap load of garbage - and its axis are total chaos. They even correlate between each others. That’s part of why the distribution of MBTI types is actually so skewed.
Seriously the MBTI is a perfect exemple of what’s wrong with psychology nowadays. On the one hand you have academics trying to do serious research and the other hand you have people motivated by greed pushing random rubbish and gathering a following in the corporate world like a pseudo-cult. It’s both sad and maddening.
Ima guess you score low on openness. And probably T as opposed to F on MBTI.
Look, the reality is that almost all interviewing is far from scientific. I'm sure there are worse heuristics many of us use than MBTI[1]. The comment being downvoted is being perceived as trying to appeal to an argument of extremes: It doesn't follow that if you're following some poor methodology that one should consider even crazier ideas.
If we had nailed interviewing down to a science, I could see the point in the comment. Instead it's coming off as "Hey if you're going to do something imperfect, you should consider something extremely wrong!" We all have mostly wrong approaches to interviewing.
[1] Stuff I've seen:
Rejecting a candidate because they read Chapters 1-4 but not 5 of a textbook when the interview prep material mentioned chapters 1-5. Note that chapter 5 is not used at all for the job.
Favoring a candidate because of a strong handshake (cliched, but happens!)
Gauging the enthusiasm a candidate by assuming everyone is an extrovert (fairly common).
Using the MBTI is an improvement to these!
it sounds like you're assigning tasks based on prejudicial categorization of genetic traits (as MTBI claims to be) instead of actual demonstrated job performance.
Not a huge sample size, but everyone has agreed on the output of their tests. Only in a few instances (like 1 of the strengths for a few people) were there surprises, (ex: Woo under Influencing) but they understood why it was a top strength and how it did make sense even though they wouldn't have chosen that for themselves if they were tasked with picking their top 5 strengths from the list instead of doing the test.
I don't like the personality tests at all. A strong team IMO should have a mix of personalities and strengths and I prefer to build teams based on just a few core values. From that approach, I've gotten a great mix of both personalities and strengths organically.
I could see maybe some teams using personality tests (ex: for sales) to architect a desired team type in a specific industry. Research is all over the place though on what's ideal. And can it be trusted as a hiring framework?
There are many other factors to consider. Let's say 5 specific personality traits perform the best in the aggregate in sales for one industry. But then people with those traits may be hard to retain. They may not get along with one another. They may create a toxic environment. There are too many things that are very hard to measure IMO to use that as your framework.
So I don't buy the personality test stuff in general. I suppose it may be a decent data point as your example of avoiding "assigning the wrong task to a person", but a strengths based approach makes more sense for that to me.
I think of MBTI as a framework for categorizing human tendencies. But the real power of MBTI is in cognitive functions as vocabulary to classify how people will react in situations.
Given a person without major forcing functions changing their behavior, what tendencies do they have?
Cognitive functions defines a set of tendencies that you can have a discussion around, assuming you agree on what each cognitive function really means.
For instance, someone with Ti as a primary function subconsciously looks for correctness that can be validated. Whereas someone with Fi as a primary function subconsciously evaluates whether someone is expressing their true self or not. This can be used as a manager tool to do behavioral risk management.
But everyone has forcing functions that change their behavior, and people with enough practice can get good at anything. As an evaluation tool MBTI probably accounts for at most 10-25% of the outcome. And the older you get, the more well rounded your cognitive stack becomes, making it even less of a predictor of your behavior.
Additionally, cognitive functions are abstract enough to not correlate highly to specific tasks, although one can certainly argue a correlation (I've heard arguments where programming suits Ti and Ni the best).
I’m sorry to say, but your methods are flawed, as are your predictions. Your methods may only be helpful in confirming your biases, nothing more.
There's an internal, voluntary, just-for-fun MBTI within Google that breaks down stats of the test-taking population. 75+% of takers are N's (vs. an estimated 25% in the general population). The number of INTJs (22%, vs. ~3% in the general population) itself outnumbers all S types combined.
While it's possible that Google is unrepresentative of the general population (something much more likely in 2005 than 2022, though), I think it's more likely that N's are just more drawn to completing a personality test and sharing their results with the company.
yet everyone here completely understands the dozens of archetypes and human personality portraits invoked by hundreds of ever changing memes and meme-speak...
"don't be that guy" "tell me youre x without telling me ..." ms-paint wojacks, etc
I think people who's pattern recognition works great on classifying others in the private (read:petty) freedom of their own mind are also the exact brittle, neurotically vulnerable hypocrites bristling about other's pattern recognition seeing them... (I'm all the latter but embrace it lol)
The same crowd that loves quantified self and concrete "evidence" would hate to be seen as they are by actual tally of what they do and how their time is spent, or especially to have their most common interpersonal reactions categorized into a dozen buckets, of gut-reactions, core values, status stuff, etc.
Any whiff that someone has figured you out and hark, all of a sudden you contain multitudes! Meanwhile, developing advertising software to build ever more accurate portraits of consumer types...
MBTI is as useful as you make it, as are harry potter groups, memes, vibes, DSM-mental illness groups, shakespeare's tragedies, etc.
They work great if you put them to work, shrug. It's just a word-substrate to better deal with the intuitions you already have going on about people subconsciously.
meh, I guess I'd just much rather know exactly what stereotypes / impressions I invoke in others with my looks/identity markers (age sex race etc), behaviors, class mannerisms, aesthetics, posture etc.... and then take it from there if I don't like what I see in the mirror.
(seeing people seeing us is always a mirror i think)
Knowing my MB category was amusing but not useful.
Knowing my Big 5 percentiles - very useful. Understanding where I land on disagreeableness and openness to ideas made my life a lot easier (both at home and work). At least because I have a framework to understand personality differences when dealing with teammates and what frustrates me (like people being close-minded or indecisive, or both).
My current company doesn't do it, but I would support mixing and matching people with complementary strengths. Like match someone with high openness to ideas to explore various angles on a particular problem and someone with high conscientiousness to get the project across the finish line.
For example the "generally people flip all their letters at the end of the work day" principle with four-letter type, or the way you can extract cognitive functionality from the four letters to explore potential cognitive gifts and blind spots.
I've arranged groups like you stated and found some interesting takeaways. Like one of the partners can perceive an annoyance with the work requirement and they become an effective interference machine team rather than a results-team. It's tricky because they are never really working in isolation and one partner will also be looking for outside opportunities and so on.
There is some interesting theory on this, which expresses that not only do some kinds of people work effectively together really well, but when they are also matched with the right project or field, they will carry the project out in a way that exceeds normal expectations. By definition they have more energy to spend and it replenishes quickly.
My MB letters tentatively are INTJ. I say tentatively because I took a couple of free online tests. Those might not be very accurate. Knowing those letters never aided me in anything. The only interesting that has come out of it is that I discovered a weird subculture of people who wish their MB letter were exactly those. Some kind of a weird obsession.
Big 5 - I took Jordan Peterson's paid test. Discovering that I was more disagreeable and more open to ideas than roughly 90% of population was helpful with self awareness and managing expectations when dealing with others. For example, I don't expect most of my colleagues to be as critical of the company leadership or company policies as I am. And I fully expect some of my colleagues to shut down my ideas for deviating too much from existing patterns.
The article's answer: "We just don’t know."
Whole bunch of words in that article and some interesting background, but zero effort to address the title of the piece. It's like they meant to be going somewhere, provided some interesting background information, and then just stopped. No hypotheses, no interviewing a company to ask them why, just a shrug.
If you wanted to say "Companies shouldn't use Myers-Briggs," you should have made that the title.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Colors_(personality)
My impression from some brief training was that it's based on temperament theory and not a knock off of MBTI.
No.[1]
> My impression from some brief training was that it's based on temperament theory and not a knock off of MBTI.
From your link:
> According to this personality temperament theory, which is a refined version of the popular Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) [...]
To-may-to, to-mah-to.
[1]: https://realcolors.org/
https://realcolors.org/what_is_realcolors/history/
Anytime they start by rewinding to millennia ago, that's temperament theory. Keirsey's temperament theory that they mention is fundamentally different from typical MBTI in lots of ways. In fact they can both be used to complement each other.
So it's different, or not, depending on whether you want to be accurate, and true to details, or not. (Also someone should correct the way the Wikipedia article is written regarding MBTI)
The thing that jumped at me is that it is not some small companies that are using these. US Banks apparently used it with its private capital customers[1] ( I am almost curious as to how it was applied ).
[1]https://realcolors.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/11/US...
I'd imagine that in capital markets it's used to help keep things more objective, to lower the personal stakes for all parties, and demonstrate an interest in constructive partnership. One of the best relationship techniques is helping the other feel understood, and that is also where tools like this one will always stand out. If you can't connect with someone via the normal methods, it's usually worth trying to connect through their self-identified objective preferences.
Anyway, just some thoughts...
[1]: https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/214
What it's good for is to help you understand how people who think differently than you do are often not wrong. Other people are super great at things you can't hardly do at all, for reasons. Putting people good at X doing Y instead is a formula for dissatisfaction for those putting and those put. People naturally try to sort themselves into work that they are good at, where how they think works best.
Great actors, pilots, artists, surgeons, musicians and engineers would mostly do one another's jobs very, very badly.
That is not to say there aren't hucksters peddling it for what it is useless for, but that is on the hucksters and their pigeons.
You mention that hucksters peddle it for things that it's isn't useful for, but in what context is it useful? The realization that people have different ways of thinking, abilities and interest, which in turn means they are good at different kinds of work isn't the invention of the MBTI. Why does a 4-axis test help with this? Why should people take it seriously, especially considering it's highly commercialized?
Anyways, you're just missing my point. You just don't get what my point is for. You don't understand it either.
Like Astrology, Meyers-Briggs is a specific system of categorizing personality types with a lot of lore about how the types interacts. There is no evidence that MB is any better than astrology or the theory of humors or any other arbitrary categorization for this purpose.
Btw is your comment implying that only certain MBTI types are able to become musicians or pilots or engineers? Because that at lease a falsifiable statement which is quite interesting.
Yet, when somebody puts in work to systematize that understanding, you do. If you know a better way to organize the knowledge, publish that.
> evidence that MB is any better than astrology or the theory of humors
Better at what? Invariably whoever imagined they are debunking it shows how little predictive value it has about behavior, proving only that they have no conception of what it is for.
People have often imagined they were debunking astrology by showing that sun signs have no predictive value, and completely missing that the signs are purely a randomization device: if they had any predictive value, they would be a failure.
[0] https://youtu.be/T3FC7qIAGZk?t=6127
In fact, my pet theory is that some of our problems with policing in the US are a direct result of hiring practices such as the use of personality tests and the polygraph. I suspect you may inadvertently pass people who are experienced liars at a far greater than normal rate under normal interviewing practices.
[0] https://youtu.be/T3FC7qIAGZk?t=5941
He says it's not a lie detector test, but a variance detector. /shrug
I expect the CIA polygraph detectors are super skilled and can detect if you're messing them around. Also I think there's a difference if you're trying to mess with a civilian polygraph detector (to cause confusion for a crime), verses one where you're trying to get a job at the agency.
Polygraphers are skilled at reading people & telling stories. But them reading the machines? It's kinda nonsense - they'd only read results to find excuses to gaslight you. They pretend to rip off the polygraph sheets and yell. Playing good cop/bad cop and making up stories to try to build a rapport. It's really just an interrogation. If you can handle being yelled at for a week, then you'd pass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#Effectiveness