It's a guide, not an answer. And it's pretty damn good at what it does.
Another thing to look into and try out are the "Clifton Strengths". Now unfortunately, you have to pay to take the test, but you can just buy the companion book and get a code along with it.
What I like about clifton strengths is they are more targeted, and you can more easily use the information to actually better yourself. You can focus on improving your strengths, or recognizing how they can or cannot be used in your profession.
For example, my #1 strength is adaptability. I do well under pressure and even look forward to emergency-like situations. I had always wondered why all the engineers would freak out when we would get hacked, or get DDOS'd, etc. and I would immediately spring into action and handle things, and even enjoyed these ugly situations. As a manager, if you know your team's individual strengths, you can better set them up for success.
> I do well under pressure and even look forward to emergency-like situations.
I hate working under pressure. It's agonizing. However, I also produce my best work when under pressure. So, I guess I get to choose between producing the best I can and being happy!
People don't understand Myers-Briggs. The scientific experiments all test against questionnaire results, which are admittedly pretty useless. But the theory posits internal mechanisms, and nobody has determined a reliable to measure this yet (except expert-guided self-assessment - which is pretty reliable, but generally disregarded by researchers). And most of the studies don't even use this model, and fallback to a frankly ridiculous trait model.
The two fundamental distinctions made by the theory are introversion/extraversion and "judgement"/"perception" aka rational/irrational which remarkably similar to Dual-process theory's System 1 and System 2 thinking (as popularised by Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow).
Both of these models have a ton of experimental evidence validating them. Myers-Briggs just needs a reformulated hypothesis that removes all the Jungian jargon, and explicitly puts it in these terms. When that happens, and with advances in neuroscience, the flood gates for evidence for Myers-Briggs will open.
I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on this topic, and I'm vaguely planning to turn it into a book at some point.
> But the theory posits internal mechanisms, and nobody has determined a reliable to measure this yet
That's the generalized problem with psychoanalysis. It rings true, but lies outside Popperian lines. It's not science in the contemporary sense.
Then again, psychology within Popperian lines isn't doing so great. My hot take is that modern psychology's problem is not about overemphasizing biology or anything like that -- it's that it tries to be "enhanced behaviorism": start from what's most superficial and apparent and try to find e.g. what's the molecule of love or the rational (cognitive therapy) way of dealing with depression. Physics got where it is by postulating general principles (e.g. conservation of energy) from shreds of evidence.
To do this with psychology takes you outside Popperian lines.
I think your use of ‘problem’ subtends a subtle bias. We tend to take ‘science’ as the golden standard of knowledge, and I’m all for that, but when dealing with human cognitiuon it kind of breaks down anyway because we find ourselves dealing with qualia sooner or later anyway. Expecting falsifiability at the basis of the the cognitive pyramid is, at least for the foreseeable non-cyberpunk future, a bit of a stretch.
In the case of qualia, whilst we cannot make direct measurements, we can make indirect measurements, most especially of behaviour in response to some stimulus or phenomenon.
Though that can also go poorly. Microeconomics is based on the foundation of the qualia of utility, as an example. Which presents numerous problems.
I took my first MBTI test by running mbti.exe on my 386's DOS command prompt. After answering all the questions it gave me a score on a 10 point scale for each letter. So for instance I scored an 8 on the Introversion/Extroversion scale, but only a 6 on the iNtuition/Sensing scale. As such when I read the ensuing results/profile information I would always check INTP and ISTP knowing that i personally fell somewhere inbetween. That had to be somewhere in the mid 90s.
The four letter code has only ever been about having a conversational starting point, it has never been a binary thing. Anyone that ever said (like this article, or your comment) made that up in their head and then projected it on the world around them. Very INxJ behavior ;)
For whatever reason I had multiple teachers in K12 who thought MBPI was a fun thing to do in class (not sure why) (really, I even had a teacher in college think that after it'd been somewhat been debunked) and I remember at least one of the times I did it showing scores for each category on an axis rather than just telling you your "type." Which finally revealed to me why I seemed to switch between J and P randomly when taking it: mine was just barely over the middle in one direction on the J/P score and I finally realized "oh, no wonder it changes, I'm right in the middle." And then I realized it put you solidly in a category when you were only one point away from being in a different one and thought "this is kind of ridiculous."
The MBTI assigns binary categories to 8 thinking processes. It then posits that people have an ordered preference for using those 8. But the degree to which they prefer 1 versus another leaves plenty of room for a normal distribution by the time we get to the level of describing a person's personality.
The Myers-Briggs categories are more neutrally named than those of the "Big Five".
SENSING VS INTUITION is called OPENNESS in the Big Five.
THINKING VS. FEELING is called AGREEABLENESS
JUDGING VS. PERCEIVING is called CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
So people who rate as SENSING, THINKING, and PERCEIVING in the Myers Briggs scale would be rated as "low" in openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness in the Big Five.
Seems pretty clear why the Big Five would never catch on in popular culture. Oh, and the fifth category is "Neuroticism". Not exactly a neutral label either.
I think even if it were more neutrally named it would still be less popular than Myers-Brigs because MB gives you an either or which gives you the simple [E/I][S/N][T/F][J/P] categories which maps to just 16 convenient categories where the Big Five tests spit out numerical scores ranking you relative to the population. The former lends itself to the kind of short in grouping and desire for fast categorization that keeps horoscopes popular, Myer-Brigs giving you ENSP is a clear group to belong to with all sorts of "what does it mean to be ENSP" articles to write, where the former doesn't really give you a clear concise slot to use it in. The closest would just be ranking high or low in each category but that's 32 groups and long to type compared to the 4 letter MB personality groups.
It's simple. It's the same reason that people are fascinated by their sign and horoscope. People want to feel like they belong to a group. They want to feel like they belong and can relate to other people. This gives them a "scientific" (the article mentions that it has long been abandoned as useful) validation. To the lay person it's very hard to explain to them how, how according to this theory and such, it doesn't really work. People are going to always like things like this, because it's easy to relate to and makes them feel better about not a single anomaly that is like no one else.
You're exactly right, I think, as to the reason most people are attracted to Myers-Briggs.
That said, it's odd that the narrative persists of M-B having been discredited, when, as the article mentions but doesn't explore, the opposite is true. Myers-Briggs traits strongly correlate with the categories in the FFA, which is the dominant model in psychology, as the article states. But this doesn't even include the cross-correlations between the 4 MB traits and the 4 main FFA traits (minus neuroticism)
Myers-Briggs is in fact basically identical to FFA but in a different eigenbasis, and minus the "neuroticism" dimension. This information is available in every major source on MB vs FFA, including just on Wikipedia. And yet, the "MB as horoscope" idea continues, despite having been scientifically discredited, so to speak.
the mapping is roughly this:
E/I <=> Extroversion
N/S <=> Openness
F/T <=> Agreeableness
J/P <=> Conscientiousness
But it is fun to make fun of the MB-scale (and its enthusiasts) as a horoscope and it's also fun to USE its categories as horoscopes, and the first meme feeds off the second, so both persist.
>That said, it's odd that the narrative persists of M-B having been discredited, when, as the article mentions but doesn't explore, the opposite is true.
What? The article directly says M-B has been discredited:
>In academic circles, however, the test has long been discredited. While the Myers-Briggs test lumps people into “types,” most modern personality tests measure traits on a continuum. Another objection rests on the test’s inability to predict meaningful life outcomes. “Basically, there isn't an algorithm that translates how people answer into how they're likely to behave,” explains Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology at University College London. Today, this is considered a crucial element of a personality tests. The backlash against the Myers-Briggs test has been powerful – beyond being shunned by academics, a steady drip of articles over the years have condemned its shaky scientific grounding. But this hasn’t stopped diehard Myers-Briggs fans seeing themselves within the test’s categories.
You're falling into exactly the same trap that horoscope enthusiasts have, gesturing to vague correlations and associations with no scientific grounding or basis.
I'm not sure what the best way to link a source on HN is, but I'll do my best.
McCrae and Costa did a study in the 1980s that looked at correlations between MB and FFA, as part of a larger, longitudinal study on aging. There were 468 participants.
As you can see, these are extremely strong, and the reason F/T and J/P are in the 0.40s is the cross-correlation I was mentioning, with part of the T/F prediction being tied to intra/extraversion (0.19), and part of the P/J prediction being tied to openness (0.30), which is intuitively just what you'd expect.
The full table of 16 correlations is available here:
McCrae, Robert R; Costa, Paul T (1989). "Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from the Perspective of the Five-Factor Model of Personality". Journal of Personality. 57 (1): 17–40
...so that's one of the sources for the correlations I mentioned, though there have been other such studies. But as I said, the strange thing is that this information has been publicly available and is even referenced on both the M-B and FFA Wikipedia pages (i.e that M-B and FFA are more or less measuring the same thing) and yet the popular narrative remains that one is dogma while the other is pseudo-science.
(and sorry, yes indeed, the article directly says M-B has been discredited, which is part of the point I'm making. It SAYS that, but it doesn't offer any support for that claim, and the only data it cites shows the opposite)
(edit: author does cite one source, a Vox article, which has the same problem of not citing any data and also plugs the FFA, saying "the newer, empirically driven test focuses on entirely different categories" which suggests the Vox author has also not delved into the research. Most of the people quoted in both pieces make statements like "[using the M-B] would be questioned by my academic colleagues," which may suggest the echo-chamber nature of the problem)
>yet the popular narrative remains that one is dogma while the other is pseudo-science.
Because it's not "the popular narrative", it's a factual statement. MBTI is unsupported pseudoscience while the Five-Factor Model is the more widely accepted model in psychology.
You seem fixated on the correlation point, as if that provides any validity to MBTI. For instance, you cite the study you mention being referenced on Wikipedia but ignore the numerous other studies cited in the lengthy section detailing the various criticisms and problems with MBTI. The article even opens with:
>Though the MBTI resembles some psychological theories, it is commonly classified as pseudoscience, especially as it pertains to its supposed predictive abilities. The test exhibits significant scientific (psychometric) deficiencies, notably including poor validity (i.e. not measuring what it purports to measure, not having predictive power or not having items that can be generalized), poor reliability (giving different results for the same person on different occasions), measuring categories that are not independent (some dichotomous traits have been noted to correlate with each other), and not being comprehensive (due to missing neuroticism).[10][11][12][13] The four scales used in the MBTI have some correlation with four of the Big Five personality traits, which are a more commonly accepted framework.
Your fixation on the correlation between the two models is noted, but MBTI otherwise lacks a valid scientific basis.
Again, you are simply wrong on the facts. MBTI is indeed pseudo-science, and selective use of sources doesn't change that. You keep trying to frame this as a popular misconception when it is simply the academic consensus.
The same professor says that criticism of the MBTI is overblown.
The article doesn't back up the claim that predicting meaningful life outcomes is considered a crucial element of personality tests. It also doesn't define meaningful life outcomes.
‘One of the most useful effects of nerding out over Myers-Briggs or Enneagram is that it gives you a structure to easily relate to people in multiple modes. Either/both under stress or relaxed conditions gives you 4 modes. Already 4x better than “harmony or conflict”.
‘Such unflattening is good for all relationships. You can do it without crutches like Myers-Briggs but it will stress your reserves of compassion and empathy way more. So why not use any crutches that seem to help continue the game rather than blow it up under stress.’
This. Cerebral people tend to denounce personality types as pseudoscience, astrology, Barnum effect etc. which they likely are.
But the usefulness of personality types is that they are shorthand for people who are into them to describe themselves without going through every story in their lives. It gives people a kind of crude vocabulary to convey their rough self image without using a lot of words and without the need for repeated exposure. It is kind of like an aggregate statistic that is wrong but still useful.
Oddly enough, that is extremely valuable guide to reading their behaviors. They may self identify as a ENFP or whatever while being something else, but even knowing what they perceive themselves to be is extremely useful especially in relationships. In romantic relationships it helps you navigate unknowns by anticipating them (trust but verify still applies but this gives you some Bayesian priors).
Just because a tool is not scientific doesn’t mean it’s not useful and to be summarily dismissed. (Note the subtle point: I’m not saying all non scientific tools are useful — just that some are) You just have to know how to extract the signal.
P.s. the big 5 personality test is more scientific and reproducible and reports along dimensions in percentiles. This is useful for research but no one ever mentions their big 5 scores in casual conversation. (I don’t even remember what my scores are)
> the big 5 personality test is more scientific and reproducible and reports along dimensions in percentiles.
It's also pretty useless for genuinely understanding people because it's claims are so shallow. You like talking to people, therefore you are extraverted, which means you like talking people. Brilliant.
The equivalent claim in Myers-Briggs on the other hand is something more akin to "you like talking to people", therefore you are extraverted which means that your mental processes are tuned to process a high quantity of external input, which you can then use to make predictions well outside of the domain of talking to people.
> personality types as pseudoscience, astrology, Barnum effect etc
Personality types at least have a plausible mechanism - different processes in the brain. If you think about it, the idea that people have different mental processes is actually a more sensible starting point than the idea that everybody thinks in the same way.
1. There's utility in information compression. Extraversion encompasses a lot more than "talking to people"; it encompasses things like positivity, social proactivity, energy level etc. If you say "someone is more extraverted than 99% of the population" you can make a lot of inferences other than "likes to talk to people". The Big Five aren't everything, but they convey a lot.
2. There are theories underlying the Big Five; the Big Five and its variants are so well-replicated and appear in so many settings that they have become something to be explained, which is generative. E.g., there's a theory that extraversion basically refers to basal level of active, positive emotion, neuroticism refers to basal level of negative emotion; agreeableness to empathic ability processes etc. Maybe these are or aren't right, but there are non trivial theories about them that are very elaborated. You just don't hear about them as much necessarily because you don't hear about the Big Five as much, and because there are multiple theories for the Big Five -- as opposed to the Myers Brigs, which is tied to one account.
Except the meyers briggs claim is probably not true while the big 5 claim probably is.
> Personality types at least have a plausible mechanism - different processes in the brain. If you think about it, the idea that people have different mental processes is actually a more sensible starting point than the idea that everybody thinks in the same way.
Except the MBPI results show very poor repeatability and don't seem to be particularly predictive of anything.
As much as people hate on IQ, a large fraction of what an IQ test measures seems to be intrinsic. The same is true for e.g. the Big 5.
The percentile thing is not to be dismissed either. If we were to do the MBPI thing with IQ, then everyone under 100 would be "stupid" and everyone over 100 would be "smart" which is silly because obviously someone with a 99 IQ is much more similar to someone with a 101 IQ than either is to someone with an 85 or 115 IQ.
> Except the MBPI results show very poor repeatability and don't seem to be particularly predictive of anything.
Which is either an issue with the theory or the experiments, right?
In general I agree that one should be skeptical of theories that aren't validated by experimentation, but in this specific case there is plenty of reason to believe that it is the experiments themselves that are deficient:
- MBTI theory is complex. An order of magnitude more so than something like the big 5. This also makes it more useful / predictive.
- MBTI theory posits internal thinking processes. These cannot be directly observed. Most experiments don't even discuss this, they just rely on the unreliable type indicators (questionnaires) blindly. Of course they don't find significant results
- Most experiments that do discuss theory, discuss the simpler (and IMO plain wrong) trait model of MBTI that is more similar to the big 5 model. Under this model, MBTI terms (e.g. Introversion, Feeling) apply to people. The more sophisticated and plausible model (that almost all MBTI practitioners and theorists work with) applies these terms to Cognitive Processes (i.e. thinking mechanisms), and only then describes people in terms of which thinking processes they prefer (use more often/easily).
- The theory itself is still often described in terms of Jargon that came from Jung. This makes it hard to understand what is being described, even though it very similar to other theories in mainstream academic psychology/philosophy.
> If we were to do the MBPI thing with IQ, then everyone under 100 would be "stupid" and everyone over 100 would be "smart" which is silly because obviously someone with a 99 IQ is much more similar to someone with a 101 IQ than either is to someone with an 85 or 115 IQ.
This is actually a misconception. An MBTI type really describes "A baseline trajectory of preferences towards different mental processes across their lifetime". So:
- Individuals will differ (due to life circumstances, experience, etc). The MBTI claim, is that modulo life experience, this individual would develop in this way.
- A given individual will vary how they think over their lifetime (in a predictable way!).
- A given individual will vary how they think over short time scales (minutes) in a random (unpredictable) way. But that over longer time scales patterns will emerge.
Notably, dual-process theory has the same binary structure, and a LOT of experimental evidence that the bimodal distribution holds up in practice.
> - MBTI theory is complex. An order of magnitude more so than something like the big 5. This also makes it more useful / predictive.
If it's more predictive, where are the studies showing it? Big 5 has some fairly good studies (and of course lots of terrible no good very bad studies[1]) that show e.g. conscientiousness predicts future academic performance.
> - MBTI theory posits internal thinking processes. These cannot be directly observed. Most experiments don't even discuss this, they just rely on the unreliable type indicators (questionnaires) blindly. Of course they don't find significant results
Can they be indirectly observed? Are there studies doing so? Otherwise this is just another non-falsifiable prediction.
> - Most experiments that do discuss theory, discuss the simpler (and IMO plain wrong) trait model of MBTI that is more similar to the big 5 model. Under this model, MBTI terms (e.g. Introversion, Feeling) apply to people. The more sophisticated and plausible model (that almost all MBTI practitioners and theorists work with) applies these terms to Cognitive Processes (i.e. thinking mechanisms), and only then describes people in terms of which thinking processes they prefer (use more often/easily).
I am (possibly unfairly) regarding this as a no-true-scottsman. You may be right, but I've seen enough of "Oh, sure that MBTI wasn't good becaus X/Y/Z", but my special MBTI A/B/C is better!" type comments that I lack the motivation to continue investigating them. In addition, this is somewhat irrelevant to TFA because the MBTI types are exactly what the internet is obsessed with.
> - The theory itself is still often described in terms of Jargon that came from Jung. This makes it hard to understand what is being described, even though it very similar to other theories in mainstream academic psychology/philosophy.
Agreed. It doesn't help that a lot of Jung's theories are just absurd.
>> If we were to do the MBPI thing with IQ, then everyone under 100 would be "stupid" and everyone over 100 would be "smart" which is silly because obviously someone with a 99 IQ is much more similar to someone with a 101 IQ than either is to someone with an 85 or 115 IQ.
> This is actually a misconception. An MBTI type really describes "A baseline trajectory of preferences towards different mental processes across their lifetime". So:
> - Individuals will differ (due to life circumstances, experience, etc). The MBTI claim, is that modulo life experience, this individual would develop in this way.
This is probably not testable, and I'm not sure how it's useful to say "If you didn't have any life experience you Alice would be like X and Bob would be like Y"; if MBTI measures something that will have a net effect on life outcomes, than it should be revealed in the data.
> - A given individual will vary how they think over their lifetime (in a predictable way!).
> - A given individual will vary how they think over short time scales (minutes) in a random (unpredictable) way. But that over longer time scales patterns will emerge.
It seems likely that these statements are true, but I disagree that there is any reason to believe that MBTI will predict these patterns very well, and particularly not better than Big 5 (as your GP comment states).
> Notably, dual-process theory has the same binary structure, and a LOT of experimental evidence that the bimodal distribution holds up in practice.
Which makes me ask why MBTI doesn't have such experimental evidence about bimodal distributions showing up.
> Cerebral people tend to denounce personality types as pseudoscience, astrology, Barnum effect etc. which they likely are.
At one point back in college I made up my own astrological sign and insisted people (frankly, women; the major preoccupation of a 20-something dude) accept it. When I explained carefully how my birth sign didn't fit me at all, they tended to accept it.
There's a distinction to be made between the framework and the tests.
The framework is ultimately literary. The tests might be terrible at telling you what's your type, and therefore nonscientific. I mean, this was literally a meme with Harry Potter characters like six months ago.
Same with why the Internet is still obsessed with many things: it reduces very complicated things to simple, easy to consume buckets. Instead of having to understand and relate to an individual, you can lump lots of people into one of a relatively small number of piles and treat them the same under the guise that it's 'scientific'.
Let's put it this way: you've put people into buckets. Great. Science says: if these buckets represent something inherent about the person, then you should be able to predict using this information.
Maybe you can predict the likelihood of someone getting depression? Or of having a high paying job? And those predictions have to be better than random guesses, and hopefully better than existing tests for those things.
So, where is the scientific evidence for Myers-Brigs? What exactly does the typing predict about a person that we can't predict better using other methods?
"Cautionary comments regarding the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator."
By Pittenger, David J.
Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, Vol 57(3), Sum 2005, 210-221
Given that we have scientists reject man-made climate change and Darwinism, and, for the longest time, mainstream belief was geocentric, I would guess there is no such thing as an unambiguous scientific rejection of anything, and in fact, such a rejection would be - in itself - unscientific
Two of the best cases I'm aware of scientific viewpoints on a massively significant fact or theory changing involve the age of the Earth and the dynamics of continents.
As of 1800, the Earth was thought to be variously by mainstream proponents anywhere from 6,000 years (Biblical chronology) to "old", possibly even 30 to 300 million years old (geological chronology). A leading geological text suggested the actual duration was unknowable.
The continents were thought to have been in their present locations for all of time, though it was also clear that land had moved veritcally -- there were fossils of seashells and aquatic creatured found high on mountains.
What shifted the age of the Earth calculus most was discoveries in chemistry and physics, most especially of radioactivity and radioactive elements, and the fact of half lives, though also of spectroscopy and the first discovery of an element not initially noted on Earth: helium (named for the Sun).
Radioactivity provided both mechanism and clock to explain and measure a longer geological history. Lord Kelvin's calculations of the age of the Sun were based on conversion of gravitational potential energy to heat -- he had no other explanation for the Sun's energy -- and this would have been exhausted after a few tens of millions of years. Though that figure conflicted with geological estimates based on sedimentary deposits suggesting 100s of millions of years' accumulation.
In the early 1900s, measures of radioactive decay and daughter elements showed conclusively that the Earth was at least 0.5 - 1 billion years old, and likely more, whilst hydrogen-helium fusion explained a far longer life for the sun.
At the same time, the theory of "continental drift" (now "plate tectonics") was first proposed, and rejected (~1914).
Over time, more evidence, largely again from radioactive decay, bolstered by meteoric asteroid and later Lunar rock samples, pinned down the age of the Earth to 4.5 billion years +/- 1%, and increased evidence in the form of continental shapes, common geology, fossils, subsurface ridges, rift and convection faults, and more, finally proved plate tectonics beyond a doubt. The theory was finally formally accepted in the mid-1960s.
Radioactivity played a role in the latter as well as it accounts for roughly half of the interior heat of the Earth (the other half being residual gravitational potential energy of formation).
The story (most especially of plate tectonics) is told by Naomi Oreskes, science historian, in Plate tectonics: an insider's history of the modern theory of the Earth.
As a study in how science changes its mind, over profound differences of opinion and much institutional and social resistance, it's a fascinating story.
Plate tectonics is now not only a central theory of geology, but the central theory and the fundamental explanatory mechanism of the discipline. It's the idea which moved the science from a mere cataloguing and collecting phase to a theoretical and explanatory discipline.
I think it has less to do with Myers-Briggs itself (which was around for decades before most people had ever heard of the Internet) than it does with a particular quality of online social interaction. By removing barriers like distance, the Internet encourages us to sort ourselves into groups based entirely on specific shared interests. And since the only thing these groups have in common is their specific shared interest, they tend to spin off into obsessing over it, just because it's the only thing they have to talk about. When you only have one patch of cud to chew on, the only thing you can do when it stops satisfying is chew harder.
This is true of people in communities like Myers-Briggs subreddits, but it can also be observed among participants in all sorts of interest-organized online communities. And a lot of the really damaging social pathologies of our time are a direct result of it. When you look at things like "incel" culture, for instance, you see a group of people who have taken what was a shoulder-shrugging "whaddaya gonna do?" kind of routine life problem before everyone became extremely online, and collectively obsessed over it so hard they built an entire ideology around it. That didn't happen nearly as much before social interaction became primarily an online thing. But it happens all the time today, on all sorts of subjects, because the online medium encourages it.
Personally, I find my Myers-Briggs typology (INTJ, if anyone cares) to be mildly interesting, as it highlighted some aspects of my personality that I had previously not really understood very well. For me, that's as far as it goes -- I don't see Myers-Briggs as some kind of all-encompassing Key to Life, the Universe and Everything. But if I spent lots of time on a Myers-Briggs discussion board, where the only thing we had to talk about is Myers-Briggs, I can totally see how I could end up becoming convinced that it is the key to everything. Not because it actually is, but because once you fall down a rabbit hole it's hard to see anything but the walls of the hole.
I was really into Myers-Briggs in my early 20s. As a bit of a lost soul it was a great beginning for understanding how I could be different from other people. It’s right up there with “Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus.” (Talk about a book that probably hasn’t stood the test of time!)
I've also used Myers-Briggs quite a lot in my 20s as well.
It helped me a lot to understand why and how some people function differently than others. Instead of thinking "this guy is an asshole", I began to think "I understand this guy does not behave correctly when dealing with this kind of stress" and I could improve the way I communicate with different types of people quite a lot.
The only useful thing to come out of Myers Briggs is awareness of "introvert/extrovert" as ideas. It's better than what was there before, but is still woefully inadequate to describe people's personalities.
The implication is that people fall into the extremes of these factors. But in truth, most people probably deviate very little from the mean. If you're a tiny bit more introverted, it doesn't mean you never want to go to a party, and if you are more extroverted, it doesn't mean you don't want to sit down and read a book alone now and then. Not only is the test not very accurate, but it is almost impossible to interpret.
This debate shows up periodically and it's perplexing. Of course the buckets are arbitrary, I’m pretty sure most people are aware of that actually.
I don’t know much of the cult like following but it was a source of amusement for me and some friends years ago. It gives you some discrete, if ultimately meaningless, classifiers to compare against. (FWIW, I am strongly in the INTP bucket.)
Better personality classifications certainly exist, but there is something amusing about being placed into buckets. Some workplace personality classification systems do this exact same thing, probably for nearly the same reason.
The article highlights that diehard fans do not think the buckets are arbitrary.
>As an INTJ, what are the things that I can do to better understand, relate to and communicate with my INFP wife?
If you thought your label was arbitrary, you wouldn't phrase your question like that. Clearly these people think that these labels provide an accurate shorthand summary of their marital communication issues... which is kinda sad.
we have found that it is quite accurate and even precise. I can talk to people and generally figure out their MBTI pretty accurately. Each of the attributes are scored numerically and arent binary.
For example in our organization most people are INTs. We have a mix of Ps and Js. The main difference is that Ps tend to be slower to make decisions and Js make decisions much more quickly. Ps are more likely to walk back decisions, where Js are stronger to commit.
We have a few ISTs and they tend to be our most detail oriented people.
We have very few Fs.
We have Es that get their energy from being around people. They are generally the ones that are always up for going out after work and with clients. The ENTJs tend to drive to be leaders. We mainly talk to clients all day. By the end of the day the Is want to go home, the Es are ready to go out with clients.
It is not like a horoscope in that it is based on your preferences determined by answering questions. If you answer them honestly then you can get a reasonable result. Over time people that were borderline can flip, but typically not in multiple areas.
I personally am a classic INTP as are many people I work with. Engineers are commonly INTP and INTJ even though they are a very small percent of the population, they show up at like 70% in our workplace even though they are around 6% of the population.
Anecdotally: MB is a very useful, extremely high level abstraction (and thus can only be so accurate) of real cognitive behavior.
I reject the notion that it's just like a horoscope. I've routinely tested as INFP, leaning towards an INTP (based on their cognitive stack, a grey area between the two makes perfect sense), and reading about the two feels like reading a very accurate blueprint of my brain, whereas reading, say, an ESFP, feels totally foreign. Even something that's apparently "close," such as an INFJ, still feels totally wrong, like a shirt that fits well except for being too tight across the chest. If it were really like a horoscope, I could pick any of them out of a hat and find something to relate to, but -- I mean, I guess you've gotta trust me here -- that simply is not the case.
Perhaps I'm the "time at which the broken clock is stuck" and am benefitting from an accidentally correct explanation, but learning about and deeply understanding my "cognitive function stack" has allowed me deeper insight into my strengths and weakness (not what they are -- I already know that -- but why, and how they manifest in ways I don't always readily see), and has genuinely made my life better -- more so than any therapy sessions, and that's saying something, as I easily count seeing a therapist as one of my best decisions in life.
I suppose that my type more or less predicts that I'm the kind of person who would find value in tests precisely like these, and my test always has the "-T" flag (for "turbulent," meaning "not secure in oneself"), so it's certainly a chicken and egg problem. I take it with more than a grain of salt, but not a mountain.
I'm also not a "personality test" junkie at all. I remember a decade ago I tried a few random ones, and they were clearly all bullshit, more along the lines of a horoscope. MB is a different beast.
Furthermore, I later learned that I'm actually friends with the types of friends I'm "supposed" to be friends with, and in hindsight, we had bonded precisely the way the test had predicted. Same for who I'm attracted to, and who I'm repulsed by. It's not like I go around asking about peoples' types, but the handful of times I have, the conversation has been pretty eye-opening.
All I'm saying is: don't totally discount it just because you heard someone compare it to a horoscope once. There are a lot of flaws -- the most obvious one being that its accuracy depends upon the ability of the person taking it to answer authentically and truthfully, rather than what they wish they were like.
But my gut tells me that it's a good direction for science to go. Are there probably too few many types? Absolutely. But like I said, it appears to be an extremely high level abstraction of actual psychology, just as so much in psychology is (Jung's Archetypes come to mind).
Considering you know enough to know about the cognitive stack (more than most who take those awful online quizzes), you also should know that INFP and INFJ aren't close at all. It's a complete mirror of the entire stack :)
Right, but we tend to be drawn to our inferior functions, and thus the end result of those mirrored stacks can end up being pretty similar. That's what I'm getting at. Should have been more clear.
Because people love ways to easily label themselves, feel a part of something/feel different and this is one such way. It also happens to be in a short, snappy four letter format.
Just look at the amount of Twitter bios that have Myers-Briggs personality types listed on them.
Ever since I researched into Myers-Briggs, I've considered it to be the equivalent of a Buzzfeed quiz ("Which Star Wars character are you?"). Entertaining, perhaps even insightful on a superficial level, but not at all useful.
It’s not useful to me because it’s not accurate. I already knew everything it told me about myself and recognized the parts that weren’t accurate, but what can I do with that information? I can’t expect that its conclusions about anyone else or how to relate to them are any more accurate.
I use them as Bayesian priors in my model of a person's behavior.
In my experience, when someone tells you they are x personality type, that's generally a starting point for you to refine your understanding of them as opposed to starting from zero. Unless they had meant to throw me off altogether, I generally find that information helps my mental model of them to converge fairly quickly.
Example: you ask a girl out and she tells you she self-identifies as INTJ, so you think to yourself -- she gets her energy by being alone or with a few people, she's probably a little cerebral and probably tends toward orderliness. You then have a basis of testing your hypothesis to see what her actual preferences are (vs stated), and also you might not want to plan your dates around meeting lots of strangers and doing crazy stuff. Remember, the utility of the MBTI isn't so much whether it is actually accurate or not -- it is more what it communicates. When someone gives you their type, it's them communicating to you a compressed signal that says, "I think I kinda fit this description" -- and that's a useful signal.
You may later learn that your model of her is wrong and needs refinement, but you'd be making iterations in small steps as opposed to throwing the entire model out. Once you know her, you no longer need MBTI or whatever, but during the initial stages, it definitely helps guide the exploration.
How is that not useful?
Sure, there are more complex instruments like Big5 and such that are more "accurate" but outside of research circles, no one uses them. That right there is an example of a more accurate, but less (day-to-day) useful signal.
(though I would say Big5 is good for understanding where you are on certain dimensions with respect to the general population. And it is undeniably useful in psychology.)
Prior to the widespread adoption of the internet (thinking late 90s) this idea that people's personalities could easily be grouped into distinctive categories was not a widespread idea yet. Buzzfeed "which star wars character are you" quizzes probably grew out of this, but that's tangential. Knowing the category exists is not nearly as beneficial as understanding what makes that category separate and how to interact with those types of people.
Most of the value of loosely grouping people together into groups is understanding how to interact with those people, namely how to approach them about an idea, or how to handle their reaction to negative news, or, why they reacted to something differently than you expected.
In school we studied "True Colors" which breaks personality types down into four primary types, or colors, with strong or weak secondary types. Most people on this forum would be classified as "Green". Then it breaks down how and why those four groups respond to things. This has been hugely helpful in my professional as well as personal life.
Another example of this sort of personality categorization is "The five love languages" by Gary Chapman which breaks down how people share and receive intimacy, which breaks down common things like why some women don't care about getting flowers but for others it's crucially important, and more importantly, why.
Many such online quizzes (also: what is your X name, based on your first & last names, birth year, city of residence, etc.) are very thinly disguised deanonymisation / classification systems.
There are 33 bits required to uniquely identify any individual on Earth. Since the userbase of any online service is already a far smaller subset (particularly when looking at active userbases), answering such a quiz (truthfully) is quite likely a way to specifically identify you. Even as little information as residential and work postal codes is effective at uniquely identifying 90% of a population.
The slightly less nefarious use is in classifying audiences for advertisers, though even this can be abused.
Myers-Briggs is, to me, much more helpful for understanding my reaction to stimuli, but doesn't provide as much use for me to engage with other people. The enneagram, arguably less scientific, helps me understand my tendencies when interacting with other people. I'm an ENTP type 8, which essentially translates to an extroverted intuitive person with very low agreeableness. It helps to police my own interactions, since I can't exactly apply the golden rule.
If anything, MBTI helped me assimilate the meta-fact that there are lots of different types of people out there, many of whom I'm simply never going to really click with.
I did not know that MB was not considered "mainstream" or scientific, nor did I know that likely no such test is (one I have reference before is the MMPI).
I have recently in other venues advocated for the idea of such testing as part of the controls implemented for the purchase and use of guns. Not so much those lengthy tests (except maybe on occasion), but something shorter that could be filled out casually. Ultimately evaluated and scored by a randomly picked independent body of psychologists.
I will refrain from now on with this kind of rhetoric in the future, unless I can find something that would be workable for such a test - if there is anything.
I don't believe such a test, administered fairly and properly, in a non-biased manner, with the score/outcome other than pass/fail being kept - would violate the 2nd Amendment. I think if such a test could exist, it would be better than the catch all of past mental health issues being a part of the judgement for current background checks; a proposal which has many proponents and opponents for various reasons.
The idea I was trying to propose was to gain a sense of who this person was at the time of the purchase of a firearm, of bullets, before practice at a range, etc (the idea I had involved a lot of additional restrictions - such as where and when guns could be used, by whom in what situations, and penalties for straying from those - ultimately, my goal was to make things broad enough that people wouldn't feel constrained as gun owners, but narrow enough that such laws and regulations could identify threats before they became "out of control" problems).
Constant regular checks of a person - if they could tell that such a person had an intent to harm others at some point in the future - would likely be a sound method to reduce incidences of mass violence that I believe will not and cannot be solved by laws targeting just the weapons.
I am one of those strange liberal souls who also supports 2nd Amendment rights; there's a good reason it's in the BoR right behind the first, and I don't believe it was meant only for those in a "standing army"; the Framers didn't want a standing army - they were fairly united against it. Instead, I believe they wanted each individual to be armed, well trained in arms usage, and that he (or she) could band together with fellow citizens to repel both external and internal threats as such arose.
But things have changed in so many ways from that ideal - most notably we have a huge standing army (I do not believe the Framers would approve at all), and we allow guns for everyone without proper training and care. What we don't seem to have, though, is a proper understanding of violent extremism and how it festers and arises among a local population of people. What starts it, how do you detect it, and what can you do about it without violating the rights of that person, in order to defuse it or protect against it?
Apparently we don't know - but I thought tests like MB and MMPI could help solve that problem, and, if administered properly in coordination with other changes on how we as a society allow for guns within it, it could help to quell what we currently witness (on a seemingly weekly basis lately). Since such tests are not what I thought they were, my advocacy will stop until I can figure something else out.
I don't believe for one second that what I was proposing would stop all gun violence, nor violence in general, but I did think it had a good chance of drastically reducing it, in the unlikely event that such a thing was adopted (highly unlikely - but I was hoping it might spark discussion). As a gun rights supporter, my hope was to make it compatible with the wants of gun owners and users, and current law, while also balancing that with restrictions that would promote safety of the general public who may or may not be gun owners themselves.
If anyone has thoughts on any of this, please feel free to respond, as I would love to hear any suggestions on this...
It's prima facie absurd to categorize human personalities across 4 arbitrarily chosen dimensions. Why those 4 specifically, and why not 3 or 5? There's no real justification for any of it.
But as a way to break the ice when introducing new team members I suppose it isn't terrible, as long as no one takes it seriously.
Another thing to look into and try out are the "Clifton Strengths". Now unfortunately, you have to pay to take the test, but you can just buy the companion book and get a code along with it.
What I like about clifton strengths is they are more targeted, and you can more easily use the information to actually better yourself. You can focus on improving your strengths, or recognizing how they can or cannot be used in your profession.
For example, my #1 strength is adaptability. I do well under pressure and even look forward to emergency-like situations. I had always wondered why all the engineers would freak out when we would get hacked, or get DDOS'd, etc. and I would immediately spring into action and handle things, and even enjoyed these ugly situations. As a manager, if you know your team's individual strengths, you can better set them up for success.