Uncovering the Secret History of Myers-Briggs

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3 points·pfooti··2 comments

A long read, but a good one. I've seen the MBTI used in lots of places, and as someone trained in cognitive science, I've always looked askance at it. It's tough to think about how we can reduce personality to four axes that are immutable as you grow and change. It's an interesting intellectual exercise, but using it in hiring decisions or to do anything other than just provoke some thought is probably a terrible idea.

from the end...

"More unexpected is what I now know about personality. I know that it occupies some dream state between fiction and a reality. I know that its fictions infiltrate our lives in ways we do not always perceive — every time we decide whether to let a stranger become a friend or a lover, every time we conclude that someone possesses a good personality or a bad one. I know that the reality of personality is inescapable, and that many of the people I met in training will make irrevocable decisions about their lives based on the truths they believe are encoded in four simple letters."

> It's tough to think about how we can reduce personality to four axes that are immutable as you grow and change.

I don't think that jives with MBTI. Even the harshest critics of MBTI would acknowledge that MBTI doesn't preclude plasticity and "type development." I think MBTI just says that you have a dominant proclivity along certain axes. You can re-take the test at different lags to test the hypothesis for yourself. The MBTI argument goes that you'll develop additional competencies.

Re: article, I didn't find the authors arguments compelling. Not that you need a "cognitive science" background, but the author's an English Lit. prof who makes hand-wavy arguments against MBTI. I suspected clickbait due to the title, and I was right...

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