The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
For me, Myers-Briggs tends to be little more than a starting point for discussing the finer parts of my own personality, values, and perspectives. I find that those who are equally interested in Myers-Briggs share similar values in self-understanding, thus a starting point for some interesting discussion.
As an individual (Taurus) thoroughly interested in astrology, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who tout astrology as a comprehensive personality test fail to understand what astrology attempts to identify. While the "value-add" is more subjective, I'm going to go ahead and say it's not as useless as this article claims. While I don't think anyone (especially employers) should rely heavily on astrology, I think it can provide a decent framework (or starting point) outlining basic facets of an individual's personality based on their own perspective. Though I often distrust individual claims about belonging a sign, given my interest in understanding myself and facets of my own personality, I enjoy discussing why a person may claim to be a part of a certain sign. For me, astrology tends to be little more than a starting point for discussing the finer parts of my own personality, values, and perspectives. I find that those who are equally interested in astrology share similar values in self-understanding, thus a starting point for some interesting discussion.
Your comment can be distilled to "it's fun to talk about".
However you don't need anything so complex for such a starting point. A classic demonstration that I saw was a large group of people who marked where they were on two lines. The first was how organized you were. The second was how extroverted you were. Based on this we divided into 4 groups, and began talking. It was surprising how much people in each group had in common. And how differently the groups behaved. The groups were:
Introverted and disorganized: Supporter. Good shoulder to cry on.
Introverted and organized: Analyst. They make good accountants.
Extroverted and disorganized: Promoter. High energy, lots of ideas, not a lot of carry through.
Extroverted and organized: Controller. They generally relate to, "My way or the highway."
I was in the Promoter quadrant. One of the things we had in common was that our spaces look like a tornado just tore through it, but please don't clean up because then we won't know where anything is. :-)
I would really doubt that it is zero, the relative position of the celestial bodies correlates with season. All sorts of human activities follow a yearly cycle, including birth rates and mortality rates. I have no doubt there is some correlation between astrological sign and personality.
I would take it further and say a good principle is that "everything is correlated with everything else", it is just a matter of the strength of the relationship. I will probably get downmodded for that, because it is in direct conflict the "null hypothesis" testing paradigm that has dominated data analysis for the last half century or so.
However there aren't correlations between those known correlations and the traits that astrology says that you should have. Therefore there is no known correlation between your astrological description and your personality. And yes, people have attempted to measure this.
'The author once had occasion to use 700 subjects in a study of publie opinion. After a factor analysis of the results, the factors were correlated with individual-difference variables such as amount of education, age, income, sex, and others. In looking at the results I was happy to find so many "significant" correlations (under the null-hypothesis model)-indeed, nearly all correlations were significant, including ones that made little sense. Of course, with an N of 700 correlations as large as .08 are "beyond the .05 level." Many of the "significant" correlations were of no theoretical or practical importance.' https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1960-nunnally.pdf
"One of the common experiences of research workers is the very high frequency with which significant results are obtained with large samples. Some years ago, the author had occasion to run a number of tests of significance on a battery of tests collected on about 60,000 subjects from all over the United States. Every test came out significant. Dividing the cards by such arbitrary criteria as east versus west of the Mississippi River, Maine versus the rest of the country, North versus South, etc., all produced significant differences in means. In some instances, the differences in the sample means were quite small, but nonetheless, the p values were all very low. Nunnally (1960) has reported a similar experience involving correlation coefficients on 700 subjects. Joseph Berkson (1938) made the observation almost 30 years ago in connection with chi-square" http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_PSY38...
"...it is regularly found that almost all correlations or differences between means are statistically significant. See, for example, the papers by Bakan [1] and Nunnally [8]. Data currently being analyzed by Dr. David Lykken and myself, derived from a huge sample of over 55,000 Minnesota high school seniors, reveal statistically significant relationships in 91% of pairwise associations among a congeries of 45 miscellaneous variables such as sex, birth order, religious preference, number of siblings, vocational choice, club membership, college choice, mother’s education, dancing, interest in woodworking, liking for school, and the like. The 9% of non-significant associations are heavily concentrated among a small minority of variables having dubious reliability, or involving arbitrary groupings of non-homogeneous or non-monotonic sub-categories. The majority of variables exhibited significant relationships with all but three of the others, often at a very high confidence level (p < 10–6)." http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...
There's no evidence of this, so you should have doubts.
EG: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27310922 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25132151
I don't know much about astrology, but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right? From my understanding, it is basically a way of binning together sets of birthdays. There will probably be various artifacts and noise introduced by the binning process, but I am sure with large enough sample size you will see the correlation.
Sure it does. I've met people who will say things like "My sun sign is Virgo, but my personality is dominated by my Sagittarius moon", and then later say something like "I'm going through Saturn return, no wonder Pisces is such an influence".
If you compare someone's self-view ("I'm an Aries!") with their behavior (definitely a Gemini), you can draw conclusions. It's standard practice in astrology.
e.g. later Wittgenstein, process relational, integral theory, chaos magic
Measuring Cholesterol is another one, since you can't actually change cholesterol via diet and it has no relation to heart disease either (source: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/panel-suggests-stop-warni... ). But the pharmaceutical industry still wants doctors to prescribe Statins and pours tons of money into advertising them to people and doctors, even though they're terrible for you and worthless.
It's troubling when industry grasps onto these measures and makes business models out of them. Wide spread acceptance of measures like these moves them out of the realm of homeopathy or astrology and into the realm of what people believe as relevant scientific measure. They benefit industry, but not the individual. Advertising allows that industry to continue to grow at the expense of good relevant data.
The episode talks about research showing how we can understand ourselves better as sets of behavior that we exhibit in different contexts, more than as having a single personality.
Put in simple words, you maybe introvert in some contexts and extrovert in others, and theses behaviors can change over time. You ARE not AN introvert, you exhibit introvert behaviors in context.
[1]: http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/482836315/the-person...
This sentence strikes me as odd, because subjectively, the one thing that shines through the most with people, even people I haven't seen in 20+ years, is a distinct (and possibly largely immutable) personality. In fact, a large part of why I was so shy growing up is because people's personalities were so "bright" that I felt intimidated. Not of course "bright" in a literal, measurable sense, but in an irrational qualitative sense. And therein lies the problem with trying to discuss it rationally.
To this day I perceive distinct personalities in every child and pet I encounter. Not sure if related, these exact same entities seem drawn to me for some reason. I have often heard a pet owner say "my pet has never acted this way before" around me (such as sitting in my lap when it has never done so with anyone).
I wonder if it simply reflects what I see in them. Anyway. My point is that the inability to discuss something rationally is not evidence for its nonexistence.
They claimed there's simply an absence of unambiguous evidence that it exists.
The metric system was developed in the 1800s and you can do a simple search to find tons of criticism on it.
Being tall or short is accounted for by BMI, as it's a component of BMI. So that is not a problem.
The actual problem with BMI is that it attempts to measure body composition, but it assumes that fat is the only variable component of body composition. It's not--muscle can also vary. So people with a lot of muscle mass can have a very high BMI even if they have very little fat.
However, in practice this isn't a problem--nobody looks at a body builder and says they're fat because they have a high BMI. It's obvious when a high BMI is caused by fat and when it's caused by muscle.
BMI is a pragmatic way to measure body composition, which is effective for estimating body composition when body composition isn't obvious, such as in the case of a body builder. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed, or has political reasons for saying otherwise.
This is not to disagree with your overall point--industry does grasp into measurements and make business models out of them. But in the case of BMI, political interests have become invested in discrediting the BMI measurement, not in overcrediting it.
It's impossible to describe personalities without implying value judgments.
I randomly took the first Google link found under 'Myers Briggs' and ended up here:
https://www.16personalities.com/intj-personality
'Ironically, it is often best for them to remain where they are comfortable – out of the spotlight...'
https://www.16personalities.com/infp-strengths-and-weaknesse...
'Too Idealistic – INFPs often take their idealism too far, setting themselves up for disappointment as, again and again, evil things happen in the world.'
MBTI is basically this: You have a set of observed traits, and from that set we can tell you other traits you likely have based on observing many others that share the same traits.
Or in other words... -Observe trait A -Observe trait B -Observe trait C -Extrapolate trait D -Extrapolate trait E
What those sites are doing is... -Observe trait A -Extrapolate traits C, M, Q, X, Z
I interpreted 'prescriptive' as making 'should' rather than 'is' statements.
Misuse of a tool does not invalidate the tool.
Oh dear, there seems to be an epidemic of people's comparators not working. You might want to start small: try comparing two oranges, then an orange and an apple. Before long you'll be comparing supernovas to salamanders!
(Or perhaps you meant the rather less categorical "I think they're very different". I harp on this because I find "not remotely comparable" excessively dismissive. It's fine to disagree, just don't act like there's no possible way the other person might have a valid point)
If you disregard the people who claim astrology is prescriptive, and pay attention to only those aspects of it that describe tendencies - all the most convincing astrology nuts I've met do this - it can be quite... warming.
I don't put faith in or know much about astrology, but I do know there are many different types and areas of astrology and not all of them have to do with telling you how to pick your lotto numbers tomorrow.
A lot of people talk about signs and astrology in terms of being able to read people and determine personality traits of others.
It's not clear to me how that's different.
Sure, you can choose your type by responding differently to the questions, or finding a "practitioner" who assigns a type you prefer, but the same applies to astrology: shop around until you hear what you want to here.
When I first encountered M-B it rescued a sour relationship with an ISTJ boss who thought I wrote content-free status reports, where I thought I wrote well-summarized round-ups that avoided meaningless minutia. Later, the table was reversed when I had an ISTJ report who drowned me in more details than I could (or needed to) process. I used M-B to help us workout guidelines for talking with each other so that we were productive instead of both frustrated.
So M-B has been useful to me. But it should not be used for making hiring/placement decisions. I really see it as an information processing styles inventory and little more.
In that same spirit alcohol is a pretty great social lubricant. A little bit of booze lowers people's inhibitions enough to have fun conversations.
It's not scientific, it's totally based in reason. It's reasonable to deny global warming because winters are getting colder than ever. It's not reasonable to deny climate change because winters are getting colder than ever.
There's nothing wrong with someone drawing a conclusion from their personal experience, that's going to be full of emotion, opinion and hopefully some logic.
I get your concern, but the same folks who make hiring decisions based on Myers Briggs will tell you angels were watching over them when they narrowly avoided a car crash. Or their relative visited them a month after they passed away. it's mostly benign. When it's not benign, they're unreasonable. Only then is it possibly worth the effort to persuade them to be a bit more rational.
But, yes. I mean 'rhetorically useful' or 'a social hack'
Depending on where you are from I suppose.
Edit: I believe "pretense" was the incantation you were after.
Because those mentioned deal with random events, where X and Y are uncorrelated (being X a date of birth or card drawn from Tarot and Y is some personality characteristic)
MB do ask you questions from which you can predict - to some degree - some outcomes (how do you think a strong Extrovert changes from a strong Introvert)?
Just don't do something stupid like "this job requires a INTJ only" or think that the distribution is bimodal or that their behaviour will follow a strict pattern.
(It's not like the rest of "behavioral science" can make repeatable predictions and reproduce papers compared to other scientific branches)
A nuanced discussion would probably accept that these are continuous axes, but instead they get treated as clusters, distorting even casual analysis.
Further, it says nothing about the fluctuations in magnitude over time, some days 'E' might be more important than 'I' and it really can swap on other days. Or even how accurately people self report.
So, if you are 'strongly' I and weakly P that does not change the order to show P is more dominate over J than I is over E. AKA, magnitude is literally not part of the test.
When discussing the results as a class, the strength of a type seemed to correlate reasonably with behavior, and explain more than the clusters on their own, eg, all the strong NPs had similar epistemological views and styles, fading towards an SJ style as the scores people had changed.
What a lot of people seem to forget, though, is the MBTI doesn't account for effects from disorders only healthy variation and it's about who you are right now, not who you are permanently. People vary over time.
Which, of course, means that we're abandoning the actual test to get a substantive measurement.
e.g. INFP leads with a primary Introverted Feeling (judging), an auxiliary Extroverted Intuition (perceiving), then Introverted Sensing, and finally Extroverted Feeling.
Some of the better tests will help identify these cognitive processes and then attempt to find the best fitting type based on them. You can read more about the cognitive functions here: http://www.cognitiveprocesses.com/Cognitive-Functions/index....
It's too bad that so many people see the types as diametrically opposed (e.g. Feeling vs Thinking -- you do both!)
Amazingly, I've had arguments about this with folks. (probably E folks). They claimed that "it never changes", which is just patently untrue. Perhaps E folks don't introspect enough to re-evaluate their views on things? I know I tested different 5 years ago compared to when I took it 20 years ago.
I don't really see how you couldn't retest at least somewhat differently.
I think this is actually the most common experience. The data I've seen says that scores on all four 'axes' are normally distributed. So it's actually fairly exceptional to have strong, predictable positions for every letter; cutting a bunch of normal distributions down the middle means most of us are on a boundary.
And yes, it's probably those silly E folks saying they never change. God forbid we wake up tomorrow testing as E, we'll have a paradox on our hands.
The folks who have argued that point with me over the years all happened to be strong E. I'm talking perhaps 3-4 people over 20 years - not a huge number to go on, but it was the only consistent I saw (male/female/old/young/etc).
Me: "Wow, I took this a few years ago and was a moderate F, but now I'm a slight T".
Them: "That's just not possible. It doesn't work that way. You just don't remember what you had before. It doesn't change".
Me: "WTF??"
As far as I understood the test, it results in your brain's _dominant_ mode on four axes. So you are either predominantly introverted or extraverted. There is nothing in the theory stating that you are introverted 100%, all the time.
I'm not suggesting that MBTI claims we're 100% E or I. I'm saying that it assigns binary distributions on those axes, which would make it meaningful to talk about "E dominant" and "I dominant" people. Every study I've seen of the actual data, though, says that these are normally distributed traits.
So there are some people with distinctive, meaningful dominant modes on these axes. But the bulk of the population is at the center of the distributions, where marginal differences are being talked about like high-significance bimodal results.
This isn't inevitably the case, but we live in a world where MBTI results are still being used to determine who's suited to which jobs. If you're hiring sales guys who are 51% extroverted and refusing ones who are 49% extroverted, that supposed binary distribution is misleading you badly.
So you'd get an I at less than 45%, an E at more than 55%, and an X if you were on the border.
Further, you said they were normally distributed, but didnt talk about the variance. It's possible that people who are just a little from the middle by % of population are meaningfully different than the average -- a quarter standard deviation could be a meaningful amount of change in the real world.
So your argument doesn't actually support your claim: with the inclusion of an X band, it's possible the gap between E and I is meaningful in real world situations. We can't know merely by knowing it's normally distributed, we need to analyze the standard deviation size versus the minimal meangingful difference in the real world.
Several instances I've seen of MBTI didn't offer X, but that's definitely an improvement. The one I got for high school career services actually crashed if you 'tied', because that hadn't been accounted for at all.
Without the X band, "normal distribution" is enough to say things are broken. It means that you're consistently dividing similar people while grouping dissimilar people, which isn't what I like in a cluster.
With the X band, SD becomes important and a wide distribution might provide good results. Anecdotally, this could match the high attention given to E/I versus F/T - high SD axes would be relevant to more people.
Having said that, I'm still skeptical of much of the MBTI literature. It definitely deals in bimodal distributions, asserting that these clusterings are features of the territory rather than the map. If the peak frequency is a value the test can't inform about, I think that still invalidates much of the literature even if the test has some predictive power.
MBTI is a just-so story with a lot of marketing behind it.
The core of the theory is to highlight natural preferences in the way we use cognitive functions. It's a pretty good and useful model. It's not a definite one though, like all the models we have it's meant to be improved and replaced over the years (like in physics).
99% of the critics about MBTI are focusing on the tests (which I agree are not accurate) and the authors don't understand the theory behind it - which is the really useful part. (Carl Jung's work, cognitive functions preferences, etc)
I, for one, am totally alright with MBTI-style questions as a tool for analysis/introspection. RibbonFarm has some great writing about identifying 'dominant' cognitive functions based on magnitude data from MBTI.
Strictly accurate? No. A useful framework for planning? Absolutely.
MBTI is also an organization, though. It charges money for training, issues education materials, and gives trainers strict guidelines on what assessments are ok to make. That system is hideously inaccurate and deserves criticism. It asserts that the test is accurate to reality, that the personality types are 'opposed', and that people are bimodal on the four axes. Many of those claims explicitly contradict the Jungian theories that inspired them.
So it's easy to overreach when criticizing the MB model, and most articles like this aren't clear about their target. But the actual MBTI organization - which is still popular with big companies in its original form - is wrong in terms of its own theoretical foundations, defended with bad data, and deserves extensive criticism.
The MBTI is mostly just useful in that it's one of the few things that actually sorts humans in a hyperdimensional way, which is really how we're best categorized.
We're all slight wobbles (well, statistically speaking) around the center of a like 20-100 dimension distribution.
MBTI is basically just PCA on that space in to a 4-dimensional one, and while we can argue how evenly its bucketing split the actual distribution of people (not ideally, but not terribly), or how much information was lost in that downcasting (a lot!), I think the basic premise of viewing people as a composite of slight differences across many dimensions is a useful viewpoint we don't normally engage in.
So if you could pick 16 LotR characters that form a hypercube of traits, then assigning LotR characters is the same as the MBTI. The problem is usually that LotR quizzes and the like are a) much smaller than that (4-8 characters) and b) not laid out in a hypercube (ie, there's not 4+ dimensions of wobble, there's 2 or 3).
My point wasn't to argue about how well they did that (not particularly), but rather that it's useful to approach issues of understanding personality in those terms at all. That's the real innovation of things like the MBTI: that we should analyze the distribution of personalities in terms of PCA, and that we should probably use a few components, rather than like 1 or 2.
Of course, we could do the actual analysis much better than the MBTI did.
The main reason I don't think Myers-Briggs can be a true-ism is that each dimension is actually a spectrum. For example I am about 60% "I" (and thus 40% "E") so the various "I" true-isms only slightly factor on my personality.
On a more productive point, your post gave no evidence at all about why M-B is useful
As a tool, though, its utility remains doubtful. Its test-retest reliability is very low, meaning that, if you give the same person the test at two different times, you're likely to get two different results. This strongly suggests that, while the test might capture aspects of a person's personality, it's also functioning like a glorified mood ring. Without some way to separate those two aspects, its utility as an indicator of anything useful about any one individual is highly suspect.
Admittedly, the test is arbitrary in many ways, but you can't deny the questions -- about introversion, how logical, emotive, and judgmental you are, etc -- represent the subjective experience we have of others' personalities, even if the categories are incomplete, nonlinear, redundant, or transient.
Results being independently reproducible is the foundation of science. Meyers-Briggs fails that simple metric.
But people take the test once, and then use the results for a long period of time. Guess what? At night, blood sugar level goes down. it's no longer X. And likewise with this test.
Same thing, here. I wouldn't put much stock into a single result on a single test, but I think there's some broader value to be gained by examining the trend, the fluctuations, and what you wind up as more often than not.
The only assertion I have to disprove here is that the test is "worthless".
One is an arbitrary mapping of a person's date of birth to an set of traits and prophesies.
The other is a brief summary of a person's personality/behavioral inclinations based on a survey of that person's stated behavior and inclinations. When you say MBTI can be "just as arbitrary," what you're claiming is that it might be true that there is zero correlation between how any individual person of a given personality type answers any of the 93 MBTI questions. Sure, there is variation in people's self-assessments (and personalities for that matter, but let's ignore that for the moment) over time, but it wouldn't be "just as arbitrary" unless it had no correlation at all with basically anything about the person. I find that claim to be completely implausible.
The only way it could be true that it is meaningless is if upon repeated testings, knowing a person's formerly reported MBTI provided no insight at all into what MBTIs are more likely than for the average person in subsequent testings. That's certainly not the case that's been found in the research, so at the very least, it provides insight into what a person thinks that they are like.
Even if it were the case that all the MBTIs are only related to positive traits (which isn't true), the idea that it is meaningless is just nonsense.
Then let me try to help clarify. MBTI has no predictive power ("I'm an INTP, so... ?") and is not falsifiable. Those are the delineators between science and pseudoscience, so that's why I bucket it with astrology.
Since mbti essentially neuters it's own usefulness in the "round those percentages down to binary" stage, you could end up with a situation where an INTP and an ESFJ have only an 8% total difference in mbti-measured personality between them.
The question isn't whether people who are in the middle of each criteria exist and could easily swap classifications to their polar opposite. The question is what percentage of people would do that and whether it's high enough that there's too little signal to noise to extract any meaningful information out of the classification system.
i'm pretty sure someone who has gotten INTP every single test in his life will behave differently on average than someone who has always gotten ESFJ
I think its a mildly useful categorization which allows a simpler and more coarse view of personality than the full spectrum of data would normally allow.
If I ask you what your weight and height is today, it's indicative of what your weight and height will be a year from now even if the number doesn't fit into exactly the same rounded range. Doesn't mean weight and height are meaningless if the answers change classifications a bit.
A much better analogy would be blood sugar level. For many healthy people its sorta constant-ish. The fact that its not nearly constant for a subset of people doesn't prove the test is therefore worthless. It just proves some people have untreated diabetes. The test is not worthless because it can be used in diabetes screenings, unless the point of the test was to tap people like maple syrup trees or something really weird like that.
A major problem with the test is we know people are not terribly good at self introspection, we're all above average drivers and lovers and thinkers, all of us. I am good enough at self introspection to tell I'm pretty well introverted, yet I can imagine someone not so observant or self aware or perhaps neurotic about the whole topic, getting a fairly random score. Or I'm bad enough at self introspection to not realize I'm no good at it at all, and I'm actually a closet extrovert, although I find that rather unlikely (although I would, wouldn't I, if I failed at introspection).
In that way as a secondary measurement I'd propose theoretically that the wider the variation in test results, the worse the person would score in some kind of self introspection ability test. It seems a reasonable hypothesis. You'd need correction factors to deal with people having diagnosed or undiagnosed swings in brain neurotransmitters or use of addictive substances (including sugar and caffeine). But it could be run as a study.
That said there are other criticisms, for instance: Are thinking and feeling really an axis or are they two independent traits? Are there other useful axes not included?
While I sort of cringe at the idea of using this for assigning people jobs, there area few people in my life that fit some of the type narratives fairly well and it helped me understand their motivations a bit better, which did legitimately help my relationships with them.
That doesn't seem like the proper question. Specifically, it works only to predict future MBTI results, not anything further. That's fine for height and weight because those values are robust to small/moderate changes in value.
MBTI already has low predictive power about real-world content, and high sensitivity to change (on the margins; it also suffers from applying a clustered model to non-clustered data). So if retest reliability is anything less than excellent, I worry that our predictive power has been almost totally destroyed.
To provide a new analogy, this is like variance in number of fingers. The significance of 11 vs 10 vs 9 isn't proportional to magnitude, so we wouldn't accept "small" counting errors.
None of that says that "I'm an INTP" is meaningless, but I suspect that MBTI is no better, or even worse, than non-formalized personality summaries.
Of course not. All the companies are simply wrong. They're falling for management/hiring fads, or relying on old superstitions. This happens all the time. "Companies are using it" says nothing about whether it's actually reliable.
Specifically, many studies and meta-studies have failed to show correlation between MBTI results and job performance. Here is one such summary: http://www.opd.net/abstracts5.html
Does this have predictive power? Yes. If I needed somebody to take care of small children, would this test be useful? Yes of course. If I had to pick people blindly for this task, except for the results of this test, then this test would be very useful. Now, MBTI is more sophisticated than this simple test. So to say that it has no predictive power is just silly.
This is a null argument.
Unless you show that those predictions actually assess whether someone is fit for those tasks this is absolutely content free.
MBTI is a subjective categorization. Astrology is more like your DNA. You're born with a specific set pattern. Just like we don't understand what most of our genetic patterns mean, we don't understand what most of our astrological patterns mean.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/magazine/is-most-of-our-dn...
The problem is not variation over time - that's fine. The problem is that when someone gets a result, that result doesn't say what it claims to about them. It's similar to astrology because while it has a series of well-defined rules for making a decision, that decision does not reflect reality. It is therefore effectively arbitrary.
Both MBTI and astrology are internally valid - that is, the same person will get the same or similar results the majority of the time. That doesn't mean they mean anything.
If say some person knows two people and that one tested as INTP and the other as ESFJ and this person doesn't know for a fact who had which test results. Are you really sure they won't have better than even odds at figuring out which is which based on their interactions with the people that don't involve asking for their MBTI test results? If so, based on what study?
It's clear I wouldn't be able to tell them apart based on their birthday (unless they were super young or something), but it's not at all clear that it's the case for MBTI.
If you say "the sky is green," it's not my job to prove to you it's not. It's your job to prove it is. You're the one making the claim.
But here is a (more politely worded than I) paper on the MBTI's ineffectiveness for your perusal: http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... - simply googling "mbti external validity" will also give you plenty of explanation. I also recommend looking at the many studies that review cites, since its whole purpose is amassing information on whether the MBTI is effective.
There's a difference between saying the extent of something's effectiveness hasn't been established by existing research and saying that it is ineffective. I've read the publication you are linking to before and it is saying the latter without the evidence necessary to back up the claim.
I don't want to be "credentials guy," but I have a degree in cognitive science and I've conducted human subjects research. What you are saying is simply wrong.
That publication cites dozens of studies to back up its claims. Are you suggesting they are all invalid? If so, why?
I can't prove a negative, all that a study can do is say "no results observed", but there's plenty of that. From the researcher cited in the article: "Many very specific predictions about the MBTI have not been confirmed or have been proved wrong." "Finally, there is no evidence that the MBTI measures anything of value."
This aligns with all of the other at-all-convincing research I've seen on MBTI: it assigned binary distributions to normally distributed data, and has very low predictive power. The majority of people will be near the middle of those distributions, where MBTI is at its least useful.
Further, I think your example is unfair: MBTI is a one-way function. I can meet people and anticipate their scores to with 1-2 errors (a huge margin, but we talk like it's 'close'!) I can't go from an MBTI score to useful predictions about the person though, because it's so massively information-destroying. Even on the things it purports to measure, the normal-to-binary problem means that it has awful predictive power. MBTI defines a somewhat-consistent function from people to letters, but since it's an arbitrary clustering system it doesn't actually allow new predictions or efficiently compress information about people.
So yes, I could probably tell some people apart by MBTI, but you could also assemble 10 different ESFJ's who are more dissimilar than the ESFJ and the INTP. It's like a compression algorithm that can't be reversed, and about as useful.
I don't disagree with the fact that it's not necessarily super effective because the distributions of personalities of people are not bimodal, as would be ideal for this simplistic sort of classification. It's also unlikely to be supremely effective at clustering in that way because the design of the metric wasn't really data driven in any systemic way. It's not even like someone used principal component analysis to really establish that the four classifiers are reasonably orthogonal. It's probably not super obvious/trivial to find human language-friendly orthogonal aspects of personality that are each bimodal, but I imagine the surveys could be improved informed by better data science.
It's certainly a compression algorithm, as are all classification based metrics based on answers to multiple questions, and I'm not arguing it's the most effective one around. However I think before making claims like it has no "external validity" the degree to which it might have it should actually be tested with reasonable methodology and I'm offering something that can absolutely be tested scientifically. There's nothing impossible about having some people take the test and having others who know them try to classify them without the results and see how well the two coincide. It's also possible to evaluate the degree to which people can decompress the data. You can set it up where people have equal time spent with two people of each MBTI and see how well they can guess their answers to the original survey questions with additional knowledge of the MBTI as opposed to without it. It won't establish an upperbound for how useful an MBTI is but it will help gauge a lower bound and I'm pretty confident the lower bound will be higher than that of a zodiac.
I imagine we can design a better classification, probably with even the same survey questions, but just because a metric wasn't well-designed doesn't mean the information it provides is meaningless.
"INFJs are strong leaders" is as arbitrary as saying "aquarius's are strong leaders"
The problem i, and many other people find with the mbti is that most of its users, and even scientific apologists, can't help but fall into the trap of categorizing people into perceived behavioral trends based on their types, which is at best, scientifically invalid, and at worse, harmful.
I'm really a very nice person. I'm magnanimous, full of goodwill and compassion and everyone I meet immediately likes me. I am intelligent and brave and very gregarious. I am the best person to be around when you need a shoulder to cry on because I have a deep understanding of human nature, thanks to my very high emotional intelligence.
That is the problem with taking into account people's stated behaviour and inclinations.
Of course other parts of the article talk about the predictive power of the personality test. On the other hand, those excerpts don't talk about horoscopes.
- Engender some self awareness. It's astonishing how many people lack critical self-awareness about how they approach problems , handle change, communicate with others, or deal with their emotions. MBTI might be nonsense or unverifiable but for many people it's their first exposure to any written form of objective introspection. The belief that these are immutable traits somehow isn't usually dwelled on.
- Help team members recognize that there are different styles/preferences of thinking and reasoning. You'd be amazed how many inter-office conflicts get resolved just through spending time getting to know one another. MBTI or HBDI workshops (not just the test) are helpful for this
On a final note, there is a fairly popular executive MBA program where I took a one week survey course on leadership about a decade ago. In both this course and the program, they were pretty stoked about the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrmann_Brain_Dominance_Ins...
With the hope it was a bit more rooted in science than MBTI. It focuses more on cognitive preferences than on personality.
More articles
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/give-and-take/201309/go...
Edit: http://www.forbes.com/sites/toddessig/2014/09/29/the-mysteri...
And the Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2013/mar/...
It's marginally analogous to the Big Five personality traits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits - this is the personality paradigm recognized by academia), it just leaves out the tendency to experience negative emotions (probably because neuroticism is a negative thing, and businesses like their HR experiences and training to be as positive and feel-good as the bottom line allows.)
It is unfortunate that people like the false dichotomies and the Forer effect (the generic but positive descriptions that apply to just about everybody.)
I'm sure the Myers Briggs people would be selling the Big Five if they thought they could copyright it.
Everyone is some range of introverted to extroverted, for example. It's their preference, such as the flavor of ice cream they like. It can change often, under circumstances, or even not be present, of course. It's not set in stone; it's just a preference. It doesn't define you; you define it.
Myers-Briggs is unfortunate in that it assigns that preference as letter. You like Chocolate. You're a C. There are some who have no problem with this sort of designation. They love chocolate always and in every circumstance. Many, however, are not one letter, and so it's a poor test.
The point is not the letter. The point is asking yourself the question: do you feel more energized after a dinner party or after a quiet day alone? The point is to know, not just what flavors your prefer usually, but what situations (in this case) you prefer. And why not know that about yourself?
The scales are unsound. They actively direct people away from curiosity in discovering other structures which are less wrong.
Some more critique on the article.
1. The Myers Briggs test result does not need to be binary. There are variants of the tests that give you a score on each of its 4 axes (Introvert/Extrovert, Sensing/Intuitive, Feeling/Thinking, Judging/Perceptive). For example, see https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test
2. The test results do not always talk about positive qualities. For example, here is a discussion of strengths and weaknesses of the ISFJ personality. https://www.16personalities.com/isfj-strengths-and-weaknesse....
Finally, on the point of falsification, I would like to suggest the following test. Take a group of people and let them take the test. Now let the close friends of the test taker read all the personality type descriptions and chose one for the test taker. Find the correlation between the friends' choices and the test results. If the correlation is significant, then the test is meaningful. Otherwise not meaningful.
The first thing, MB-style tests, are amorphous and have been improved in various ways since the invention of the test.
That second thing is a formalized test with licensed practitioners. It's been used to disqualify people from jobs, and has produced a huge amount of secondary literature/analysis which requires the binary distribution to be meaningful. This formalized test has been worth a small fortune for the people who own it, and their training seminars and public literature aggressively go against both points 1 and 2.
It's fair to criticize MBTI as, say, needing to be binary. 16personalities is a secondary group which is doing a different thing than the still-popular, rigorously-bounded original.
This is a valid point. If the version that most companies are using needs a binary classification, then this is a meaningful criticism of the test.
However, note that this is just be a criticism of the test. It says nothing about whether the tests are effective or not, which is what the article tries to prove.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now%2C_Discover_Your_Strengths
Sadly, these tests are misused by well-meaning HR departments who are in no position, as amateur psychologists, to make _any_ decisions based personality test results.
By forcing people to think in these characteristics to evaluate someone it makes it easier to have a common vocabulary and to predict stuff along those lines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
That said, I don't think it's quite true that "The MBTI is approximately as valid as the Big 5". It seems to me that the Big 5 is a strict improvement on the MBTI. First, the discrete nature of the MBTI incorrectly suggests that the distributions are bimodal, when I don't think anyone thinks that's true. Second, I'm willing to bet that even if we just concentrate on the 4 factors of the Big 5 that correlate with the (non-discrete version of the) MBTI factors, we'd find significantly higher validity for the former, if only because there have been many more serious scientists studying and refining it over many years.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-myers-briggs-pe... Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
You're describing salesmanship and/or popularizing techniques, not scientific validity.
If you are a logical positivist and scientific realist you'll never be able to grok this. As a utilitarian I understand that science is the process of making something that does something you want done.
Thanks!
I'm no statistician, but "is approximately as valid" looks to be overselling the situation.
Also correlation is a linear operator which is not particularly sensitive to anything nonlinear. Use a good statistical test instead.
In my opinion, the Meyers Briggs is useful mainly because it can help people become more self-aware and more empathetic toward others.
I've observed that in a group of 15 people who just got their Meyers Briggs results, several usually think it was uncannily accurate, and a few are immediately defensive because the result does not jive with their self-perception (usually because the personality type is described as similar to some unsavory characters from history). When I read articles criticizing Meyers Briggs, I always assume it was written by one of these people.
If you are in a relationship, one interesting game to play with your significant other is to take the Meyers Briggs test and then read some of the stuff that has been written about relationship compatibility through the Meyers Briggs lens. I've found it to be quite accurate for many couples I know. There is also a very amusing book called Please Understand me II which has detailed write-ups about the characteristics of each type. It's great for parties to read out loud everyone's results over a glass of wine.
IMHO Personality tests are useful mainly to encourage self-awareness, introspection and empathy. As a Meyers Briggs ENTP I find the descriptions of an ENTP personality flattering and desirable. I suspect nearly any type would find their own type description equally flattering and desirable.
Unfortunately, the traits investigated by the MBTI seem to be normally distributed. So as true as this is, it still means that people who are decisively placed on all four axes are the exception rather than the rule.
Nonetheless, one meets a lot of ENTJs and INTPs and understanding some of the subtle differences between those and ENTP has helped me understand my differences and similarities with those people better.
> As a Meyers Briggs ENTP I find the descriptions of an ENTP personality flattering and desirable.
Of course, they're your descriptions and therefore they're biased. (Incidentally, I'm an ENTP too).
Well, if you take a 2000 word write-up about your own type, there may be some thought-provoking generalizations either about your own type or about patterns that are consistent when people of different types interact... things which derive from what you believed about yourself but are consequences of the MBTI's generalizations about human interactions.
But I agree, it would be interesting to incorporate the sort of information in the MBTI along with less subjective metrics and come up with a more rich analysis.
Right, but how many of those generalizations are actually verified? The specifics are studied to be consistent, but there are very few generalizations backed up by data.
Could this be the placebo effect? I once read a comment, that all self-help methods are successful, simply because they make you self conscious. The personality test gives the impression of being a carefully developed machine that can peer into your soul. Does it need to be real, in order to be useful?
I've observed that in a group of 15 people who just got their Meyers Briggs results, several usually think it was uncannily accurate, and a few are immediately defensive because the result does not jive with their self-perception (usually because the personality type is described as similar to some unsavory characters from history). When I read articles criticizing Meyers Briggs, I always assume it was written by one of these people.
But isn't that an argumentum ad hominem? At the very least, it's a good reason why an individual's personal impression of the results is a poor source of validation. The ones who think it's accurate could be wrong too.
On the other hand, in a workplace situation, the defensive ones are simply not thinking tactically.
Haha absolutely true. It puzzles me that anyone would react that way.
Your points are totally valid. For me, the interesting part was reading my own results and thinking about my reaction to them, and watching people I know pretty well reading and reacting to theirs.
Also, the way the results are framed teases apart some of the more "identity-oriented" aspects of peoples' personalities and validates them as legitimate rather than (perhaps) annoying quirks. I think this can lead to empathy.
So I don't really think it matters how psychologically real the assessment is, so long as it's interesting, relatively repeatable, and useful in the sense I mentioned. Just my opinion though. In the workplace I've used it before alongside a few other metrics (like DISC and one other private one) as part of a fun "learn about each other" exercise. I would not use it for hiring decisions or as part of any kind of official HR oriented policy.
how dismissive of you. do you dismiss the science in those articles as well?
I've been subjected to "DiSC" profiling at a previous employer. After taking the test we were subjected to a 3 hour session where we slowly discovered and learned about our unique profile. The best part was I compared my strengths and weaknesses with someone who had an "opposite" personality and they were pretty close to identical.
Granted there is a lot to be gained by getting a group of people in a room to talk about the different ways they interact with the world and how they go about solving problems. However, as soon as you start providing formulas for how to interact with people my bull shit detector goes off.
I don't think it's necessary to precisely nail a specific set of quanta, but simply to avoid the symbols that are associated with negative stereotypes such as introverted, obstinate, or lazy. When I had to take one of these kinds of tests, I just put myself into a mind set of being outgoing, cheerful, agreeable, diligent, etc.
This is categorically false. Myers Briggs results are quite literally reported on a spectrum of 100 I - 0 - E 100, with your position on the spectrum shown. The 4 letter rollup is exactly that: a summary rollup of your test results.
So, no, she was not a doofus.
I use it a lot when it comes to introducing people to nerdy friends (especially in the context of dating, like: "She's INFP!" or "Yeah, she looks nice, but is a total ESFJ...".)
A link (nice pictures, especially the carnivorous plant for INTP) and some descritpions that actually may be helpful how to deal with other people (especially with different personalities): https://www.16personalities.com/.
If you really want to "be scientific" (as if it was a binary criterion), you can use OCEAN. For me it would be:
O+ C- E= A- N+
If you've never heard of it, I recommend watching the video before you Google anything. It's only a short video (less than 4 minutes) and is a brilliant demonstration.
For a real personality exam with actual use in psych research, check out the Five Factor metric.
Explaining the profile parts while seeing your team members profiles was a great exercise for us because it effectively taught us how to communicate better with each other. I'm an ENFJ on a team of highly technical introverts INTJ.
We learned how to work better together, how to communicate better and they also learned how/when to better utilize me for interactions with the rest of the company.
Until we did this exercise it was just some interesting test results.
That's not entirely true. The final answer that people wear as a badge is binary, but the result is calculated as a percentage, and usually presented to the test-taker as a percentage.
I'd love to do some data mining on a large MBTI test database. Better yet, a large database of people's responses to various personality-oriented questions, MBTI or not.
In my experience, Gallup's Strengthsfinder system is much better suited to workplace environments. It's backed by solid research, and I really like its core philosophy: everyone has natural strengths, and building off those strengths will lead to better outcomes than trying to compensate for personal weaknesses. As long as companies understand that it isn't a litmus test for suitability -- teams should have a diversity of strengths or they will have blind spots -- it can actually be a great tool for understanding management and team dynamics.
For personal development, I prefer the Enneagram system. I've found each type's "levels of development" to be incredibly helpful in pinpointing my own type, and overall I have a much better "fit" with my type than in MBTI. As opposed to Strengthsfinder, the Enneagram system is mainly useful for identifying patterns in behavior and understanding motivations. Not such a great business tool, except perhaps at the executive level.
Similarly you could reason about type 7 and their ideal job position: they see more opportunieties and options than others (Steve Jobs was said to be 7w8), but they often dismiss any risks involved. They also hate repetitive day to day work. Hence they would make better Architect, Analyst, UX Designer or Salesperson than a Project Manager (unless they are eg. balanced by a 6 in their team).
I'm not saying that we should choose job solely on the type, it just offers lot of opportunities to understand what is it specifically in given activity that we like and what goes naturally against our habits. Whether we change the job or just work on the weaknesses is up to us.
Correlations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi... 0.44 / -0.49 is not correlation.
The MBTI is more useful than an astrological sign, and less useful than a 15 minute conversation with someone, if you want to understand their personality. That said I think it's a mostly harmless way of classifying people, unlike race, class, nationality, profession, etc.
E.g. consider someone who has previously worked in a dysfunctional corporate environment but was unable to quit that job for financial reasons. They were very well rewarded for superficial qualities like punctuality and tidyness and thus learned that it was necessary to prioritize these values.
Does that mean that this person now has a personality which prioritizes these values? What if their ``natural'' personality in another environment would have been to only emphasize utility to their company even at e.g. the cost of tidyness. What if their natural personality will quickly adapt once they are put in an environment that emphasizes these qualities?
These issues seem to be given oddly little weight by advocates of Myers-Briggs classification for the purpose of hiring decisions.
Disclaimer: I work for Birkman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
When I look at those, I think "Not everything, but not nothing either". A correlation of 0.7+ is pretty high for anything in the social sciences - by comparison, the correlation between intelligence and genetics is about 0.4. It's certainly a lot higher than astrology, which has a correlation of roughly 0.0 with anything other than birthdate.
A lot of the criticism of MBTI is that it breaks people down into 16 arbitrary categories, and there's no way a single category can reflect everything about a person. This is true; there is no way a single category will reflect everything about a person. But we break people down into arbitrary categories all the time - race, social class, profession, job title, political party, ethnicity, place of residence, generation, etc. Categorization by MBTI brings all of the pitfalls of these - you're stereotyping, and you're going to miss important details about the person themself - as well as all the benefits, in the form of a quick mental shorthand to draw inferences about their future behavior on little data.
You can think of it in "Thinking fast and slow" terms: MBTIs and other social categories are in the "thinking fast" category, where you make quick but error-prone judgments on limited information, while actually getting to know someone is the "thinking slow" side, where you get a much more accurate picture of who they are at the cost of significantly higher effort. Indeed, the MBTI has a dimension for this (iNtuitive vs. Sensing), and I've found that online MBTI tests tend to overrepresent the number of Ns in the population compared to offline, professionally-given tests, because Ns tend to be more attracted to the MBTI as a way of thinking about the world.
So it might not be completely accurate, but it did help me understand how I relate and differ with others due to these 4 major personality characteristics.
My uninterest only increased when I was in an environment where this was a frequent point of reference among co-workers, as I watched people with no education and training in psychology or other relevant fields make pronouncements and direct people's work lives based on four letters.
As far as I can see (and obviously, I don't know a lot about MB), it's words pulled out of legitimate fields of study and used ignorantly and out of context, sometimes with real consequences.
AFAICT, the only reasons for a company to administer it are: employee development (same as universities); to attempt to fix a deficient interview process (which is BS).
Anyway, this personality system is what I thought when I first heard of the Myers-Briggs test and I thought it has exactly the same merit as any other system that arbitrarily groups people into 16 types based on whatever perceived characteristic of theirs, which is to say: none at all. In Castaneda's case you need to have special seer powers to see peoples' type. In Myers Briggs all you need is an MBTI test.
There is progress even in magic, it seems.
The four letters that pop out are purely a function of some responses given, and not of actual personality. Anyone who understands the mapping from answers to outcome can just give the answers to produce a desired outcome.
Any test that a subject can game is inherently unscientific.
The above would be true even if the model of personality were actually valid, and indicated something meaningful in the case of honest, accurately introspective answers. (That it isn't and doesn't is what is called into question by the article.)
This section of the Wikipedia page on it suggests that some other personality tests have some built-in sophistication to detect dishonest answers, which is lacking in Myers-Briggs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
As a citation, pretty much all of these: https://youarenotsosmart.com/all-posts/
The classification was purely validated by Isabel Briggs Myers' own free interpretation of what a particular trait should be.
That's self-deception, not science.
There's nothing wrong in trying to build an understanding of personalities but making things up just because you think your intuition is all you need to build theories, well, that doesn't inspire much confidence.
The Myers-Briggs Test smells like science -it has codes and categories!- but like most pseudo-sciences, no-one has really been interested in validating the assumptions with actual data.
Pseudo-Psychology is rife with these wishful-thinking theories that sound kind of right but have no solid data to support them.
Not bashing Psychology, I think it's a hugely interesting field, but the science behind a lot of it still remains fishy.
This is like saying that somebody who claimed that 1+1=2 is wrong because they came up with the left hand side of the equation themselves.
Yes, the MBTI is arbitrary to a large extent, but that does not make it meaningless.
I've never bought into the test. IMO, it's much too simplistic to describe human behavior. People don't fit cleanly into one of just a few categories.
For me, it's been meaningful in that it emphasizes that my preferences can be different from those around me, and that that is just fine. It's helpful to consider that some prefer to think for a while before speaking, even if that's not my preference because silence makes me uncomfortable. It's helpful to acknowledge that some people like to make detailed plans whereas I prefer to be more flexible and open to possibilities. The attitude of the MBTI is that neither approach is wrong but that it helps to recognize which approach you prefer.
Does each person fit comfortably into one of 16 categories? No, of course not. But it might be a useful framework for introspection and thinking about your relationships.
It was so bizarre it took me a while to decide if they were insane or just incredibly rude. Upon reflection, they were both.
"The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless"
promises explosive insights such as:
"[...] and statistical analysis reveals even data produced by the test shows a normal distribution rather than bimodal, refuting the either/or claims of the MBTI."
It is really surprising that aggregation of a number of binary questions results produces a normal distribution. In all my experiments with a randomly selected coin from my purse I got something close to bimodal - not.
MBTI may be flawed, overused and too simplistic. However simplifying statistical arguments down to that level is not the way to advance science.
Apart from that, I don't think there are necessarily problems in treating it as a fun personality test, like "astrology or tarot cards" as others have said. But in the digital marketing space, Buyer Modalities is a popular model used to segment site visitors. It's based on the Myers-Briggs so it's inherently useless, but makes you feel like you're doing rigorous work.
Do you know if it was an official MBTI test or something else? In keeping with the "no wrong personality" mantra, I found the test questions to be fairly neutral. By that I mean neither option would be perceived as socially unacceptable, just different personal preferences.
Needless to say I've ignored any MBTI results since.
Naturally most people would have at least an X or two, but it would be much more useful if people didn't have to advertise an F or T if it didn't really matter for describing them.
Though it probably wouldn't have caught on. Who wants to be the XXXX in a situation.
Of course, my theory is that personality tests just tell you what you think of yourself, and I change my opinion about that often.
A few points:
- Science is concerned with making accurate predictions about the future
- Predictions range in quality: QFT can predict the gyromagnetic moment of the electron to 12 decimal places, but psychiatrists still have trouble figuring out which medications serve as effective antidepressants (nothing against them — it's a complex subject)
Also, good science is able to find correlations between things, and these correlations allow you to improve your predictions. How much of the variance in a dataset is explained by a given model? In this sense:
- Astrology has almost zero predictivity (I say "almost" because there are extremely weak, but non-zero correlations with the month that someone was born in)
- Myers-Briggs has weak, but non-zero predictivity that is still much higher than that of astrology
- Big Five has weak, but non-zero predictivity that is slightly higher than Myers-Briggs
- The field of psychology has weak, but non-zero predictivity (http://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-f...)
- The field of biology has adequate predictivity
- The field of particle physics has extremely high predictivity
See where I'm going with this? The math may be hard, but quantum mechanics is actually pretty easy as far as accurately predicting the future goes. Understanding the human brain is a far more difficult task than making sense of C* algebras.
There's been quite a few studies on Myers-Briggs, and I think it has more value than the Smithsonian article gives it credit for. That said, I think Big Five has much less value than most psychologists give it credit for.
In terms of determining the eigenfactors of personality, something recent like this goes much further than Big Five:
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.1176/ajp.161.10.1...
There is another personality typing method called Enneagram, that takes a more interesting approach than static M-B. Rather than attributing some essential properties to each person, it assumes that personality is formed by a set of cognitive habits. These habits condition our attention to pick specific aspects of experience and giving it interpretation in line with this bias. Most people use all of these 9 identified patterns, but one is dominant, and hence it defines what we perceive as personality.
These habits are mostly crystalised in childhood and depend on the environment and upbringing. Eg. when a child is punished at random without any consequence there's a chance it will become type 8, on the other hand if there's great deal of regularity and rules at home, it may and up as type 1 etc. Seems like a gross oversimplification, but it's just an example of this type of conditioning.
The general approach seems legit (based on what we know about cognitive science), but what's more important, learning about these 9 habits/types usually leads to incredible insights into one's behaviour. There's lot of regularities that we suddenly find in our actions that fit specifically to one of these 9 types.
Unlike what article states about M-B, Ennegram mostly focuses on the dark, habitual and unconscious aspects of each personality, so it's much less susceptible to the "horoscope effect" (where we're more likely to attribute anything positive to ourselves).
I try to challenge it as much as possible, because as anything related to personality it may become a self fulfilling prophecy, but still I found it very hard to falsify, there's just a lot of positive evidence.
Since there's strong overrepresentation of rational thinkers on HN I'd love to hear some comments from anyone here who took Enneagram test or heard about it (there's a lot of free tests on the internet).
The MBTI has some correlation to the Enneagram, and it is from that correlation that it takes most or all of its validity. But the correlation is only partial. If you look in Jung's Psychological Types, you will see that he correctly characterized eight of the nine Enneagram types (which one he missed I leave as an exercise for the reader). Missing one type, he was unable to see the whole structure with its deeper properties, such as integration/distintegration, that reflect the way the types relate to one another. Nor did he pick up on how the types develop as childhood survival strategies (which is not as simple as you're suggesting).
The MBTI starts with Jung's already incomplete system and just messes it up further.
Someone will probably ask me whether the Enneagram has been objectively validated. It has not been, and can never be, because it contains an inherent element of subjectivity. The way you know your Enneagram type is not by taking tests. Tests can provide useful hints, but if all you have is a test result -- even if it's correct! -- you do not know your type. The way you know is by studying the types until one of them clicks for you, and you see yourself in a new way: then you know.
The Enneagram does talk about our dark sides, and that's important; but it isn't only about that by any means. It can also show us positive aspects of ourselves that we have not accepted, and it's very much about how to develop those aspects further.
ETA: if you would like help figuring out your type, I would be delighted to assist. My email address is in my profile.
Does it make some sense? Where are the gaps?
Are there any Eneagram specific resources that you'd recommend? I've found A.H. Almaas and Eli Jaxon-Bear books the most insightful. I'd love to read/hear something original on the topic that doesn't come from the echo chamber of people who are in these circles, make money from it etc.
As to the type, just as you said one of them "clicked" with me strongly and I'm almost 100% sure which one is mine.
ES - 7
IS - 9
EI - 8
II - 4
ET - 1
IT - 5
EF - 2 (but see below)
IF - 6
I tend to doubt classifications with dimensions that lack opposing extremes. Yes, I can imagine how is a person with heavy reforming personality, but how is one with very little of it? Besides the idea that those traits are formed at the infancy, or that they crystallize at all is so opposed to my experience that I can't take the idea seriously.
I understand your point about classifications, but it assumes that Enneagram spectrum is a result of random distribution of X values in some vector. In such case indeed each dimension should have 2 extremes. However, according to my vague intuition Enneagram is somewhat different. Rather than describing the whole space in which each solution (personality type) is equally possible, it seems to describe specific points in the space that seem to act like attractors. For some reason these specific behavioural patterns crystalize, because they tend to create very specific meaning/identity and way of making sense of the world around us. You can't create an identity/self around 'lack of something', it needs to be some specific quality that allows to interpret reality in given fashion.
The example you bring up (type 1, the Reformer) is not about reforming vs not reforming, but rather about seeing the world in terms of perfection: this is perfect and this is not perfect. Hence they may end up as a reformer or just someone overly pedantic. Other types have completely different perspective (eg. this is safe and this is not safe), so in a way each type is a separate according to which a given person interprets the same reality.
This is very subtle and more complex than M-B. In M-B we have one 'objective' world and set of values in which various types rank differently. In Enneagram each type has a different way of defining the world/experience so in each case the measuring axes are different. It's as if you had different formal systems based on different axioms - each would end up with different consequences and you wouldn't be able to compare their statements directly. You'd have to compare the properties of the systems as a whole.
Your last point about infancy - that was my mistake, I shouldn't write 'early childhood' (edited). The theories I heard mentioned some formative, sometimes traumatic (single, or repetivie) experiences in childhood/adolescence that shaped given perspective.
Again, not sure if it actually made any difference in interactions with coworkers but it was kinda interesting.
[1]: http://www.nature.com/news/smart-software-spots-statistical-...
That there are widespread problems with psychological research does not mean that there is no reason to apply standards when evaluating proposed models in the field (in fact, it's a good reason to be particularly careful in doing so.)
What meyers briggs is NOT is a group of 16 types each with a description of what the person is like. This looks like astrology. This 16 groups is just a summary of what people might be like based on the test results.
Meyers briggs IS a group of four classifications. A person falls on a continuum related to each classification. For each classification there is a letter associated with each end of the spectrum. For a given classification you can label yourself as one of the two letters based on which side of the continuum you fall, though this is just a simplifying representation. The true representation is a place on the continuum between each of the two letters.
The four categories are give below, in my matchbox description:
E vs I - extroversion/introversion. An I is a person who recharges by being alone. An E recharges by being with other people. An I type person will typically be tired after spending a lot of time in a group of people and will want to spend some time by themselves. An E will be drained if they are by themselves for a while. Keep in mind, there is no such thing as a pure E or a pure I. We are all a combination of the two.
N vs S - intuitive/sensing - An N person relies on subconscious thinking, whereas a S person relies on conscious thinking, or reasoning. We can thinking much faster subconsciously but the problem with it is that it is when are brain produces a result, such as "That person doesn't like me", it is difficult to know if it is right if it is based on subconscious reasoning.
T vs F - thinking/feeling - An F is more sensitive to another's feelings where as a T is less concerned with a persons interpretation of what they say than with how true it is. A T is more the brutally honest type.
P vs J - perceiving/judging - a J is a planner and doesn't like when the plan changes. A P likes to take things as they come and doesn't like to be tied down.
I see this as a very scientific classification. Of course, what people do with the classification may be a different story, such as how it is used in the hiring process. I find it very useful in understanding how people react to situations differently than I do, and that I should not judge them negatively for this.
** If not MBTI, then what else instead? **
i get the business and HR "value" (yes, in quotes :), but i largely view this as "astrology for top 50 university people", ie people who want to believe in some collective unconsciousness affinities, peppered with scientific plausibility. especially with regard to application in personal life
But it really shouldn't be used as an employee classifier... just personal growth only.
It didn't actually solve anything though.
Here's one example: I'm an ISTP which is only one letter away from ISFP. That's pretty similar right?
No, they're actually pretty different.
The letters ISTP are just a shorthand for a system developed by Carl Jung. ISTP actually means that I have a stack of behaviors that I tend towards and that I've developed as I've aged.
The stack goes as follows: Introverted Thinking which I have (supposedly) developed since I was young. http://personalitygrowth.com/introverted-thinking/
Extraverted Sensing which, again supposedly, I started developing since I was in my teens and through my 20s. http://personalitygrowth.com/extraverted-sensing-se/
Introverted Intuition which I've been developing more recently (30s). http://personalitygrowth.com/introverted-intuition/
And finally Extraverted Feeling which is still moderately awkward for me (like trying to write with my off hand). It's getting less awkward as I get older. http://personalitygrowth.com/extraverted-feeling-fe/
An ISFP, on the other hand, has the following stack: Introverted Feeling, Extraverted Sensing, Introverted Intuition, and Extraverted Thinking.
And other types have their own function stack that they've developed as they've aged. Some faster, some slower. This is one potential reason why people test differently as they age. I first took the test I was in my 20s when I was at a different point in my maturation process. Nowadays I'm much more focused on long term goals as opposed to short term satisfaction. Maybe I'm just developing my Introverted Intuition which is typically associated more with long term thinking. Maybe it's just part of the maturation process everyone goes through.
I will say, though, some people I've observed have gone through the process in reverse -- being interested in long term goals when they're young and then realizing they should also pay attention to short term gratification a little as they age. Maybe they're a type that leads with Introverted Intuition. Who knows.
https://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2009/08/fascinating-...
he original developers of the MMPI questionnaire went about choosing their "normal" control group. They compared test answers from patients in hospitals for the mentally ill with answers from people working in and visiting those hospitals.
Who’s to say those workers and visitors were mentally healthy?
It's well known that certain kinds of mentally ill people are drawn to working in the mental health industry. I know a psychiatrist who's a narcissist, and a psychiatric nurse who's probably BPD or NPD.
Bootstrapping a test from a hand-picked set of people is just bad methodology.
Yeah... this is called being undisciplined. Experts and Masters aren't born with the discipline to master their craft. They struggle like anyone else, but they break through those barriers and continue their mastery.
Don't use your personality as an excuse to get around the discipline and practice components of success. Don't let the introvert label be an excuse for you being a standoffish asshole or a hermit.
Go on the subreddits for these ... such as /r/INTP and browse a bit ... they are sad.