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This is a nice, very readable article by a psychologist specialising in lifespan personality development: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/30/4840534...

"while personality traits are relatively stable over time, they can and often do gradually change across the life span. What's more, those changes are usually for the better. Many studies, including some of my own, show that most adults become more agreeable, conscientious and emotionally resilient as they age. But these changes tend to unfold across years or decades, rather than days or weeks"

The important word there is "tend". For most people their personality slowly shifts over decades. However, that doesn't mean faster change is impossible. People's personalities can change quickly, either due to life changing events or to intentional effort to change - for example, nearly anyone who is neurotic, depressed, anxious, easily angered, or similar who practices mindfulness daily for 6 months will experience a reduction in those aspects of their personality. Combine that with CBT, new hobbies, changing to a less stressful career, choosing better friends, more exercise, better diet, better sleep, and so on, and you'll experience even faster change. However, most people don't do this, especially when they are older, and hence the statistics show that changes tend to be slow.

Your argument sounds like it's taken out of a motivational book.

You can do it! You can become a better person! You just need to change every single detail of your life and you will be a better person!

Well, I was trying to phrase it positively because the original example I came up with was that if your entire family dies in a car crash, it's likely to cause an instant, long lasting negative change in your personality. Guess I swung it too far in the other direction haha.

But changes can be negative in a less drastic way too. For example, I'm sure the forced isolation of the past year has brought out depressive tendencies in a lot of people. In the face of that, we do need to be reminded that we can take charge and make positive changes in ourselves and that there are tools like meditation or CBT to help us (although it's certainly not so easy or works so universally as suggested in certain motivational books).

Worth noting is that many psychologists are calling for the end of solitary confinement in the prison system citing the adverse effects it has on inmates personalities.

Mindfulness isn’t necessary helpful by itself, nor is CBT. You also need to have the capacity to change, which is not a given.

In my case, unmedicated, my executive function is compromised. This means I lack the self-control necessary to regulate emotions and control what I’m paying attention to.

> In truth, people's personalities are malleable

That's what I observed myself - I can have different MBTI depending on situation and context. When "people change" it's mostly the context that changes, and a different personality is assumed like a role by the mind, as if the mind just wants to adapt to each situation as best possible.

Reminds me of the unlimited ability of GPT-3 to assume personalities and points of view, with the right trigger you can get it to be anyone. I'm not saying people's personalities are equally flexible but they do have a degree of context flexibility.

I think degree of malleability would be the most interesting personality facet to measure.

Anecdotally, I think it varies quite a bit between people and changes over time.

* In truth, people's personalities are malleable *

Thank you for saying that. There was an interview before Carl Jung passed away, where even he talked about how in certain situation where arch type changes. We all ought to view tests like Myer Briggs as a way to shade light on people and their ways of being.

I dunno? It seems my type is pretty much fixed between INFL and INTP.

Everyone thinks I’m extroverted because most of my job involves talking to people.

People's personality's certainly are malleable, but the MBTI does not purport to measure personality. It (attempts to) measure personality type. i.e. the underlying baseline from which your personality starts. At no point does it claim that people's personalities don't change. Of course they do.

Perhaps you are assuming that people are "tabula rasa" - blank slates - from which their personalities develop. The MBTI is a criticism of this: it asserts that there is variance in the nature component of people's personalities. That two people exposed to exactly the same environmental stimuli from birth will not react to it the same way.

IMO this is fairly obviously true if you think about it (even if you don't think the MBTI accurately describes the differences.)

> It (attempts to) measure personality type. i.e. the underlying baseline from which your personality starts.

Which proof do you have that such a thing exists? Underlying personality traits sounds to me like a theory of epicycles when a simpler more plausible theory exists.

I don't have proof. I'm merely correcting the parent on what the theory claims. That said, the only thing that "underlying baseline from which your personality starts" really claims is that there is a "nature" (as opposed to nurture) component to people's personalities.

While I'm sure not everyone would agree with that, it's not exactly implausible. Indeed it must surely seem likely to anyone who has observed how wildly differently young children react to the same situation. And has been borne out in twin studies, etc.

Now that doesn't mean that the MBTI has the right theory about the nature of the "nature" component, but my point is that if you are taking the MBTI to be a description of someone's total personality rather than just the nature component of their personality, then you are completely misconstruing what it is claiming.

As far as my understanding goes the nature vs. nurture debate in psychology is really old school. Like it was fairly concluded before The Bell Curve came out in the mid nineties and argued in favor of nature.

As I understand it that arguing nature vs. nurture usually stems from badly defined concepts often defined in terms of how they are measured (e. Operationally defined). What happens then is that you get a bunch of correlation between various concepts just because one concept pollutes into another, not because of how we are geared. Nature vs. nurture is also an awfully dualistic approach and completely misses (or ignores) interaction effects.

To tie this into this thread. GP is not saying that nurture defines personality as opposed to nature. They are simply claiming that it is malleable. How malleable, under which circumstances, malleable to what, which aspects, etc. are all still open questions which may be ascribed to ones genes (and maybe not; hence the open question). This is the interaction effect which the dualistic nature vs. nurture debate completely misses.

I would actually go further then GP and say that the question is flawed. Personality is not a useful psychological concept and does not describe behavior any better then, say, political leaning, religion, or how many languages you speak. That is to say, measuring personality and categorizing people based on personality traits brings us no closer in understanding human behavior. That is to say, measuring personalities and ascribing traits is not only harmful—like GP says—but also bad psychology.

esperent's comment that I originally replied to not only claims that personality is malleable (I completely agree), but that MBTI theory claims that is not. That represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what the theory is claiming.

> How malleable, under which circumstances, malleable to what, which aspects, etc. are all still open questions

Indeed. And the MBTI theory makes a specific and very interesting claim about this open question: that what is malleable, under which circumstances, etc varies between people. And furthermore, that there is an extent to which that variation follows certain set patterns (possibly as a strong statistical average with exceptions rather than a sure thing), such that we can classify people by which pattern(s) of malleability they follow.

This doesn't mean that all malleability is subject to these patterns. There can still be aspects that are common to all people, and aspects that are completely individual. But the claim is that there also some aspects that apply to group of peoples.

Of course, such a claim needs to be substantiated and the current evidence is mostly from clinical observation rather than scientific experimentation. But whether it is true or not there is good reason to believe that the lack of scientific evidence stems from a lack of ability to measure accurately because (as you say) mainstream psychology has very little to say on this topic at the moment and exactly how this aspect of the mind works is still considered an open question.

> That is to say, measuring personality and categorizing people based on personality traits brings us no closer in understanding human behavior. That is to say, measuring personalities and ascribing traits is not only harmful—like GP says—but also bad psychology.

I should note that the MBTI does NOT measure external traits. It (attempts to) measure an actual functional mechanism in the mind/brain (which it postulates to exist).

> The problem [is] that people think they measure a permanent aspect of themselves. In truth, people's personalities are malleable...

The one and only time I did the Myers-Briggs stuff, the speaker made it absolutely abundantly clear:

1) Traits were contextual. We're different around family, friends, coworkers, commuting into work... (Duh, right?)

2) Though people can fake traits, like an introvert acting extroverted, doing so requires more effort. So maybe ponder that your resting state traits are more likely the "real you".

2.1) The speaker used an ice berg metaphor, which stuck with me. People present an aspect of themselves in public. With effort, you can rotate your ice berg to show other aspects. Removing the effort allows the ice berg to find its resting state.

I’m a bit lost. Combining 1) and 2), it means the test is against contextual and “fakeable” traits ?

Setting apart 3), as I would imagine a rotated iceberg might not come back to a resting state identical to before the rotation.

If the goal is to predict anything, we could also assume that context will change with time (even working at the same company, people change, assignments change, incentives change).

All in all it feels like a super weird disclaimer for something that is supposed to be useful.

You're the exact same person at church, work, hanging out with your buddies watching sports (or playing board games), doorbelling for a political campaign, baby sitting your nieces, etc?

Per the article, your traits are on a spectrum. Not binary. You may be more extroverted at church and less at work.

While the article does mention non-"binarizing" (I prefer "non-discretizing" as the more common parlance) in the sense of treating the 4 dimensions as axes not buckets, the article does not mention context sensitivity like church-home, buddies, babysitting, same/opposite sex, older/younger, etc., etc.

I just don't understand which of these criticisms doesn't apply to the Big Five too.

They do. The best criticism I see on the Mayers Briggs is the one that attacks the whole notion of personality tests (including Mayers Briggs and the Big 5).

Big 5 is not an established scientific theory, it has never been. In fact in the field of psychology, personality is as useful as a concept as your astrological sign is. There is no evidence that personality trades exists outside of factor analyzing pen and paper tests, let alone that they can be measured and classified.

For personality to be a useful psychological concept it would need to be predictive of behavior. So far we have more evidence that religion has a bigger role then personality traits. E.g. studies find that the more religious people are the less they obey in the Milgram experiment, however there is no evidence that people that score highly on the agreeableness factor do.

> however there is no evidence that people that score highly on the agreeableness factor do.

I went and did some exploring of the literature and found a study[1] that seems to contradict this statement. E.g. they found a significant correlation between Agreeableness factor and obedience in the Milgram experiment. However, the effect size is fairly small. Political leaning was also significant with similar effect size, and this study has yet to be replicated.

[1]: https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01158395/document

Personality is mostly established by age 6. Its more plastic than people realise, but it can be altered over a long period of time. Trauma helps, in regards to the big 5, concienciousness is the easiest to change.