Why are people suckers for the Myers-Briggs, Zodiac signs?
powerofus.medium.com
powerofus.medium.com
I've heard a common complaint that "traits are a spectrum, not discrete categories." But often in biology, this is not exactly true, just like there are light brown leopards and black leopards but no dark brown leopards.
Don't "listen to the scientists" who say otherwise, those hopeless reductionists who obsess over what is true but useless rather than what is faulty but useful. Pareto said it right: "Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself."
Of course it doesn't cover everyone well or every aspect; it's just one model of many, but it's useful and predictive.
As for zodiac signs...I can see some correlations popping out based on whether you're young for your grade or old for your grade (like Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Outliers), or perhaps when your parents decided to "mate" says something about them which says something about you, but yeah idk how deep it goes.
It can give a vague discription to some obvious traits, and many people need validation or direction, so that's why it "works".
No, its not. Its not the worst pseudoscience because parts of it map tolerably well to a some of the axes of the Big-5 model which has some apparent empirical validity, but it in is still pseudoscience with a huge marketing push behind it.
> I've heard a common complaint that "traits are a spectrum, not discrete categories." But often in biology, this is not exactly true, just like there are light brown leopards and black leopards but no dark brown leopards.
Yeah, sure there are traits that, within a properly selected domain, really are binary, but in terms of personality traits of the type M-B addresses, as well as knowing that M-B doesn't quite have the axes right, we known that position on those axes where M-B has the axis right still aren’t binary or even bimodal, because we have extensive personality research that isn’t a just-so story with a marketing push to sell proprietary BS products and consulting services.
Myers-Briggs hasn't really been useful for me. I fall very close to the middle on 2 of the axes.
> We often crave self-definition and are attracted to group memberships that balance a sense of differentiation from the many with a sense of connection to people just like us.
My answer:
Most people don't have the wherewithall to give their own lives meaning. They need someone else to give them purpose. Being given a label and expectations, fills that hole in their psyche that they can't fill themselves.
As an example: some situations call for being very detail oriented (J), where some situations call for being big picture (P). If you know you are prone to one or the other, you can either let others handle those situations, or realize that you are outside your comfort zone and be extra intentional.
The issue is you might do the test today without a morning coffe and 5 years from now after a good night sleep and get a large results disparity.
So either we accept that we as people keep changing the personality, that this tests for, thus making the test meaningless. Or we accept that inter test reliability is not great, which also makes the test meaningless.
Most of the people using these models in practice aren't claiming that you can find your type after just taking a test. Most who are being honest about it (instead of trying to make a quick buck) will warn you that it can take years of introspection to figure out what are the biases that consistently lead you to shoot yourself in the foot in life.
Eg, have a look at some of the early stuff by Objective Personality (not the last year or two when they started getting more commercial.) Constant warnings about people mistyping themselves and the need to consider feedback from a wide variety of people and situations before making any conclusions about yourself.
I remember taking this test many moons ago as an intern, it was never said explicitly but it was clear later on that the test was used by HR and multiple engineering teams to advise who would be put on a management track of that batch of new employees.
I don't think it's fair to compare this to astrology, which as far as I know isn't accompanied by any kind of reasonable or observable mechanism.
An example which comes to mind from recent media is John McAfee. Anyone who has put much thought into MBTI will no doubt all agree that he was an ENTP, who exemplified the charming chaos of extraverted intuition, while becoming paranoid about the parts of life that he repressed: the down-to-earth organisation of introverted sensing.
Knowing his Big Five percentages wouldn't give you the same quick insight into how exactly he was always his own worst enemy.
Personality tests are bunk science.
If you're trying to generate efficient groups: sort people by interests and don't spread them out. Literally the worst kind of systematising will go toe-to-toe with MB.
When I took the test, it classified me as an introvert. Since I prefer to be thought of as an extrovert, I changed my type accordingly. Because the test is not very helpful.
Additionally, I reliably find that when I am in the company of other declared NF’s we understand each other easily.
Perhaps you think there is a better preference indication heuristic. I have seen several, but MBTI is my favorite so far.
Anyway my point is: criticizing it as being a poor instrument to categorize people is thinking about it all wrong. We categorize ourselves.
That's fine for self-exploration and games at the family table and such. When employers start using as a "tool" for discriminating against people, however...
If you say: "I do x thing great and x thing bad, because I'm a Taurus," the conversation can move on.
If you say: "I do x thing great and x thing bad because I'm just that way," you'll be simultaneously bragging and then having a conversation about how to fix "x thing bad."
MB and Zodiac signs are a very pragmatic way of talking about personality.
[1] Jones, C. S., & Hartley, N. T. (2013). Comparing correlations between four-quadrant and five-factor personality assessments. American Journal of Business Education, 6(4), 459-470.
At USNA we joked, when asked, that our MBTI was IHTFP.