Why companies are interested in Myers-Briggs types
daily.jstor.org
daily.jstor.org
A friendly reminder of the beating this dead horse that is Myers Briggs have had almost a decade ago by Adam Grant
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog...
Edit: non amp link (thanks smingo) https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/give-and-take/201309...
That is clearly hyperbole, as is the equivocation with horoscopes mentioned in the article you linked. In both instances, the argument is hurting your case.
Look, I agree that the big 5 is superior. But the MBTI traits are clearly rough first approximations of traits discovered by more rigorous science - not just pure superstition.
There is an easy counter: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18248
The other two still holds for me though. But Big Five is not any better IMHO, it can be a trait for psychological health, but definitely not for personality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
These are not insignificant, particularly in the social sciences. 0.45 would be a large effect size in most psychology papers; 0.72 is huge.
I think a large part of whether people think MBTI is bunk or a useful tool depends on their willingness to overlook small details to get a general gist that's helpful but perhaps not totally accurate. Which is perhaps why another comment down-thread remarks that N's are much more likely to view MBTI as valid than S's (and sure enough, the indicator was developed by an INFJ and INFP, based on the ideas of an INTJ). "Personality" itself is an abstraction, and personality types are an abstraction on top of an abstraction. All generalizations are wrong, but some of them are useful.
One test measuring extroversion only manages 0.74 correlation with another. I'm not impressed.
They didn't invent traits and then came up with fake data to prove their model. It's the opposite: they used statistical methods to discover those traits.
It might be an imperfect model, but it's still scientific.
I was surprised there wasn't any mention of a very interesting issue here, i.e. MBTI and other typological instruments come with user manuals, training, etc., and those materials specifically say "do not use this for hiring".
This is true even in marketing materials...Here's an example directly from the Myers-Briggs Company website:
https://www.themyersbriggs.com/en-us/company/press/press/202...
Even as a personal growth tool the instrument itself is kinda meh, but the soft science behind it is pretty fascinating...
And if you are concerned your employer is going to misuse your MBTI type somehow, 1) know your type first, ideally before they do 2) learn the associated relational blind spots and decide how you'll work around them 3) call yourself a "reformed XXXX" because basically the deeper theory is that any given personality type is similar to an illness in a lot of ways. Oh and 4) this may not be a very good workplace, good luck out there.
I'd never ask about this, the number of bumps on someone's head, or if the candidate still beats their spouse. However, the best response would be a candidate who would laugh and say, "I think you know enough of my capabilities and personality from this interview process, already"
I know some would give the type that they feel best matches the position, which, I guess they are also desperate for a job in that case.
Unfortunately from what I've seen some hiring teams will give a questionnaire to fill out and a) it's not labeled as any specific type of questionnaire, plus b) you don't get to know your results. One sales company administered a combined IQ test and personality instrument this way. Pretty cringe. They had no certification or corporate permission or anything, just a copy paste test done attitude.
Otherwise there's also the post-hire event in which a trainer offers insights, among which is some personality type sorting and theory, and even one on one coaching. Some of this kind of thing is absolutely worth it depending on the situation. For example you've identified someone you want to work more closely with in future projects, so you want to learn how they see themselves and their contribution.
So it's best to feel it out, see if you can find a good way to respond to the specific circumstances at work without raising the stakes for yourself. Or basically broadcasting your personal relational blind spots as part of a complaint-driven process. :-)
It's true that interviews aren't always easy to maneuver, but the interview process of today reflects the manager, teammates, and workplace of tomorrow.
The first line about getting what I'm saying is typically used to telegraph disagreement beyond the point of consideration, which kind of weirdly raises the stakes for you, rhetorically. Humor is better, or feel free to tell me to pound sand because you are about to drop a truth bomb.
A potential employer will never know what my MBTI type is, so they can't misuse it.
You might be surprised to find how easy it is to make a very good guess, after all there are 16 types and this usually narrows down to 3-4 common applicant types given the job and field. If you know how to differentiate between those types, or have friends who are of those types, it's going to be hard not to make a close guess.
If you want to take on the global MBTI cabal it's important to learn the game IMO. The obvious weaknesses will become your friend rather than a point of defense to get intense about. Less MBTI-sucks and more MBTI-meh.
It's also available in other disciplines, e.g. I once took a course on how to determine personality characteristics from texts and emails. Some obvious stuff, but also some really fascinating ideas in there.
But it's still a guess. You don't actually know.
But it's irrelevant in a sense. As you say, there are so few types that it's not hard to make a better-than-chance guess for pretty much anybody you meet. As a job applicant, this is no different than what I expect -- the interviewer is going to be making a subjective assessment of me and how well I would fit into the team.
I wouldn't ever take an actual personality test for employment, though, because a company's willingness to engage in straight-up psuedoscience as a factor in making important decisions tells me something important, and unflattering, about that company.
Personality type theory shines exactly in those kinds of situations, where it works better to zoom in and look at group composition, isolating for specific perspectives and integrations, rather than zooming out to broader abstractions about humans or people in general.
It very often turns out that people have radically different ideas of what it means to get along, and who that should be done with, and when. Advising people to "make an effort to get along" can be extremely offensive when all parties have nearly exhausted their known resources for doing so.
At least it’s helpful for me to point at the ‘challenges’ section and tell people ‘I do this, please keep poking me until I give you attention’.
In the same way it’s helpful to have a literal definition of how other people think, because the idea that someone might deliberately go with a suboptimal idea because they value peace is absolutely foreign to me.
The implied undertone was that all others should accommodate the author and change themselves to better interact with the author so that his needs were met and he could be a productive member of the work force.
But what does that imply the other way around? If I were to write a play book like this, were this person to also adapt to my ways/wants? Or would this be too much to ask?
Working in any professional environment to me implies adapting to others around at least a bit (without loosing what makes out our personality). Out of respect to other human beings alone I think this is decent human behavior.
But as said, to me these writings sound like excuses to expect one sided adaption and I could say "pampering". But maybe that is just me.
I was using this style of enquiry with new hires 20+ years ago as a natural step to ensure we would get the best out of them - it just seemed like an obvious thing to do.
I don't like sticking square pegs in round holes so if by understanding, and being able to accommodate, personal characteristics, we can make the person more comfortable they'll generally contribute more, faster, and better.
You hate travelling in rush-hour? fine, set your own hours to fit in with the team requirements.
E.g. for myself I'd say: "No distractions - if I'm obviously focused on something do NOT disturb me - send an email" and "I'm productive when my brain gets intensely into something - when it doesn't I don't sit around I go do something else" and "I work better in darkness or dim light, or overnight" and "Sometimes I need to do intense random brain-storming sessions to clear the crap out my head".
If you decide to stay on your type-script, your life will be more repetitive than it otherwise would. Many of the same problems, repeated. Your preferences will be less flexible by definition, so your scope of decision-making and even perceptual skill will be limited by subconscious pressure inputs, for example.
Also, you can more readily be manipulated by those who understand your blind spots better than you do. (This makes some people angry, but IMO it's better to embrace it and find a way to work on those)
However, to transcend one's own type requires intense learning, growth, and therefore stress. And the concepts here are so new that there is very little support available should you decide to really go in this direction.
Anyway. Personally I can understand either way. But the theoretical answer to "is having a personality type a problem" is both a hard no and a hard yes. This applies both for yourself and others as they interact with you.
BTW have you ever gotten into acting, even on the side? Asking because your comment reminded me of some people I've known with similar experiences.
Except the Myers-Briggs types are meaningless.
> the idea that someone might deliberately go with a suboptimal idea because they value peace is absolutely foreign to me.
That seems like you're lying to yourself. Everyone goes along with tons of suboptimal ideas or has enough money and power that everyone does what they want or is insufferable and everyone avoids. You could be in the latter two categories, but that doesn't seem likely.
Yet oddly enough just about everyone has at least one MB type.
The religious right embraces the doctrine of "original sin". The secular left focuses on the concept of "unconscious bias". It seems to be part of the human condition across all cultures and ideologies to view people as inherently flawed, and to see the path toward sanctification as being recognition and never ending struggle against those inherent flaws.
Myers-Briggs is just the LinkedIn counterpart to this. Fodder for "Tell me about your strengths and weaknesses, and a situation in which you've had to overcome the latter" interview questions. You're supposed to don your hairshirt, beat your breast, and talk about your struggle for salvation in order to demonstrate piety to the interviewer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Colors_(personality)
My impression from some brief training was that it's based on temperament theory and not a knock off of MBTI.
No.[1]
> My impression from some brief training was that it's based on temperament theory and not a knock off of MBTI.
From your link:
> According to this personality temperament theory, which is a refined version of the popular Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) [...]
To-may-to, to-mah-to.
https://realcolors.org/what_is_realcolors/history/
Anytime they start by rewinding to millennia ago, that's temperament theory. Keirsey's temperament theory that they mention is fundamentally different from typical MBTI in lots of ways. In fact they can both be used to complement each other.
So it's different, or not, depending on whether you want to be accurate, and true to details, or not. (Also someone should correct the way the Wikipedia article is written regarding MBTI)
The thing that jumped at me is that it is not some small companies that are using these. US Banks apparently used it with its private capital customers[1] ( I am almost curious as to how it was applied ).
[1]https://realcolors.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/11/US...
I'd imagine that in capital markets it's used to help keep things more objective, to lower the personal stakes for all parties, and demonstrate an interest in constructive partnership. One of the best relationship techniques is helping the other feel understood, and that is also where tools like this one will always stand out. If you can't connect with someone via the normal methods, it's usually worth trying to connect through their self-identified objective preferences.
Anyway, just some thoughts...
It's also easy to see the financial incentive of removing the possibility for someone to get an "unremarkable" result. Telling people that they're mostly average, even if for a lot of people it's the truth, doesn't convince them they're getting their money's worth.
- The types do not indicate the degree of tendency in each axis. That can vary within a type and isn't captured by the type code at all. The types just indicate the direction. There is some evidence that children tend to have more extreme preferences which balance out people mature.
- Have you seen Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow? The "fast" and "slow" thinking described there is very similar to what the MBTI calls "perception" (fast) and "judgement" (slow). And notably those categories do have strong evidence of an innate tendency which remains consistent over time (but only if you don't bias the participant by asking them to approach the task in certain way indicating that this tendency can be overridden by the appropriateness of certain thinking mode to the task at hand)
It's a preference. You're making it out to be more than it is. It doesn't preclude that someone can have little preference for one tendency over another. Most times test results give you percentages.
> Telling people that they're mostly average, even if for a lot of people it's the truth, doesn't convince them they're getting their money's worth.
What money? Who pays for this shit? There's like a million free MBTI tests online.
As for who pays for this stuff: At least two of the FAANGs pay consultants thousands of dollars to run these tests as team building exercises. There's a thriving market for this stuff.
Also a friendly reminder that a quarter standard deviations above the mean vs. the same distance below the mean is quite often a trivial difference in population statistics. And it should be nonsense (pseudoscience if you will) to make the distinction. A much more interesting statistic are the outliers. And grouping an outlier with a person who is 0.05 SD from the mean is just confusing at best.
Heck we don’t even know what personalty is, or if it is even a useful scientific term. Evidence suggests that peoples behavior varies wildly between situations, way more then any preconceived notion of behavior dictated by personality.
If tests show a normal distribution of a personality trait, it is most likely because it has been standardized to do exactly that. Not because people’s behavioral patterns align neatly in our favorite distribution.
However it does correlate with behavior, otherwise personality traits would be completely dead as a science. But the effect is very weak next to the effect of the situation. Diverse personality traits will cheat if the environment is conducive to cheating behavior.
I would put personality in the same camp as religious believes or political leanings. An effect that mildly alters behavior, but not enough to actually matter in most circumstances.
Preference is not nothing. It reflects what people like and want.
Preference for these traits, e.g. introversion, is a fairly reliable predictor of behavior, but it doesn't matter if it is or not, if someone lies to themselves entirely (however likely that is). The purpose is regurgitating to the test-taker what they like and want. I don't see how a company could make good use of it.
To me, MBTI or Big 5 (not the actual tests, but their framing of aspects of personality) are mental tool kits for trying to make better predictions from limited data (i.e., the interview process). As a manager, I've found them incredibly helpful for avoiding problems (i.e., assigning the wrong task to a person).
Interestingly, in my personal experience, I've found logicians (ISTJs in MTBI) seem to be the most resistant to quantifying aspects of personality.
If measuring skull shape during the interview process was a) socially acceptable and b) actually predictive of outcomes, why not? The problem is that it is neither. The reason that it is not a) is because it was not b) and thus easily misused to justify stereotypes.
The MBTI is tea leaves reading. It has been experimentally shown to have no relationship to reality and no predictive power time and time again. Even the axis don’t make sense as some are heavily correlated.
The Big 5 is useful but far more complicated. It uses scale and has no pretty little boxes but at least it seems to consistently measure something.
No, just no.
The Big 5 was statistically designed using factor analysis so that its axis are independent. The axis actually came before their description. It’s actual serious research. Psychologists found that some characteristics clustered together and then spent time understanding what these clusters actually measured.
The MBTI however is all over the place. It was designed "using" Jung theory - itself a heap load of garbage - and its axis are total chaos. They even correlate between each others. That’s part of why the distribution of MBTI types is actually so skewed.
Seriously the MBTI is a perfect exemple of what’s wrong with psychology nowadays. On the one hand you have academics trying to do serious research and the other hand you have people motivated by greed pushing random rubbish and gathering a following in the corporate world like a pseudo-cult. It’s both sad and maddening.
Ima guess you score low on openness. And probably T as opposed to F on MBTI.
Look, the reality is that almost all interviewing is far from scientific. I'm sure there are worse heuristics many of us use than MBTI[1]. The comment being downvoted is being perceived as trying to appeal to an argument of extremes: It doesn't follow that if you're following some poor methodology that one should consider even crazier ideas.
If we had nailed interviewing down to a science, I could see the point in the comment. Instead it's coming off as "Hey if you're going to do something imperfect, you should consider something extremely wrong!" We all have mostly wrong approaches to interviewing.
[1] Stuff I've seen:
Rejecting a candidate because they read Chapters 1-4 but not 5 of a textbook when the interview prep material mentioned chapters 1-5. Note that chapter 5 is not used at all for the job.
Favoring a candidate because of a strong handshake (cliched, but happens!)
Gauging the enthusiasm a candidate by assuming everyone is an extrovert (fairly common).
Using the MBTI is an improvement to these!
it sounds like you're assigning tasks based on prejudicial categorization of genetic traits (as MTBI claims to be) instead of actual demonstrated job performance.
Not a huge sample size, but everyone has agreed on the output of their tests. Only in a few instances (like 1 of the strengths for a few people) were there surprises, (ex: Woo under Influencing) but they understood why it was a top strength and how it did make sense even though they wouldn't have chosen that for themselves if they were tasked with picking their top 5 strengths from the list instead of doing the test.
I don't like the personality tests at all. A strong team IMO should have a mix of personalities and strengths and I prefer to build teams based on just a few core values. From that approach, I've gotten a great mix of both personalities and strengths organically.
I could see maybe some teams using personality tests (ex: for sales) to architect a desired team type in a specific industry. Research is all over the place though on what's ideal. And can it be trusted as a hiring framework?
There are many other factors to consider. Let's say 5 specific personality traits perform the best in the aggregate in sales for one industry. But then people with those traits may be hard to retain. They may not get along with one another. They may create a toxic environment. There are too many things that are very hard to measure IMO to use that as your framework.
So I don't buy the personality test stuff in general. I suppose it may be a decent data point as your example of avoiding "assigning the wrong task to a person", but a strengths based approach makes more sense for that to me.
I think of MBTI as a framework for categorizing human tendencies. But the real power of MBTI is in cognitive functions as vocabulary to classify how people will react in situations.
Given a person without major forcing functions changing their behavior, what tendencies do they have?
Cognitive functions defines a set of tendencies that you can have a discussion around, assuming you agree on what each cognitive function really means.
For instance, someone with Ti as a primary function subconsciously looks for correctness that can be validated. Whereas someone with Fi as a primary function subconsciously evaluates whether someone is expressing their true self or not. This can be used as a manager tool to do behavioral risk management.
But everyone has forcing functions that change their behavior, and people with enough practice can get good at anything. As an evaluation tool MBTI probably accounts for at most 10-25% of the outcome. And the older you get, the more well rounded your cognitive stack becomes, making it even less of a predictor of your behavior.
Additionally, cognitive functions are abstract enough to not correlate highly to specific tasks, although one can certainly argue a correlation (I've heard arguments where programming suits Ti and Ni the best).
I’m sorry to say, but your methods are flawed, as are your predictions. Your methods may only be helpful in confirming your biases, nothing more.
There's an internal, voluntary, just-for-fun MBTI within Google that breaks down stats of the test-taking population. 75+% of takers are N's (vs. an estimated 25% in the general population). The number of INTJs (22%, vs. ~3% in the general population) itself outnumbers all S types combined.
While it's possible that Google is unrepresentative of the general population (something much more likely in 2005 than 2022, though), I think it's more likely that N's are just more drawn to completing a personality test and sharing their results with the company.
The article's answer: "We just don’t know."
Whole bunch of words in that article and some interesting background, but zero effort to address the title of the piece. It's like they meant to be going somewhere, provided some interesting background information, and then just stopped. No hypotheses, no interviewing a company to ask them why, just a shrug.
If you wanted to say "Companies shouldn't use Myers-Briggs," you should have made that the title.
It was a half-day seminar. "Professionals" gave the tests and told everyone their type. That took only an hour. The rest of the time was spent doing role-playing, where you were supposed to use your coworkers' MB types to adjust your interaction with them in various settings.
It was a waste of time then and I bet it still is.
https://generallythinking.com/richard-feynman-on-thinking-pr...
Interesting. It wouldn't have occurred to me that was the message at all until you said this. My takeaway would be "a really good salesman caught the ear of some executive somewhere."
Though Apple did a pretty good job of doing that already.
HR was so patronizing, like, "I bet you wouldn't have known that about yourself if it wasn't for us!"
"Uhhmm... yeah I would. ENTJ every weekend and INTJ most other days."
Knowing my MB category was amusing but not useful.
Knowing my Big 5 percentiles - very useful. Understanding where I land on disagreeableness and openness to ideas made my life a lot easier (both at home and work). At least because I have a framework to understand personality differences when dealing with teammates and what frustrates me (like people being close-minded or indecisive, or both).
My current company doesn't do it, but I would support mixing and matching people with complementary strengths. Like match someone with high openness to ideas to explore various angles on a particular problem and someone with high conscientiousness to get the project across the finish line.
For example the "generally people flip all their letters at the end of the work day" principle with four-letter type, or the way you can extract cognitive functionality from the four letters to explore potential cognitive gifts and blind spots.
I've arranged groups like you stated and found some interesting takeaways. Like one of the partners can perceive an annoyance with the work requirement and they become an effective interference machine team rather than a results-team. It's tricky because they are never really working in isolation and one partner will also be looking for outside opportunities and so on.
There is some interesting theory on this, which expresses that not only do some kinds of people work effectively together really well, but when they are also matched with the right project or field, they will carry the project out in a way that exceeds normal expectations. By definition they have more energy to spend and it replenishes quickly.
My MB letters tentatively are INTJ. I say tentatively because I took a couple of free online tests. Those might not be very accurate. Knowing those letters never aided me in anything. The only interesting that has come out of it is that I discovered a weird subculture of people who wish their MB letter were exactly those. Some kind of a weird obsession.
Big 5 - I took Jordan Peterson's paid test. Discovering that I was more disagreeable and more open to ideas than roughly 90% of population was helpful with self awareness and managing expectations when dealing with others. For example, I don't expect most of my colleagues to be as critical of the company leadership or company policies as I am. And I fully expect some of my colleagues to shut down my ideas for deviating too much from existing patterns.
yet everyone here completely understands the dozens of archetypes and human personality portraits invoked by hundreds of ever changing memes and meme-speak...
"don't be that guy" "tell me youre x without telling me ..." ms-paint wojacks, etc
I think people who's pattern recognition works great on classifying others in the private (read:petty) freedom of their own mind are also the exact brittle, neurotically vulnerable hypocrites bristling about other's pattern recognition seeing them... (I'm all the latter but embrace it lol)
The same crowd that loves quantified self and concrete "evidence" would hate to be seen as they are by actual tally of what they do and how their time is spent, or especially to have their most common interpersonal reactions categorized into a dozen buckets, of gut-reactions, core values, status stuff, etc.
Any whiff that someone has figured you out and hark, all of a sudden you contain multitudes! Meanwhile, developing advertising software to build ever more accurate portraits of consumer types...
MBTI is as useful as you make it, as are harry potter groups, memes, vibes, DSM-mental illness groups, shakespeare's tragedies, etc.
They work great if you put them to work, shrug. It's just a word-substrate to better deal with the intuitions you already have going on about people subconsciously.
meh, I guess I'd just much rather know exactly what stereotypes / impressions I invoke in others with my looks/identity markers (age sex race etc), behaviors, class mannerisms, aesthetics, posture etc.... and then take it from there if I don't like what I see in the mirror.
(seeing people seeing us is always a mirror i think)
And a nice thing about MBTI in the comparing-humans world is that it's way more objective _and_ uses more than one dichotomy unlike lots of other default typologies (cf men-women, especially when MBTI was first developed) _and_ can also resolve down into things like cognitive processes, which provide even more leverage and depth.
Not that MBTI is everything, but it's damn impressive for where it came from.
And, it usually works better to criticize specific typologies using qualitative means than quantitative, just IMO.
Sure, most of which involve multimodal distributions?
This is why Big 5 often gets dragged on by people who like MBTI better: It's not really qualitatively interesting to try to work in depth with such a broad and shallow tool. People can also try both and judge for themselves or just defray judgement and use both.
The benefit with the MBTI is showing employees that people think differently from them.
Yes, we all know that, but we still need prompting and practice on it.
It's best as an exercise to highlight "I need to consider this person's perspective and take that into account". Flexing that muscle is incredibly useful, even if it's a somewhat arbitrary exercise in itself.
However, I think approaches such as "User Manuals" do that better.
It used to be used at a large company that I worked for. The preferred types were RED and BLUE around 2010. GREEN AND YELLOW I remember were overlooked for promotions. Everyone was trying to be the biggest idiot in the room to prove they were RED person. It propogated bullying and prevented good teamwork. Credit Stealing was legitimized with preference for RED. If Helen Fischer is correct and RED people are the closest to testesterone heavy people, the RED people have the shortest neural circuits.
In fact, my pet theory is that some of our problems with policing in the US are a direct result of hiring practices such as the use of personality tests and the polygraph. I suspect you may inadvertently pass people who are experienced liars at a far greater than normal rate under normal interviewing practices.
[0] https://youtu.be/T3FC7qIAGZk?t=5941
He says it's not a lie detector test, but a variance detector. /shrug
I expect the CIA polygraph detectors are super skilled and can detect if you're messing them around. Also I think there's a difference if you're trying to mess with a civilian polygraph detector (to cause confusion for a crime), verses one where you're trying to get a job at the agency.
Polygraphers are skilled at reading people & telling stories. But them reading the machines? It's kinda nonsense - they'd only read results to find excuses to gaslight you. They pretend to rip off the polygraph sheets and yell. Playing good cop/bad cop and making up stories to try to build a rapport. It's really just an interrogation. If you can handle being yelled at for a week, then you'd pass.
I learned the term WRT insulin for diabetes. I think the key is that the scale you use for determining something (fees, insulin dose) changes depending on other characteristics of the person
Not to me; I am actually not familiar with any clear meaning for the phrase "sliding scale". It's just a thing people sometimes say.
If you wanted to say that your score on one axis could affect how your answers to questions on another axis are interpreted, you'd need to call them something like "non-independent". Not much call for that kind of terminology.
Can you provide any examples of someone using "sliding scale" in the sense you suggest?
Further, I've done the interview process with Google and they do not ask anything about personality types. All the information in this article about at least Google does not seem accurate. Overall, kinda seems like click-bait without even establishing how many companies actually do ask about personality.
However, around 2005, I knew of interns who were interviewing for permanent roles and they got brainteaser questions. One of them was something about the expected payoff of bets about removing socks of various colors from a drawer. Another was a variation on the "missionaries and cannibals" problem.
One of the interns failed, despite having delivered lots of value over their tenure there. I and the dev lead were pissed. Good times.
The only system that seems to have any sort of validity and real-world use is Dr. John Beebe's Eight-Function Model.
Most people still believe that your peak heart rate is 220 - age when the paper that determined this showed no one actually met that at all and the variance was massive, the same is true of Myers Briggs we are a long way away from the original science with the use of these tests and since no one reads the papers they don't realise how badly its being applied.
No, it's not.
What it's good for is to help you understand how people who think differently than you do are often not wrong. Other people are super great at things you can't hardly do at all, for reasons. Putting people good at X doing Y instead is a formula for dissatisfaction for those putting and those put. People naturally try to sort themselves into work that they are good at, where how they think works best.
Great actors, pilots, artists, surgeons, musicians and engineers would mostly do one another's jobs very, very badly.
That is not to say there aren't hucksters peddling it for what it is useless for, but that is on the hucksters and their pigeons.
You mention that hucksters peddle it for things that it's isn't useful for, but in what context is it useful? The realization that people have different ways of thinking, abilities and interest, which in turn means they are good at different kinds of work isn't the invention of the MBTI. Why does a 4-axis test help with this? Why should people take it seriously, especially considering it's highly commercialized?
Anyways, you're just missing my point. You just don't get what my point is for. You don't understand it either.
Like Astrology, Meyers-Briggs is a specific system of categorizing personality types with a lot of lore about how the types interacts. There is no evidence that MB is any better than astrology or the theory of humors or any other arbitrary categorization for this purpose.
Btw is your comment implying that only certain MBTI types are able to become musicians or pilots or engineers? Because that at lease a falsifiable statement which is quite interesting.
Yet, when somebody puts in work to systematize that understanding, you do. If you know a better way to organize the knowledge, publish that.
> evidence that MB is any better than astrology or the theory of humors
Better at what? Invariably whoever imagined they are debunking it shows how little predictive value it has about behavior, proving only that they have no conception of what it is for.
People have often imagined they were debunking astrology by showing that sun signs have no predictive value, and completely missing that the signs are purely a randomization device: if they had any predictive value, they would be a failure.
Imagine everyone on a team does a (free, found online, not 'legitimate') test and then spends an hour or two discussing the results. Everyone learns that the developers are not very agreeable (joking! Lighten up!) and that the sales people are extroverted and that we're all quite different but we can all work together to achieve a common goal, or whatever.
I think it's fine so long as you don't claim it it science and that you don't get caught up in it. And it's better than going on a ropes course . . .
I guess on the other hand, if the operator did fully know it's complete pseudoscience, then it might be sometimes useful, because it could then function as a useful interrogation prop as long as the person being interrogated beleives it works.
My main issue with Meyers-Briggs is the use of a questionnaire to type people - I'm an ESFP, but every time I've taken an MBTI test I've gotten back INTJ or ISTP. I never felt that either of those were completely accurate, or that I was an introvert. It's far, far more accurate to type people based on their preferred styles of interaction and thinking (e.g., as an ESFP I have an informative, initiating, movement-based interaction style and I think in concrete, pragmatic, interest-based terms).
I'll add to this that Enneagrams are useful for understanding my emotional approach to things. I'm an Enneagram 8, which is a more combative, take-the-bull-by-the-horns type of personality. This can be offputting, so I consciously tone it down when meeting new people.
I would 100% hire an INTJ for dev ops.
How do you know this?
What's the deal here? Companies are so desperate for any criterion to reduce the pile of applicants? Do they believe it helps? Do they look for a few of these profiles and never the others?
Hiring is hard, I know, but I only know of these models in the context of understanding existing teams, not hiring for individual positions.
Yes. They are looking for anything that lends credibility to their choices and that they believe objectively guides them toward the right candidates. Truth is, it's a total crapshoot but no one wants to acknowledge or believe that.
It's actually pretty draining and difficult doing multi-way comparisons between so many candidates, let alone doing it day after day. And recruiters/HR are only human.
So any technology or approach that can attach a number/rank a job application is seen as hugely welcome. If Bob scored 56 out of 100, and Sue scored 87, then even if we have doubts about the methodology, surely we can still go ahead and reject Bob based on such a large difference! Then we don't need to spend a lot of time looking at Bob's resume, we can screen him out early on.
The dirty secret is that it doesn't even matter that much whether the scoring process has any real science behind it - the mere fact of attaching a number is so desirable that employers are wide open and begging for this kind of capability. At the end of the day, who really cares if Alice was better that Bob or not? Virtually no companies have the HR performance monitoring in place to even know this anyway.
That's why in the HR world, psych testing firms are not quite fly by night, but they are the kind of companies an entrepeneurial type can set up in a couple of weeks with very little tech but a lot of powerpoints, and immediately start selling to really big companies that will funnel a lot of money their way. Such companies normally make a big song and dance about the scientific verifiability of their technology/approach, even to the extent of having on-staff psychologists.
Many people would feel though that the process has little more validity than reading tea leaves, or drawing up astrology charts.
Any personality test is bad in my opinion and I wouldn't like being tested in it but this statement and article feels like feel good pseudoscience. Is there any data on any kind of test that it works? At least for Myers-Briggs it has been tested and it hasn't been proved or disproved.
"And that’s it — there’s simply very little data on how well the Myers-Briggs (and other type-based personality tests) measures personality and even less on how it might predict job performance."
They thanked me for my time but said they didn't feel I was a good candidate.
I thought long and hard about it for a few days, feeling down and depressed. Then I realized that not one question was technical. It was a typical psychometric exam. Did some research and found that the company specialized in predictive evaluations. Imagine Gattaca...
I was pissed. The idea that you can distill someone's performance down to 30 questions asked by faceless people giving limited feedback is HR homeopathy. I was glad that I had dodged a bullet, but treating people like "resources" is something I despise.
This company claims to have lots of Fortune 500 companies as clients, now offers unlimited PTO (another red flag) and a pretty website espousing the virtues of their filtering system. Looks like a cult, smells like a cult.
Also, asking for a personality test tells you a lot about a company. Do what you will with that info.
https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/253790/science-of...
" You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life. "
If they treated it like an exercise to make people talk to each other about styles of communication, I wouldn't hate it as bad. They usually treat it like something conclusive, science based, etc. Meaning it might drive what assignments you get, training, etc. That's...dumb.
https://80000hours.org/2012/07/the-myers-briggs-type-indicat...
Bullet dodged? Does anyone know what kind of pass/fail filter would be used here?
Maybe the CEO had a bad experience with someone claiming to be a ASSH?
In fact all personality systems have seemed of limited use, until I was shown the Enneagram. It has helped me think not about my strengths, but my weaknesses. It has been useful for understanding how I relate to others as well; and have better sympathy for their struggles
And then just ends, never even touching the "why" question at all.
No right minded person would hire me for an “energetic, outgoing go-getter” job.
Win/win.
I remember in college I applied to over 100 internships and my friend said “I don’t understand how you wrote over 100 cover letters.” My response was “I didn’t. If they ask for a cover letter I don’t want to work for them.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934135
I wish I could find the golden comment of an HN user realizing that he has used cover letters to exclude candidates, but he can't do that for those who didn't supply one - putting the latter at an advantage.
If you want to work with a think tank, a nonprofit doing exciting and important work, a startup with an amazing idea that really captures your imagination, or any other org where the big picture needs to matter as much or more to everybody involved than the content of the PRs, then the cover letter likely matters more than the resume.
No judgement. I use those top 5 products. It's just pretty myopic to deem cover letters as unnecessary when that's only true for people with very specific goals and ideas about what matters in a job, even if they happen to be very common.
I didn't suggest this, at all. I suggested the value of a cover letter is not some constant across the tech sector, from startups (sample size = 2) to the big 5 (sample size = 2).
Changing jobs is a big life investment. I would prefer it not be a blind date with one-way conversations from somebody likely abusive and neglectful looking for a surf to abuse. If the potential employer is instead interested in potential they are sending a signal they are willing to invest in you.
Myers Briggs gets a lot of hate due to low precision but it’s a cheap and fast assessment. There are much better assessments of personality but they take more time and are more invasive.
Then it would be guessing just the same as using no metric at all. This is only worse if the candidate is so naive as to believe they are of superior consideration than the value of a simple measure.
If not (and I’ve not seen it) then the candidate is just stating a preference for not working with companies that are lazy intellectually. That’s not naive that’s sensible.
Do you have a citation?
I'd rather take the intuition of some interviewer because at least that's based on something real. I mean if objectivity is the only criterion you simply may want to roll a set of dice for the applicants because those are cheaper than Myers-Briggs consultants.
the attitude of replacing useful human judgements with useless metrics in the name of eliminating bias is one of the worst trends in modern hiring.
That something real is called discrimination.
the relevant question is whether astrology for nerds is better than human judgement just because the former is perceived as impersonal.
If someone says a particular type fits them well, that helps you understand them quickly. And if they say the type they get doesn't describe them, then you don't need to use that information.
"McCarley and Carskadon (1983) replicated these findings and demonstrated that across a 5-week test-retest interval, 50% of the participants received a different classification on one or more of the scales."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232494957_Cautionar...
I don't think it has much value beyond some sort of throwaway catalyst for conversation.
Worse, it's the Market for Lemons. The jobs nobody takes get seen by more people because they stay on the market, and so they are over-represented amongst observers. Then the horrible people at your company start saying things like, "everybody is doing it". Everybody does a lot of things that nobody should be doing.
... it's the same when someone asks what my horoscope is. Thanks for the red flag.
1- it contradicts the multiple-selves theory (which is based on science and backed by personal experience and observation.). You have your "good" self, your "private" self, your "evil" self, your "social" self, etc.
2- the human personality is subject to many variables to behave consistently across any given length of time (Bandura's formula). Same settings with a different music background and level of blood in our sugars might produce different outcomes.
3- the illusion of appearances: a person might appear as x but actually be y. I appear an extrovert but I am deeply introverted; it is not my fault that the people around me can't see it.
4- people are trainable. any set of traits and personality adjustments can be taught and trained under rigorous conditions. I became a dog person in 2021 even though for 30+ years my hair would stand on my back when the cutest puppy would appear in my social radius. Now I actively seek the most badass dogs others walk outside and pet them.
5- deep prejudicial and otherwise core personality traits are set in childhood, in the "parent ego state" and are not easy to remove or deprogram. These core traits stem from the millions of situations and interplay of various variables in childhood. labeling them into five neat categories is like classifying the plant world into five "basic" types of plants (which is totally unscientific) and naive.