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Comment by moxy | Hacker News Reader

I feel like these personality tests could essentially delineate any combination of letters and have the user feel as if the judgment represents them. All people are multifarious in the sense that we each share both introverted and extroverted characteristics, albeit usually at different times, and within different circumstances. These words have come to describe behavioral patterns that are not nearly as trenchant as we have come to assume they are.

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This reminds me of a story my introductory psychology professor told in an early lecture:

A few years earlier, teaching that class, he handed out a "personality test" questionnaire and collected the responses. The next class, he handed each person an envelope with their name on it containing their results. They were told not to reveal their results to anyone. He then asked the class for a show of hands of who thought their results accurately described them. Most of the class put their hand up.

Then he started reading from a page in front of him, and then they realized they were set up: he had given the same results to everyone, yet they all thought it described them.

That's the Forer effect, a very well replicated result in psychology,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect

and a very good reason not to believe Myers-Briggs type results, which have never been carefully validated.

That only applies to the description of the typical person with that type indicator, which is different than the type indicator itself. I.e., it may be possible that the categories (E/I)(N/S)(T/F)(P/J) have some validity, without the descriptions being accurate.

How would you design a validation procedure for anything that is output by the Myers-Briggs test?

I would start by creating really tight definitions. With the exception of the E/I factor, which has already been validated, I'm not sure if the other factors are well-defined enough to measure.

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