Keep in mind that in practice this classification is not perfect, as in you cannot just bucketize people into three categories and declare perfect understanding. You should treat the roles described in the article as archetypes of human behavior.
Gosh that's such an INFJ thing to say!
/s[ubtle]
EDIT: also an hour long group meeting after the interviews to be presented your collective results?
It’s not mysterious, mystical, or claiming to be science- it’s just a very simple set of arbitrary categories to give you a different perspective on yourself, and point you in a direction of dealing with things you would otherwise avoid because it’s uncomfortable to think about. For example if you see yourself as “rational” and reject “emotional” thinking, it can be helpful to actually explore your emotional side rather than push it away.
The concept itself is a useful and simple thing, but is mostly misunderstood and misused… I don’t see how an employer testing employees would be useful.
As someone who has read Carl Jungs books, but has not encountered it in the workplace, it annoys me to see people talking derisively about it from a place of misunderstanding.
Again, astrology claims to predict the future based on nonsense. MTBI makes no such claims, it predicts nothing, and it’s chosen dimensions are very transparently arbitrary value judgements, among limitless possible archetypes that one could choose.
Suppose you take a random sample of adult humans and sort them by height. What you’ll see is a bimodal distribution which reflects the fact that there are actually two distinct populations represented in the sample: men and women. The sexes can be considered types and you will get reasonably accurate results for predicting height from sex and vice versa.
However, if you instead take a sample of only men and sort them by height you will see a unimodal distribution. If you then try to split this sample into two types above and below the mean, you will find that it doesn’t tell you anything!
This is what I mean when I say MBTI astrology. The archetypes are meaningless! Someone who is at 51% on the extroversion scale will get labeled an Extrovert and someone at 49% will get labeled an Introvert, but in practice these two are virtually indistinguishable and fall squarely within the margin of error. Since the distribution is unimodal the majority of the population clusters around the means, exactly what you would expect to find with the hypothesis that personality archetypes do not exist.
It is indeed a totally arbitrary choice, and a value judgement. These are ones that Carl Jung thought particularly important based on his philosophy of personal development, and experience as a clinical psychologist. Of the ones Jung talked about MBTI further selected an even more limited set.
Personally, I think it is more useful to skip the MTBI and just use Jungs original text.
Archetypes are fairly arbitrary concepts that isolate individual aspects among thousands that could potentially explain personality traits- they don’t claim to exist in real people.
It is critical to realize that in the dimensions on MBTI everyone is actually both, but some people strongly identify with one and reject or despise the part of themselves that represents the other.
Much like an IQ test, or a having or not a PhD, it doesn’t hold much predictive power.
The valuable result is the extreme opposite of your result- it is a therapy or personal development tool that directs you to explore and understand parts of yourself you reject or disapprove of (your “shadow”).
It simply quantifies something obvious that you already know: how you consciously see yourself- in a way that guides you to explore aspects of yourself that you otherwise would choose to avoid because it’s difficult and possibly even painful to do so.
What it measures is actually pretty banal and obvious if you are familiar with Jungian archetypes- one can easily guess the result for yourself and other people without using the test.
Look, I too have read Jung and agree with what you're saying here, but this is emphatically NOT how MBTI tends to be used in corporate settings, which is what everyone else in this thread is talking about.
The history section of the Wikipedia page reads like an awful lot of effort went into making it seem scientific.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers–Briggs_Type_Indicator
This part also seems like it was intended to be predictive:
>Briggs and Myers began creating their indicator during World War II (1939–1945)[7] in the belief that a knowledge of personality preferences would help women entering the industrial workforce for the first time to identify the sorts of war-time jobs that would be the "most comfortable and effective" for them
It was at one point used as a psychology research tool, but it does not work well for e.g. predicting mental health outcome differences in different groups of people, and has been superseded by things like the Big Five personality traits, which are slightly better but also probably not that useful. MBTI is probably inappropriate and useless in the workplace as other people on here are complaining about.
Nowadays, I don't think it is appropriate to use it for anything except "for fun" or as a simplified tool for making sense of and using some of Carl Jungs ideas and techniques.
Carl Jung himself has had a lot of pushback in modern times for not using scientific methodology, and having ideas and methods that aren't even testable with modern scientific methods. I've heard people even say he "set psychology back 50 years with pseudoscience."
I disagree with that, because his methods and ideas work very well for myself and a lot of people. I think he was way ahead of his time in finding "hacks" that work to improve mental health, and overcome psychological challenges... however his ideas and methods were so far ahead of his time it will be a very long time still before they could potentially be connected to any sort of mechanistic or biological psychology, or neuroscience. They should probably be regarded more as spiritual or psychotherapy tools, in the same vein as things like meditation- but still not totally worthless nonsense like astrology.
Whether or not that's what it is in the books it's described in or elsewhere is immaterial to me.
I went through mbti at a workplace and it was used to give us an understanding of our co-workers.
Your point that it's a self assessment and thus only "how you see yourself" and not.. y'know, how you actually behave, is in retrospect "no shit" but I missed this crucial point.
It kind of changes every conversation with anyone I've ever had about our result.
The way it relates to others is more subtle than that:
Say someone is strongly extroverted and sees introversion as a negative thing… and dislikes and disapproves of their more introverted co-workers. If they come to explore, understand, and accept their own introverted aspects it will also take the steam out of their dislike for others who show those traits.
Those who know base-2 numerals and those who don't.
At the beginning I was a high-perfoming loser. Then I realized how things work, and since then I do bare minimum. I wish I could be a sociopath, but I don't have the brains nor the lack of morals to do so. I passionately hate the clueless ones because they stand against everything I believe in. My dream is to save enough money not to have to take part in this circus anymore.
You don’t really need to be a clinical sociopath for that - you need to know enough to employ the characteristics in order to reach your own goal, which might not be a selfish one at all.
It’s a fun sport if you think about it that way.