The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

Not just geeks. Anyone who is looking for easy to digest oversimplification of who they are.

As an individual (INFJ) thoroughly interested in Myers-Briggs, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who tout Myers-Briggs as a comprehensive personality test fail to understand what the Myers-Briggs attempts to identify. While the "value-add" is more subjective, I'm going to go ahead and say it's not as useless as this article claims. While I don't think anyone (especially employers) should rely heavily on Myers-Briggs, I think it can provide a decent framework (or starting point) outlining basic facets of an individual's personality based on their own perspective. Though I often distrust individual claims about belonging a certain type, given my interest in understanding myself and facets of my own personality, I enjoy discussing why a person may claim to be a part of a certain type.

For me, Myers-Briggs tends to be little more than a starting point for discussing the finer parts of my own personality, values, and perspectives. I find that those who are equally interested in Myers-Briggs share similar values in self-understanding, thus a starting point for some interesting discussion.

That is valuable and true. The problem is that people take them to mean "this is what I'm like" when it really means "this is how I responded to this test."

This is so poorly thought out. I really don't get why some people can't seem to tell the difference between things like MBTIs and astrological signs/zodiacs/horoscopes in terms of their potential to classify people in a meaningful way...

One is an arbitrary mapping of a person's date of birth to an set of traits and prophesies.

The other is a brief summary of a person's personality/behavioral inclinations based on a survey of that person's stated behavior and inclinations. When you say MBTI can be "just as arbitrary," what you're claiming is that it might be true that there is zero correlation between how any individual person of a given personality type answers any of the 93 MBTI questions. Sure, there is variation in people's self-assessments (and personalities for that matter, but let's ignore that for the moment) over time, but it wouldn't be "just as arbitrary" unless it had no correlation at all with basically anything about the person. I find that claim to be completely implausible.

The only way it could be true that it is meaningless is if upon repeated testings, knowing a person's formerly reported MBTI provided no insight at all into what MBTIs are more likely than for the average person in subsequent testings. That's certainly not the case that's been found in the research, so at the very least, it provides insight into what a person thinks that they are like.

Even if it were the case that all the MBTIs are only related to positive traits (which isn't true), the idea that it is meaningless is just nonsense.

The point of these IMO, isn't to pigeonhole people, it's for many practical reasons:

- Engender some self awareness. It's astonishing how many people lack critical self-awareness about how they approach problems , handle change, communicate with others, or deal with their emotions. MBTI might be nonsense or unverifiable but for many people it's their first exposure to any written form of objective introspection. The belief that these are immutable traits somehow isn't usually dwelled on.

- Help team members recognize that there are different styles/preferences of thinking and reasoning. You'd be amazed how many inter-office conflicts get resolved just through spending time getting to know one another. MBTI or HBDI workshops (not just the test) are helpful for this

On a final note, there is a fairly popular executive MBA program where I took a one week survey course on leadership about a decade ago. In both this course and the program, they were pretty stoked about the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrmann_Brain_Dominance_Ins...

With the hope it was a bit more rooted in science than MBTI. It focuses more on cognitive preferences than on personality.