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The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

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Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#91

Post by rdeboo »

Bartweiss wrote: post #52
n-exploit wrote: post #24

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 (…

My primary concern with even cursory usage of Myers-Briggs is that retest consistency isn't as high as I'd like. Plenty of people retest very solidly, of course, but there's a large-percentage chunk of the population that walks or more boundaries and doesn't put up consistent tests. That makes it hard to say anything about the results, at least in simple "my type" terms. A nuanced discussion would probably accept tha…

> A nuanced discussion would probably accept that these are continuous axes, but instead they get treated as clusters, distorting even casual analysis.

As far as I understood the test, it results in your brain's _dominant_ mode on four axes. So you are either predominantly introverted or extraverted. There is nothing in the theory stating that you are introverted 100%, all the time.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#92

Post by ivraatiems »

0xfffafaCrash wrote: post #84
ivraatiems wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how science works. The burden is not on me to prove MBTI does not have external validity, the burden is on the MBTI to prove it does have it. You have the chain of cause and effect backwards. If you say "the sky is green," it's not my job to prove to you it's not. It's your job to prove it is. You're the one making the claim. But here is a (more politely worded than I) paper on the MBTI's ineffectiveness f…

I'm a scientist, so I kind of know how science works. There's a difference between saying the extent of something's effectiveness hasn't been established by existing research and saying that it is ineffective. I've read the publication you are linking to before and it is saying the latter without the evidence necessary to back up the claim.

I'm sorry, but I don't believe you. You are lacking a basic understanding of how the research process works in social sciences.

I don't want to be "credentials guy," but I have a degree in cognitive science and I've conducted human subjects research. What you are saying is simply wrong.

That publication cites dozens of studies to back up its claims. Are you suggesting they are all invalid? If so, why?

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#93

Post by spennant »

Declanomous wrote: post #70
ivan_gammel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about considering other starting points and comparing the added value of them with MBTI? How differs "So, you are INFJ, let's talk about your personality" from "So, you are Captain America/Hobbit/Sith Lord, according to this online test. Let's talk about your personality"?

If you have a reasonable methodology to generate the comparison, I think being able to tell someone they are a Sith Lord can be helpful. I think tests can help provide a different perspective to people. I think tests are an issue when they present traits as concrete and unable to be changed, or only present the positive aspects of your personality.

I would never tell anyone that they are a Sith Lord.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#94

Post by pcmaffey »

Analemma_ wrote: post #35
0xfffafaCrash wrote: post #28

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…

> I really don't get why some people can't seem to tell the difference between things like MBTIs and astrological signs/zodiacs/horoscopes Then let me try to help clarify. MBTI has no predictive power ("I'm an INTP, so... ?") and is not falsifiable. Those are the delineators between science and pseudoscience, so that's why I bucket it with astrology.

You're doing a disservice to astrology.

MBTI is a subjective categorization. Astrology is more like your DNA. You're born with a specific set pattern. Just like we don't understand what most of our genetic patterns mean, we don't understand what most of our astrological patterns mean.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#95

Post by grandalf »

imagist wrote: post #85
grandalf wrote: post #41

I've found that Meyers Briggs feels accurate to people whose classifications don't fall right on the margin. If two of the letters fall close to the margin, parts of the description will feel a bit inaccurate. In my opinion, the Meyers Briggs is useful mainly because it can help people become more self-aware and more empathetic toward others. I've observed that in a group of 15 people who just got their Meyers Briggs…

The problem here is that since the MBTI only collects your own perceptions, it is only as accurate as your own perceptions--it isn't going to tell you anything you don't already think. There's some value in bringing what you think of yourself into your conscious awareness, but I don't think that can be represented as increasing self-awareness--it only can cause you to think what you already think. There's even some r…

> it isn't going to tell you anything you don't already think.

Well, if you take a 2000 word write-up about your own type, there may be some thought-provoking generalizations either about your own type or about patterns that are consistent when people of different types interact... things which derive from what you believed about yourself but are consequences of the MBTI's generalizations about human interactions.

But I agree, it would be interesting to incorporate the sort of information in the MBTI along with less subjective metrics and come up with a more rich analysis.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#96

Post by bradleyjg »

wutf wrote: post #6

The covariance of the Big 5 and MBTI is high. This means that if you give both inventories to the same population you can do a factor rotation of one onto the other with much of the variance being preserved. This has been demonstrated multiple times in the academic literature. I have never read an article against the MBTI that mentioned this, and that's because the people who write these articles do not understand st…

What's the mapping?

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#97

Post by amelius »

Analemma_ wrote: post #35
0xfffafaCrash wrote: post #28

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…

> I really don't get why some people can't seem to tell the difference between things like MBTIs and astrological signs/zodiacs/horoscopes Then let me try to help clarify. MBTI has no predictive power ("I'm an INTP, so... ?") and is not falsifiable. Those are the delineators between science and pseudoscience, so that's why I bucket it with astrology.

.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#98

Post by jessriedel »

wutf wrote: post #6

The covariance of the Big 5 and MBTI is high. This means that if you give both inventories to the same population you can do a factor rotation of one onto the other with much of the variance being preserved. This has been demonstrated multiple times in the academic literature. I have never read an article against the MBTI that mentioned this, and that's because the people who write these articles do not understand st…

Yea, it's very frustrating that this sort of article gets written when the author does not even address the arguments on the wikipedia page!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

That said, I don't think it's quite true that "The MBTI is approximately as valid as the Big 5". It seems to me that the Big 5 is a strict improvement on the MBTI. First, the discrete nature of the MBTI incorrectly suggests that the distributions are bimodal, when I don't think anyone thinks that's true. Second, I'm willing to bet that even if we just concentrate on the 4 factors of the Big 5 that correlate with the (non-discrete version of the) MBTI factors, we'd find significantly higher validity for the former, if only because there have been many more serious scientists studying and refining it over many years.

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Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#99

Post by 0xfffafaCrash »

Angostura wrote: post #87
0xfffafaCrash wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If say some person knows two people and that one tested as INTP and other as ESFJ and doesn't know for a fact who had which test results. Are you really sure they won't have better than even odds at figuring out which is which based on their interactions with the people that don't involve asking for their MBTI test results? If so, based on what study? If you can't demonstrate that, on what do you base that it has no…

Given the fact that repeated testing over a period often comes out with entirely different results - yes.

By "entirely different" you mean not the exact same classification or a classification independent of the previous classification? If the latter, the evidence does not support you.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#100

Post by II2II »

0xfffafaCrash wrote: post #28

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…

To be fair, the comparison to horoscopes was in a very specific context: the results are presented in general terms that people will be more likely to self-identify with. That particular excerpt doesn't really say much about the predictive power of MBTIs, aside from pointing to a study that suggests that the predictive power doesn't really matter when individuals assess their own results.

Of course other parts of the article talk about the predictive power of the personality test. On the other hand, those excerpts don't talk about horoscopes.

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