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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

#141

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #53
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 (…

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"?

I expect you get about the same utility out of any 4-dimensional, 16-choice bucketing strategy.

The MBTI is mostly just useful in that it's one of the few things that actually sorts humans in a hyperdimensional way, which is really how we're best categorized.

We're all slight wobbles (well, statistically speaking) around the center of a like 20-100 dimension distribution.

MBTI is basically just PCA on that space in to a 4-dimensional one, and while we can argue how evenly its bucketing split the actual distribution of people (not ideally, but not terribly), or how much information was lost in that downcasting (a lot!), I think the basic premise of viewing people as a composite of slight differences across many dimensions is a useful viewpoint we don't normally engage in.

So if you could pick 16 LotR characters that form a hypercube of traits, then assigning LotR characters is the same as the MBTI. The problem is usually that LotR quizzes and the like are a) much smaller than that (4-8 characters) and b) not laid out in a hypercube (ie, there's not 4+ dimensions of wobble, there's 2 or 3).

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

#142

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

triplesec wrote: post #80
jfoutz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a completely reasonable approach. Like astrology or tarot cards. Getting people thinking about big questions in a non threatening way can spark interesting conversations. There are a lot of cultural norms that prevent people from talking about themselves in that kind of way. A little hocus pocus can help cut through that. In that same spirit alcohol is a pretty great social lubricant. A little bit of booze lo…

When you say 'reasonable', you mean something orthogonal: rather it's 'rhetorically useful', or 'a social hack '. This does not make it scientific, nor based in reason, and more dangerous because it masquerades as reason much more truthily than tarot and other pretence magic

> more truthily than tarot and other pretence magic

Depending on where you are from I suppose.

Edit: I believe "pretense" was the incantation you were after.

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

#143

Post by 0xfffafaCrash »

cazum wrote: post #127
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…

You bring up an interesting case I think even you failed to consider: Since mbti essentially neuters it's own usefulness in the "round those percentages down to binary" stage, you could end up with a situation where an INTP and an ESFJ have only an 8% total difference in mbti-measured personality between them.

Oh absolutely. In fact I think there are those situations. My argument isn't that MBTI is effective in all individual cases to gauge much about them. My argument is that the ineffectiveness of MBTI at providing useful information to people on average has not been established. It's not been well researched in the first place and the research I've seen has been quite awful in their setup and analysis.

The question isn't whether people who are in the middle of each criteria exist and could easily swap classifications to their polar opposite. The question is what percentage of people would do that and whether it's high enough that there's too little signal to noise to extract any meaningful information out of the classification system.

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

#144

Post by personlurking »

mordocai wrote: post #47
jplahn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why do we use the summary rollup when it completely loses any of the granular insights? It makes no sense for me to say I'm an E when it was 51E, 49I. For me personally, shouldn't I instead say something like 51E64N60F65J? Likewise, the "insights" you get into your 4 letters is based on whatever the majority letter was, even when your percentages are nowhere near 100% for each.

Eh, I'm right on the E/I border and pretty strongly test one way in the other categories so I just say i'm barely an I and then NTJ.

I believe this is classified as an "x" within the MBTI community, where x means on the border.

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

#145

Post by Bartweiss »

rdeboo wrote: post #91
Bartweiss wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think I made my point clearly.

I'm not suggesting that MBTI claims we're 100% E or I. I'm saying that it assigns binary distributions on those axes, which would make it meaningful to talk about "E dominant" and "I dominant" people. Every study I've seen of the actual data, though, says that these are normally distributed traits.

So there are some people with distinctive, meaningful dominant modes on these axes. But the bulk of the population is at the center of the distributions, where marginal differences are being talked about like high-significance bimodal results.

This isn't inevitably the case, but we live in a world where MBTI results are still being used to determine who's suited to which jobs. If you're hiring sales guys who are 51% extroverted and refusing ones who are 49% extroverted, that supposed binary distribution is misleading you badly.

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

#146

Post by good_gnu »

amelius wrote: post #121
eivarv wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that (some) companies may use it to test if a person is fit for certain tasks doesn't mean that it really indicates whether a person is fit for certain tasks.

Let me devise a test. The test is just "are you a man or a woman?". Does this have predictive power? Yes. If I needed somebody to take care of small children, would this test be useful? Yes of course. If I had to pick people blindly for this task, except for the results of this test, then this test would be very useful. Now, MBTI is more sophisticated than this simple test. So to say that it has no predictive power i…

According to your logic, sophistication implies better predictive power. You completely ignore the fact that someone could devise a very elaborate system for judging e.g. fitness for a certain job, make very good assumptions and work very hard and still achieve poor predictive power.

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

#147

Post by eivarv »

amelius wrote: post #121
eivarv wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that (some) companies may use it to test if a person is fit for certain tasks doesn't mean that it really indicates whether a person is fit for certain tasks.

Let me devise a test. The test is just "are you a man or a woman?". Does this have predictive power? Yes. If I needed somebody to take care of small children, would this test be useful? Yes of course. If I had to pick people blindly for this task, except for the results of this test, then this test would be very useful. Now, MBTI is more sophisticated than this simple test. So to say that it has no predictive power i…

While I'm not a huge fan of Myers-Briggs (or rather, how it's used), that's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying that the fact that some people are using it for some purpose doesn't mean that it's actually useful for that purpose.

As for your response, the burden of proof really lies with its proponents - is there any proof of its alleged predictive power?

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by bradleyjg »

wutf wrote: post #114
bradleyjg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the mapping?

You can see the original mapping here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

Interesting. Looks like extroversion is the best correlated (.74) which I suppose makes sense. But nearly as strong (.72) is intuition/sensing to openness to experience, which I would not have predicted. Conscientiousness to judging/perceiving is only .49 and agreeableness to thinking/feeling is only .44. MBTI has no good correlate for neuroticism.

I'm no statistician, but "is approximately as valid" looks to be overselling the situation.

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

#150

Post by stared »

MBTI highly correlates with OCEAN (aka Big Five), a psychological test (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...). Sure, some parts make no sense (like insisting in binary values, or some of its interpretation). Still, it is not a horoscope.

I use it a lot when it comes to introducing people to nerdy friends (especially in the context of dating, like: "She's INFP!" or "Yeah, she looks nice, but is a total ESFJ...".)

A link (nice pictures, especially the carnivorous plant for INTP) and some descritpions that actually may be helpful how to deal with other people (especially with different personalities): https://www.16personalities.com/.

If you really want to "be scientific" (as if it was a binary criterion), you can use OCEAN. For me it would be:

O+ C- E= A- N+

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