Sooo INTJ-ish all this! Disclosure: I am INTJ and see this as a tool among other tools to understand where I do stand socially within a few business-oriented group dynamics.
The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
101–110 of 352 posts
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I talk about external validity, what I mean is that the MBTI does not predict how people actually behave. What it says about you, and what you actually are, do not line up often enough or non-trivially enough for it to be valuable. The problem is not variation over time - that's fine. The problem is that when someone gets a result, that result doesn't say what it claims to about them. It's similar to astrology b…
Do you have any serious evidence that shows that it doesn't have external validity? If say some person knows two people and that one tested as INTP and the other as ESFJ and this person 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 res…
> Do you have any serious evidence that shows that it doesn't have external validity?
I can't prove a negative, all that a study can do is say "no results observed", but there's plenty of that. From the researcher cited in the article: "Many very specific predictions about the MBTI have not been confirmed or have been proved wrong." "Finally, there is no evidence that the MBTI measures anything of value."
This aligns with all of the other at-all-convincing research I've seen on MBTI: it assigned binary distributions to normally distributed data, and has very low predictive power. The majority of people will be near the middle of those distributions, where MBTI is at its least useful.
Further, I think your example is unfair: MBTI is a one-way function. I can meet people and anticipate their scores to with 1-2 errors (a huge margin, but we talk like it's 'close'!) I can't go from an MBTI score to useful predictions about the person though, because it's so massively information-destroying. Even on the things it purports to measure, the normal-to-binary problem means that it has awful predictive power. MBTI defines a somewhat-consistent function from people to letters, but since it's an arbitrary clustering system it doesn't actually allow new predictions or efficiently compress information about people.
So yes, I could probably tell some people apart by MBTI, but you could also assemble 10 different ESFJ's who are more dissimilar than the ESFJ and the INTP. It's like a compression algorithm that can't be reversed, and about as useful.
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#103I always considered the problem with personality tests is that it tells you what the person thinks about themselves, which is always going to be an inaccurate picture, since everyone has a lot of blind spots about themselves.
As a citation, pretty much all of these: https://youarenotsosmart.com/all-posts/
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#104I remember taking the test in high school and just feeling the bias creep into my answers. Like, I would answer in ways I wanted to be viewed, not how I actually act.
Apart from that, I don't think there are necessarily problems in treating it as a fun personality test, like "astrology or tarot cards" as others have said. But in the digital marketing space, Buyer Modalities is a popular model used to segment site visitors. It's based on the Myers-Briggs so it's inherently useless, but makes you feel like you're doing rigorous work.
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#105The comments here so far seem to be jumping too far the other direction. It is an imperfect test, which does not give meaningful results for all people, and should not be a factor in business decisions. That does NOT mean that is has no meaning at all, or is a complete hoax, or is like unto astrology. Like almost all things, it is a tool that has a purpose, and understanding where it can or cannot be applied is a prerequisite to getting value from it.
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#106Earlier 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…
Which is the fundamental failure. Picking E v. I says little about relative magnitude. 'E' might be slightly larger than 'I' but below the test's noise floor so you show up 'I' slightly more frequently. Or 'E' might significantly higher than 'I' so it's a consistent result. Further, it says nothing about the fluctuations in magnitude over time, some days 'E' might be more important than 'I' and it really can swap on…
Actually, a type (e.g. INFP) does say a lot about the magnitude of different cognitive processes. Take a look at this website (INFP linked as an example): http://www.cognitiveprocesses.com/16Types/INFP.cfm
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#107I get a different score nearly every time I take it. Am I alone in this?
No, I get a different one nearly every time too. I figured it was part of learning: I adapt my personality as I learn.
Of course, my theory is that personality tests just tell you what you think of yourself, and I change my opinion about that often.
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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…
I agree that it has a use: it helps identify gullible people. Extremely valuable in that regard.
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#109What is wrong with recording personality traits of people, and determining correlations between them? Because that is essentially what the test does.
No statistical measurement or actual attempt at a scientific investigation was done. The classification was purely validated by Isabel Briggs Myers' own free interpretation of what a particular trait should be. That's self-deception, not science. There's nothing wrong in trying to build an understanding of personalities but making things up just because you think your intuition is all you need to build theories, well…
> The classification was purely validated by Isabel Briggs Myers' own free interpretation of what a particular trait should be.
This is like saying that somebody who claimed that 1+1=2 is wrong because they came up with the left hand side of the equation themselves.
Yes, the MBTI is arbitrary to a large extent, but that does not make it meaningless.
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#110Earlier 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 problem is that the opposite sides of each axis aren't even mutually exclusive. You can be a strong judger and perceiver. Or weak at both.
And the MBTI doesn't imply or assume axes. A type (e.g. INFP) is a label for your cognitive processes.
e.g. INFP leads with a primary Introverted Feeling (judging), an auxiliary Extroverted Intuition (perceiving), then Introverted Sensing, and finally Extroverted Feeling.
Some of the better tests will help identify these cognitive processes and then attempt to find the best fitting type based on them. You can read more about the cognitive functions here: http://www.cognitiveprocesses.com/Cognitive-Functions/index....
It's too bad that so many people see the types as diametrically opposed (e.g. Feeling vs Thinking -- you do both!)