Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

smithsonianmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 352 posts

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

#131

Post by ebbv »

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 (…

Your assertion that it is good for anything is based on the idea that the data is valid in any way. It isn't. When people are retested the results are very inconsistent.

Results being independently reproducible is the foundation of science. Meyers-Briggs fails that simple metric.

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

#132

Post by Analemma_ »

amelius wrote: post #97
Analemma_ wrote: post #35

Earlier 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.

.

A lot of Israeli companies use handwriting tests in their hiring decisions. Don't ask me why, it's a meme that has hung on there for some reason. Does that mean graphology has predictive power? After all, companies are using it!

Of course not. All the companies are simply wrong. They're falling for management/hiring fads, or relying on old superstitions. This happens all the time. "Companies are using it" says nothing about whether it's actually reliable.

Specifically, many studies and meta-studies have failed to show correlation between MBTI results and job performance. Here is one such summary: http://www.opd.net/abstracts5.html

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

#133

Post by Retric »

radlad wrote: post #106
Retric wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are only 4 bits of information. E v I, S v N, T v F, J v P.

So, if you are 'strongly' I and weakly P that does not change the order to show P is more dominate over J than I is over E. AKA, magnitude is literally not part of the test.

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

#134

Post by mi100hael »

iamalexbirkett wrote: post #104

I 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 vis…

> I would answer in ways I wanted to be viewed, not how I actually act.

Do you know if it was an official MBTI test or something else? In keeping with the "no wrong personality" mantra, I found the test questions to be fairly neutral. By that I mean neither option would be perceived as socially unacceptable, just different personal preferences.

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

#135

Post by triplesec »

rayiner wrote: post #71

As a society, we believe in a lot of pseudo-scientific garbage, from management principles, to nutrition theories, to psychological tests. Ironically it's an outgrowth of our glorification of science and education: kids are taught from an early age to defer to those who clothe themselves in the trappings of the academic, and so as adults people voluntarily entertain very stupid ideas so long as they sound sufficientl…

Caution and scepticism are important. However, you imply that teaching and science are bad. That way lies creationism and magical thinking via truthy plausibilist hokum to end up teaching them to be conspiracy theorists

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

#136

Post by 0xfffafaCrash »

Bartweiss wrote: post #102
0xfffafaCrash wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with a lot of this.

I don't disagree with the fact that it's not necessarily super effective because the distributions of personalities of people are not bimodal, as would be ideal for this simplistic sort of classification. It's also unlikely to be supremely effective at clustering in that way because the design of the metric wasn't really data driven in any systemic way. It's not even like someone used principal component analysis to really establish that the four classifiers are reasonably orthogonal. It's probably not super obvious/trivial to find human language-friendly orthogonal aspects of personality that are each bimodal, but I imagine the surveys could be improved informed by better data science.

It's certainly a compression algorithm, as are all classification based metrics based on answers to multiple questions, and I'm not arguing it's the most effective one around. However I think before making claims like it has no "external validity" the degree to which it might have it should actually be tested with reasonable methodology and I'm offering something that can absolutely be tested scientifically. There's nothing impossible about having some people take the test and having others who know them try to classify them without the results and see how well the two coincide. It's also possible to evaluate the degree to which people can decompress the data. You can set it up where people have equal time spent with two people of each MBTI and see how well they can guess their answers to the original survey questions with additional knowledge of the MBTI as opposed to without it. It won't establish an upperbound for how useful an MBTI is but it will help gauge a lower bound and I'm pretty confident the lower bound will be higher than that of a zodiac.

I imagine we can design a better classification, probably with even the same survey questions, but just because a metric wasn't well-designed doesn't mean the information it provides is meaningless.

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

#137

Post by iamnothere »

Lots of comments here mention the use of MBTI in the workplace. This is such a bad idea! As someone who has taken the test many times over the years, I have a lot of problems with the system in general, especially when applied to the workplace. That's not to say that the idea of personality types is invalid, but I have often seen them misapplied (and overapplied) in practice.

In my experience, Gallup's Strengthsfinder system is much better suited to workplace environments. It's backed by solid research, and I really like its core philosophy: everyone has natural strengths, and building off those strengths will lead to better outcomes than trying to compensate for personal weaknesses. As long as companies understand that it isn't a litmus test for suitability -- teams should have a diversity of strengths or they will have blind spots -- it can actually be a great tool for understanding management and team dynamics.

For personal development, I prefer the Enneagram system. I've found each type's "levels of development" to be incredibly helpful in pinpointing my own type, and overall I have a much better "fit" with my type than in MBTI. As opposed to Strengthsfinder, the Enneagram system is mainly useful for identifying patterns in behavior and understanding motivations. Not such a great business tool, except perhaps at the executive level.

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

#138

Post by SapphireSun »

mediumdeviation wrote: post #78
0xfffafaCrash wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That proves what? If you want to argue that people's MBTI fluctuates too wildly to be meaningful, the proper question is whether there's any information gain from knowing a person's previous MBTI results for subsequent tests, not whether it is exactly the same. And the answer to that is yes. If you know I scored INTP on my last test, am I equally likely to score say ESFJ on a subsequent test as opposed to INTP or som…

You're conflating two things here - the instrument, which is the survey, and the data it is measuring - the MBTI. Even if we assume the MBTI itself is accurate - that is, it is possible to categorize the entire human race into 16 distinct personality categories, the fluctuating survey results indicate that the instrument used to measure it is wildly imprecise, and using it to make any sort of important decision is ir…

I was talking with my friend pretty extensively about personality recently. One way we came to view MBTI was as a clustering on 4 axes. We came away with an understanding that the letters don't mean much without a quantifier for each axis. For instance, my results have been consistent for a long time, but hers jumped around a lot and we realized she was probably on the borderline of the classifier on several dimensions while I was probably in a corner.

That said there are other criticisms, for instance: Are thinking and feeling really an axis or are they two independent traits? Are there other useful axes not included?

While I sort of cringe at the idea of using this for assigning people jobs, there area few people in my life that fit some of the type narratives fairly well and it helped me understand their motivations a bit better, which did legitimately help my relationships with them.

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

#139

Post by Bartweiss »

Retric wrote: post #133
radlad wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are only 4 bits of information. E v I, S v N, T v F, J v P. So, if you are 'strongly' I and weakly P that does not change the order to show P is more dominate over J than I is over E. AKA, magnitude is literally not part of the test.

Notably, all the good secondary analysis of MBTI I've seen worries about magnitude. The RibbonFarm bit on it focuses almost exclusively on magnitude, discussing 'primary' traits rather than four-letter type clusters. A lot of the worst analysis, by contrast, insists on using non-magnitude, 16-case typing.

Which, of course, means that we're abandoning the actual test to get a substantive measurement.

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

#140

Post by triplesec »

Bartweiss wrote: post #102
0xfffafaCrash wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is by far the clearest methodological explanation of the problem so far from someone who understands statistics and the problems of empirical research. Thank you. It's amazing how many people are too wedded to the truthiness of it, and are unable to let go of something they did once and believed because it was plausible.
Post reply on HN