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 sufficiently "science-y."
The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
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Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Add to that "People receive different MBTI results even in the same week."
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…
Some people may score same results for the entire life, just as some unlucky molecula of oxygen can stay in same cubical centimeter of the room for a long time. Statistically it's possible. But it does not matter, when you need predictions for the entire ensemble. If real predictive power of MBTI is low, if the cost of mistake is high (e.g. when you do not hire a star because of this test or when you promote to management position a guy with promising test score), then this typology does not make sense and must be avoided. Since there's no scientific proof of predictive power of this theory, then it's garbage.
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#73Really? I used to have to take these tests in the '80s but nobody has made me do one for decades. I thought we were all past this hoax years ago.
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#74I don’t feel that it’s meaningless. I’ve taken it multiple times in a span of a decade and most of the times I get the same result (INTJ) - I guess P’s and J’s must be pretty dominant in here. As any test, it gives me a rough estimate. It’s not meant to define you, it’s meant to give you a guideline to understand yourself better. In that aspect it works just fine for me.
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#75As 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…
The goal of the test is just to give an approximation. The test is not accurate (and is not claiming to be).
The core of the theory is to highlight natural preferences in the way we use cognitive functions. It's a pretty good and useful model. It's not a definite one though, like all the models we have it's meant to be improved and replaced over the years (like in physics).
99% of the critics about MBTI are focusing on the tests (which I agree are not accurate) and the authors don't understand the theory behind it - which is the really useful part. (Carl Jung's work, cognitive functions preferences, etc)
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Add to that "People receive different MBTI results even in the same week."
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…
> whether there's any information gain from knowing a person's previous MBTI results for subsequent tests
That doesn't seem like the proper question. Specifically, it works only to predict future MBTI results, not anything further. That's fine for height and weight because those values are robust to small/moderate changes in value.
MBTI already has low predictive power about real-world content, and high sensitivity to change (on the margins; it also suffers from applying a clustered model to non-clustered data). So if retest reliability is anything less than excellent, I worry that our predictive power has been almost totally destroyed.
To provide a new analogy, this is like variance in number of fingers. The significance of 11 vs 10 vs 9 isn't proportional to magnitude, so we wouldn't accept "small" counting errors.
None of that says that "I'm an INTP" is meaningless, but I suspect that MBTI is no better, or even worse, than non-formalized personality summaries.
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#77Earlier 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…
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 for your perusal: http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... - simply googling "mbti external validity" will also give you plenty of explanation. I also recommend looking at the many studies that review cites, since its whole purpose is amassing information on whether the MBTI is effective.
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Add to that "People receive different MBTI results even in the same week."
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 irresponsible.
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#79As 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…
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 other days. Or even how accurately people self report.
Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
#80As 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 (…
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