Why I no longer believe in MBTI

[Mole]

Research and MBTI

The MBTI doesn't do further research.

Yes, in seveny years I understand no random double blind experiments have been done on MBTI.

So I think the question we should ask the USA military and USA business is why have they used MBTI for seventy years but in all that time have done not one random double blind experiment?

 

[Mole]

Angels and Empirical Evidence

The book psychological types, was written in 1921, when psychology was at it's beginning, so instead of making money with personality tests, they should have researched some more.

Carl Jung himself admits that his book, "Personality Types", is based on no empirical evidence. And it is simply not possible to do research when there is no empirical evidence.

That is why no research is done on angels, because there is no empirical evidence.

 

[Craft]

I don't understand. It's just a perspective to assist in simplification.

 

[Mole]

A Mother or a Gestational Carrier?

I don't understand. It's just a perspective to assist in simplification.

What's to understand?

The USA military and USA business have been using MBTI for seventy years to commodify recruits and employees.

This is perfectly natural in a society devoted to commodifying everything and everyone, from women to babies. You can now buy a baby in the USA and the mother has been commodified into a 'gestational carrier'.

But just as we banned guns in Australia, we are about to ban 'gestational carriers'.

So take your pick - to do want to be a commodity in the USA or a person in Australia? Do you want to be a mother in Australia or a gestational carrier in the USA?

 

[guesswho]

Romania would become the world's leading baby producer, China wouldn't stand a chance !!!

 

[Craft]

What's to understand?

The USA military and USA business have been using MBTI for seventy years to commodify recruits and employees.

This is perfectly natural in a society devoted to commodifying everything and everyone, from women to babies. You can now buy a baby in the USA and the mother has been commodified into a 'gestational carrier'.

But just as we banned guns in Australia, we are about to ban 'gestational carriers'.

So take your pick - to do want to be a commodity in the USA or a person in Australia? Do you want to be a mother in Australia or a gestational carrier in the USA?

So, MBTI "disrupts" our perceptions of what "humans" are? It may lead to certain biases but I don't think the source of the problem is the system itself. Perhaps the "execution" of it.

I'm not informed about "American MBTI", where can I find data?

 

[guesswho]

Question:

By reading something that 'predicts your behavior' and accepting it, wouldn't some people set a specific course to their behavior? (acting out your type) Wouldn't you give even more priority to your preferences, and less priority to the less preferred functions?

(I don't have anything against the MBTI, but I think this is interesting)

 

[Elfboy]

there is little empirical data because the techniques to quantify such data do not exist or are not very reliable at this time. psychology has only been around since the 1920s and brain research since the 1970s. even the most accomplished brain researches at best probably understand 1% of brain cognition and how it really works. we have hit the tip of the iceburg of psychology, but nothing more.

 

[Mole]

MBTI and the Enlightenment

The reason I don't believe in MBTI is because it is anti the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment gave us the abolition of slavery in 1833, the emancipation of women in the 20th Century, and the criminal prosecution of child sexual abuse in the 1990s.

The Enlightenment also gave us science and technology, liberal democracy and modern economics, as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

And modern Australia sprang from the Scottich and English Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment is based on evidence and reason and human rights, while MBTI is astrology for the college educated.

And this should come as no surprise as, Personality Types, was written by Carl Jung who freely and openly supported the evil side in WW II, and sexully abused his female patients, and admitted, Personality Types, was based on no empirical evidence. And Jung wrote, Personality Types, to complement the eugenicist, somatic types.

So I critique MBTI on both moral and scientific grounds.

And I support the Enlightenment for moral and practical reasons..

 

[Nicodemus]

And this should come as no surprise as, Personality Types, was written by Carl Jung who freely and openly supported the evil side in WW II, and sexully abused his female patients, and admitted, Personality Types, was based on no empirical evidence. And Jung wrote, Personality Types, to complement the eugenicist, somatic types.

"Dies Buch ist die Frucht einer beinahe zwanzigjährigen Arbeit im Gebiete der praktischen Psychologie. Es ist gedanklich allmählich entstanden, einmal aus unzähligen Eindrücken und Erfahrungen der psychiatrischen und nervenärztlichen Praxis sowohl, wie des Umganges mit Menschen aller sozialen Schichten, sodann aus meiner persönlichen Auseinandersetzung mit Freund und Feind, und schließlich aus der Kritik der psychologischen Eigenart meiner selbst."
- C. G. Jung, Vorrede zu 'Psychologische Typen'

 

[Lark]

Even accepting the existence of the cognitive functions as named in MBTI, each function is so essential to cognition that the idea of preference is absurd.

That's the eternal refrain when any choice is proffered, its never either-or anymore its all but objectively its not the case.

Where any choice exists there is a preference, it may not be strong, it may not be exclusive and when it comes to cognitive functions its very unlikely to be netly divisable but there's still a preference, there's still something that's more comfortable and natural to a person than another. So like it or not it simply is. Hence there's no invalidation from that stand point.

To me the whole tendency to rubbish MBTI on the basis you mentioned speaks back to the whole consumerist cultural malaise, choice was great, now its too frustrating, why choose which involves foregoing alternatives, accepting a marginal cost, instead of rationalising that you really can and should have it all instead?

You could argue its insufficiency or subjectivity or conceptualisation is inexacting and those are the reason why typology or the whole of psychoanalysis is often dismissed as of purely literary value but it works for a lot of people and is at least a place to begin thinking about mind, motive and behaviour.

 

[Jaguar]

The reason I don't believe in MBTI [...]

Victor, you publicly announced you're NFP, introverted:

I notice we are both NFP but you are extrovert while I am introvert. So naturally I admire you and want to be like you, just as Mole wanted to be like the Water Rat.

Of course I can see you are not quite as home in the inner world as I, so in that way I need to look after you.

You have succumbed . . . and now you must sing the MBTI kumbaya song.

 

[entropie]

The thing is, even if you'ld discard mbti as a theory and never speak about it again; people would turn to other methods of self-identification. May it even be astrology. Everyone likes it to see a purpose to his existence or being told his existence has a purpose. A purpose like: you are the crazy gadgeter or you are the starship captain.

It's not easy to live life without having created a purpose for oneself. If people do it via mbti this lets me sleep better than if they'ld do it over religion

 

[Mole]

The thing is, even if you'ld discard mbti as a theory and never speak about it again; people would turn to other methods of self-identification. May it even be astrology. Everyone likes it to see a purpose to his existence or being told his existence has a purpose. A purpose like: you are the crazy gadgeter or you are the starship captain.

It's not easy to live life without having created a purpose for oneself. If people do it via mbti this lets me sleep better than if they'ld do it over religion

Yes, astrology is the ur-religion. Astrology is the precursor of all other religions.

However we now know that the claims astrology makes are not true.

And it is becoming more obvious every day that many of the claims made by subsequent religions are also not true. For instance, the Exodus never occurred, and the Book of Mormon is not a history of North and Central America.

So we shouldn't be surprised that the claim made by MBTI is also not true.

So perhaps it is time to start to see astrology, Judaism, Christianity, the New Age, Mormonism, Scientology and MBTI as part of our mytho-poetic heritage.

And yes, mythos and poesy inform our language. We name the planets after Ancient Greek gods but today we don't imagine them to be gods.

 

[ThatsWhatHeSaid]

MBTI, like all type theories, are classification schemes. But people, especially people ON THIS SITE, forget that, and think that the classification is a thing in itself that operates and control personality and behavior. They have it very backwards: the behavior drives the type, the type doesn't drive behavior. That faulty assumptions sneaks into so many threads on this forum, for example, where people are trying to figure out what interests and people are compatible with their type. It's dumb.

It's interesting why that happens, though. To me, identity is a vacuum. People want to think they are something and when they feel like they have nothing firm to grasp on to (which, ironically, is what Buddhist philosophers say is the nature of self) they find something else, filling the vacuum. I see this happen during meditation all the time. It's pretty neato.

 

[sisyphus]

Some people I have spoken to about personality typing have claimed that it is no better than astrology. I think that this goes too far. I think the point about there not being a bimodal distribution along the preference axis is an important one and of course, like astrology, the MBTI is open to the Forer effect (you tend see what you are prompted to see). But some of the recent research, such as the Big 5 /OCEAN personality trait research produces empirical and repeatable evidence that personality can be described using five traits, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism and the first four map reasonably closely to the mbti SN, JP, EI and FT. We can see the mbti types as being characatures of personality based on extremes of preference.

Of course people go too far in using the MBTI stereotypes but that doesn't mean there isn't some validity. When I see a computer geek, or a poet, or a sales consultant, I am fairly sure I could make a good guess about which MBTI type they would test as. There might be some spurious theory behind MBTI but in many ways the test is more like a mathematical "proof" than a theory. If you answer a long set of questions in a consistent and self aware manner than the description or stereotype you will end up with is simply a re-wording of the claims you have made about yourself. The behaviour patterns the MBTI "predicts" are just the patterns that correlate with the pattern you have established in answering the questions.

 

[Mole]

Somatic Type and Psychological Type

Some people I have spoken to about personality typing have claimed that it is no better than astrology. I think that this goes too far. I think the point about there not being a bimodal distribution along the preference axis is an important one and of course, like astrology, the MBTI is open to the Forer effect (you tend see what you are prompted to see). But some of the recent research, such as the Big 5 /OCEAN personality trait research produces empirical and repeatable evidence that personality can be described using five traits, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism and the first four map reasonably closely to the mbti SN, JP, EI and FT. We can see the mbti types as being characatures of personality based on extremes of preference.

Of course people go too far in using the MBTI stereotypes but that doesn't mean there isn't some validity. When I see a computer geek, or a poet, or a sales consultant, I am fairly sure I could make a good guess about which MBTI type they would test as. There might be some spurious theory behind MBTI but in many ways the test is more like a mathematical "proof" than a theory. If you answer a long set of questions in a consistent and self aware manner than the description or stereotype you will end up with is simply a re-wording of the claims you have made about yourself. The behaviour patterns the MBTI "predicts" are just the patterns that correlate with the pattern you have established in answering the questions.

Recent research has shown that we can be divided into four somatic types - Aryan, Asian, Negroid and Jew.

And when we do the Somatic Type Indicator Test (STIT) we find that we do fall into these four somatic types.

Of course it is all just fun and we can type celebrities and our families, our neighbours our pets, and even ourselves.

But there is a serious side and that is found in Eugenics.

And like MBTI, Eugenics was founded in the USA but perfected elsewhere.

There are of course Eugenics deniers just as there are MBTI deniers here. And frankly I wonder what they are doing here. Plainly they are trolls.

But take a tip from me and ask yourselves - what is the somatic type of the trolls?

 

[Mole]

The Cusp

MBTI, like all type theories, are classification schemes.

Libraries are temples of print. And libraries are based on classification. They even provide us with, "The Classics".

On the other hand, the internet is based on random access memory where anyone can speak to anyone.

At face value, this site is based on classification by MBTI, but the soul of this site is random access memory.

Classification creates the individual and random access memory creates the tribe.

So we have a very interesting creative tension between the individual and the tribal village. You might say, here we live our contradictions.

And living our contradictions, we are constantly trying to sort them out using the logic of assumptions and conclusions.

This is doomed to failure as this is simply the logic of classification. But we persist and accuse one another of contradicting ourselves - the unforgivable sin in classification.

So we live on the cusp between a world yet to be born and a world not yet dead.

 

[Jaguar]

Recent research has shown that we can be divided into four somatic types - Aryan, Asian, Negroid and Jew.

And when we do the Somatic Type Indicator Test (STIT) we find that we do fall into these four somatic types.

Of course it is all just fun and we can type celebrities and our families, our neighbours our pets, and even ourselves.

But there is a serious side and that is found in Eugenics.

And like MBTI, Eugenics was founded in the USA but perfected elsewhere.

There are of course Eugenics deniers just as there are MBTI deniers here. And frankly I wonder what they are doing here. Plainly they are trolls.

But take a tip from me and ask yourselves - what is the somatic type of the trolls?

Say what?!

 

[tayto]

Behaviour is dependant on many variables but the way you view the world is more or less fixed. We are social creatures. It makes sense for our species to have divided itself up into different roles. If you think of mankind as one organism, wouldn't it make sense for that organism to assign different tasks to different parts? People can use their feet to draw a picture but wouldn't it make more sense to use your hands? That's what they were made for. I don't think it's even all to do with different jobs, I think it's more to do with each type banging their own drum, just so that side of the equation gets heard. Yes, it is important for entp's/enfp's to sail ahead with new ideas but it is also important that we are not allowed to lose the run of ourselves so we need isfj's/istj's to put the breaks on. The survival of our species depends on it. We need both and one person cannot be both. You can't shout "I want it better" from the bottom of your soul if you're motto is "If it aint broke, don't fix it". You'd have to be a split personality for that to work.