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MBTI vs. Big Five

Franz

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A while back there was a blowhard professor (Adam Grant) who said MBTI was done for and that the future belongs to Big Five. What do you guys think about that?

I just noticed today that a MBTI site launched a Big Five test here. I have not seen this before. Do you think it means the end of MBTI?
 

badger055

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Big five is just a dumbed down mainstream friendly version of MBTI. It has better packaging. People feel insulted being put in boxes with MBTI. In big five you get to be called vague non threatening things like "open to experience" and "agreeable".
 

Alea_iacta_est

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I agree with [MENTION=16476]badger055[/MENTION]. Accommodating/Egocentric seems like a much worse naming for a category than Feeling/Thinking. Calm/Limbic, come on.

The Big 5 isn't really all that different from MBTI, it's just got a longer name for types and tells whether or not you are emotionally stable or neurotic. Plus it has overtones slightly against Egocentric types, and the test is sometimes labeled the SLOAN test, (the equivalent of the ESFJ) and is a little biased toward people closest to SLOAN. That means types closest to RCUEI (or INTP) get blown out of proportion somewhat negatively.
 

Franz

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Where do you all go to see the letters SLOAN and RCUEI? I don't understand?
 

OptoGypsy

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I agree with [MENTION=16476]badger055[/MENTION], and ,@Alea_Iacra_est, Big 5 is for the average Joe
 

Alea_iacta_est

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Where do you all go to see the letters SLOAN and RCUEI? I don't understand?

The Big Five has MBTI type correlations that have been used by other people, such as similarminds.com which has a "Global 5" test.

Dichotomies:
Social/Reserved (sometimes denoted Extraversion) ................. Extrovert/Introvert
Limbic/Calm (sometimes denoted Neuroticism)........... N/A MBTI
Organized/Unorganized (sometimes denoted Conscientious)............ Judging/Perceiving
Accommodating/Egocentric (sometimes denoted Agreeableness).............. Feeling/Thinking
Noncurious/Inquisitive (sometimes denoted Openness to Experience)............. Sensing/Intuiting

If you score below 50 on Extraversion on a 100 point scale, you are a Reserved type. (If you score above 50, then you are a Social type)
If you score below 50 on Neuroticism on a 100 point scale, you are a Calm type. (<50, Limbic type)
If you score below 50 on Conscientious on a 100 point scale, you are an Unorganized type. (<50, Organized type)
If you score below 50 on Agreeableness on a 100 point scale, you are an Egocentric type. (<50 Accommodating type)
If you score below 50 on Openness to Experience on a 100 point scale, you are a Noncurious type. (<50 Inquisitive type)
 

HongDou

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If anything I think MBTI is most prominent in mainstream culture right now and this Big Five is kinda unknown. The classic Big Five (OCEAN, CANOE, etc) seems more well-known, especially to anyone that's taken a basic psychology class. :thinking: But I think, from experience, most people find MBTI more interesting than other personality systems.

For me personally, I prefer MBTI. Don't know why, I just find it more fun to think about. :shrug: But I think both are interesting ways of looking at an individual's personality and don't really have any preference beyond that. Interests are interests I guess.
 

Odi et Amo

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Big 5 is a set of clustered characteristics with no unifying theory. It's derived from sheer brute force data and close observation.

MBTI is a broad, sweeping, quite audacious theory with much shakier empirical fleshing-out of its component parts (the guy who runs SimilarMinds, for instance, believes that MBTI's Intorversion/Extraversion component is a measure of mental health).

Neither is without flaws. If Big 5 is the Tennyson poem Ulysses, a fragmented, divergent, tangential scattering of a bunch of trials, experiences, tests, and observations that has been made to sing, then MBTI is a haiku...concise, unilateral, deep.
 
G

garbage

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Grant's most well-known piece on the subject doesn't exactly paint him as a blowhard.

Typology systems need independent and comprehensive factors, validation, test-retest reliability, and hopefully also a good solid theoretical framework. Whichever systems can provide more of that stuff have more descriptive power and deserve to 'win.'
 
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INTP

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big 5 is made to be accurate in statistics and is good at predicting some stuff, thats why its used in research the most(research is always based on some statistics) and thus has the most empirical evidence for it and thus its easiest to get funds for a study using big 5 than for MBTI.

MBTI on the other hand is much used, and also much misused and thus has a bad reputation in the research field(there are also much more stuff for its bad reputation in high academic circles, but it still has a good reputation in some areas, like career counseling).

Personally i think that MBTI/jungian typology looks things from deeper than big 5(and i like it better), but that kinda comes from the fact that big 5 is a trait theory and jungian typology tries to explain on what sort of mental processes the traits originate from. Also big 5 uses quite traits that correlate quite well with MBTI scales, so understanding both can benefit on understanding yourself and others. Naturally neither of the systems shows the whole of human nature, they just show it from a bit different angle.
 

hjgbujhghg

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It's interesting to see, that people here view Big 5 as the "mainstream" "avarage" version of MBTI. I took the official personality test twice, once at highschool, when there was a psychologist to help us find the right college/university/job for us after graduating and the test was Big 5 test. I took the test again at college, it was given to me and my classmates from our psychology professor who promissed us the full personality report, again it was the Big 5 test not MBTI. I don't see the reason why Big 5 should be the mainstream version of MBTI, Big 5 has bigger circle of characteristics it can monitor, than MBTI. Actually MBTI is viewed as obsolete by many professionals.
 

reckful

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I don't think Grant is a blowhard at all - he did a thorough job of cutting through the bullshit.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-grant/goodbye-to-mbti-the-fad-t_b_3947014.html

I disagree. I'd say Adam Grant's blog post is the kind of poorly-informed, straw-manny MBTI "debunking" that turns up with disappointing regularity, and often in sources that ought to have higher standards.

For some background on the scientific status of the MBTI, see this post.

I considered doing a paragraph-by-paragraph smackdown of Grant's shoddy post back when it first came up in a PerC thread, but then I found out there's an "official response" from the MBTI folks. There's actually significantly more foolishness in Grant's post than their response covers, but it'll do, and anyone who's interested can find it here.
 

reckful

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Hi reckful.
I found your long articles very insightful.
I wonder what you think of this rebuttal of Adam Grant? You expert feedback would be much appreciated.

I'd say that rebuttal does a reasonably good job pointing up many of the weaknesses in Grant's blog post.

They're too kind to him when they give him "credit" for pointing to what they describe as the "cardinal flaw" in the MBTI — namely, that, as they put it, "most personality traits appear to be distributed like a bell curve rather than bi-modally." As I never tire of pointing out, Jung himself said he thought more people were in the middle on E/I than were significantly extraverted or introverted, and he also stressed that people of the same type varied considerably in terms of the strength (or, as he often characterized it, "one-sidedness") of their preferences. Myers likewise distinguished between people with mild and strong preferences, and allowed for the possibility of middleness on all four MBTI dimensions.

And it's important not to lose sight of the difference between theoretical assertions and factual assertions. Myers believed that it might turn out that one or more of the dichotomies were truly bimodal to one degree or another — with, in effect, a more or less empty (if narrow) zone in the exact middle of the continuum. But she never asserted that that theoretical possibility had been factually established by any respectable body of evidence, and the 1985 MBTI Manual (which she co-authored) stressed that the evidence for bimodality was sketchy at best.
 

Octavarium

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The only advantages the Big Five has over the MBTI, in my opinion, are: 1) it has the neuroticism dimension, which can have a pretty big influence on personality for someone who is very strongly limbic, and this should be taken into account when figuring out the T/F preference, and 2) it seems to be better at acknowledging that, on each dimension, some people's preferences (or whatever the Big Five term is) are going to be stronger than others. Even if, as [MENTION=18736]reckful[/MENTION] says, MBTI sources allow for the possibility of middleness/differing preference strengths, the type profiles are describing people who have four reasonably strong preferences, so anyone who has one or more preferences that are close to the middle isn't going to be described quite as well. Having said that, I don't know of any decent Big Five type descriptions, so it's only an advantage in that most sources seem to introduce the Big Five dimensions as scales where different people are going to be at different positions, and the MBTI preferences as black and white dichotomies.

I'm only interested in the Big Five because it lines up with the MBTI, and because of the Neuroticism dimension. I find the Big Five quite one-sided, not only because it tends to describe one end of each scale more positively than the other, but because it doesn't seem to really describe the more supposedly negative end of the scale in as much detail. There's a lot more to what, E.G. a P preference involves than "P's are not conscientious" or "P's are not J's".

And, "openness to experience" is an awful name for an N preference, although "intuition" isn't much better. I would think ESPs would be more "open to experience" than INJs; that term would lead me to expect that it was describing the kind of people who seek out lots of new sensory experiences in the external world.
 

Franz

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I'd say that rebuttal does a reasonably good job pointing up many of the weaknesses in Grant's blog post.

They're too kind to him when they give him "credit" for pointing to what they describe as the "cardinal flaw" in the MBTI — namely, that, as they put it, "most personality traits appear to be distributed like a bell curve rather than bi-modally." As I never tire of pointing out, Jung himself said he thought more people were in the middle on E/I than were significantly extraverted or introverted, and he also stressed that people of the same type varied considerably in terms of the strength (or, as he often characterized it, "one-sidedness") of their preferences. Myers likewise distinguished between people with mild and strong preferences, and allowed for the possibility of middleness on all four MBTI dimensions.

And it's important not to lose sight of the difference between theoretical assertions and factual assertions. Myers believed that it might turn out that one or more of the dichotomies were truly bimodal to one degree or another — with, in effect, a more or less empty (if narrow) zone in the exact middle of the continuum. But she never asserted that that theoretical possibility had been factually established by any respectable body of evidence, and the 1985 MBTI Manual (which she co-authored) stressed that the evidence for bimodality was sketchy at best.

Thanks for that. Good stuff :D

EDIT: Now Reckful, why can't I PM you? :(
 

Franz

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Can you quote it here? Because I "do not have permission to view" on the INTJ board
 
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