Seymour
Vaguely Precise
- Joined
- Sep 22, 2009
- Messages
- 1,579
- MBTI Type
- INFP
- Enneagram
- 5w4
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/so
Thus, I believe the focus on this site ought to shift more towards Big 5, though MBTI is still interesting.
My Big 5 has stayed pretty stable, with conscientiousness always being really low, openness and agreeableness staying very high, and my extroversion and neuroticism staying about around the mean of the general population. This was from several sources over some time. On the other hand, while N and P stay consistent on my MBTI, E/I and F/T flip a lot. That is just my affirmation.
So, the creators of the Big Five speak very highly of the MBTI, and its test retest validity are right up there with the best of the Big Five instruments (see Reckful's Debunking the MBTI Debunkers)... but only if you treat the preferences as a continuum (as the Big Five treats its traits). So people with middling preferences may test on one side or the other of the middle, but that's more indicative of a middling preference than of a flaw with the MBTI instrument itself. (The whole "the preferences are dichotomies and you can't be in the middle" is a problem with cognitive function theory, which is another matter.)
Drawing from Reckful's article:
McCrae and Costa said:Jung's descriptions of what might be considered superficial but objectively observable characteristics often include traits that do not empirically covary. Jung described extraverts as "open, sociable, jovial, or at least friendly and approachable characters," but also as morally conventional and tough-minded in James's sense. Decades of research on the dimension of extraversion show that these attributes simply do not cohere in a single factor. ...
Faced with these difficulties, Myers and Briggs created an instrument by elaborating on the most easily assessed and distinctive traits suggested by Jung's writings and their own observations of individuals they considered exemplars of different types and by relying heavily on traditional psychometric procedures (principally item-scale correlations). Their work produced a set of internally consistent and relatively uncorrelated indices.
Or this quote from a meta-review of studies of the MBTI's validity (also from Reckful's article):
Bess/Harvey/Swartz said:In addition to research focused on the application of the MBTI to solve applied assessment problems, a number of studies of its psychometric properties have also been performed (e.g., Harvey & Murry, 1994; Harvey, Murry, & Markham, 1994; Harvey, Murry, & Stamoulis, 1995; Johnson & Saunders, 1990; Sipps, Alexander, & Freidt, 1985; Thompson & Borrello, 1986, 1989; Tischler, 1994; Tzeng, Outcalt, Boyer, Ware, & Landis, 1984). Somewhat surprisingly, given the intensity of criticisms offered by its detractors (e.g., Pittenger, 1993), a review and meta-analysis of a large number of reliability and validity studies (Harvey, 1996) concluded that in terms of these traditional psychometric criteria, the MBTI performed quite well, being clearly on a par with results obtained using more well-accepted personality tests.
So it seems clear that the MBTI gets no respect in academia... from people who haven't bothered to look at the research. The MBTI has some pluses (more neutral language, emphasis on describing the combination of preferences, etc) and minuses (type dynamics, the emphasis on whole types, etc). To dismiss it as inherently inferior and without merit is to ignore what the creators of the Big Five said, and what a review of the research has revealed.
The 4 letters indicate something else - your ego aka "dominant function". You don't tell it that you, say, have a preference for Fi over Ne, but it combines all your answers to indicate it (if you are INFP).
There's no evidence for dominant vs auxiliary function rankings, empirically. Stronger preferences lead to stronger correlations, and weaker preferences to weaker ones. There's no empirical evidence that INFPs are more "feeling dom" than ENFPs, or that ENFPs are more "intuition dom." Strength of preference fits the objective evidence far better than type dynamics. However, in so far as a preference of introversion informs the "Fi" description, then of course people preferring introversion will be better described. But I'd argue that most of the Fi descriptions are "F+P" not "I+F" or even "I+F+P."