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What matters more - Type or Gender?

Salomé

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Culture often follows the tendencies of those in power, not necessarily the majority.
Now you're contradicting yourself just to be disagreeable.
For F women and T men, cultural conditioning reinforces innate tendencies.
You can consult any basic text on MBTI for the distinction between functions and attitudes.
So can you, one would presume. Despite that you mix up Jungian terms with MBTI ones.
Similarly, if you know that the continuum/dichotomy question has been resolved, please link details. That would be of great interest to many. Before you criticize someone else's information, be prepared to offer facts of your own.
And where are your facts?

Here's a "fact" for you
research has consistently shown that the bimodal score distributions implied by the “type” view of personality are not typically present in large, unselected populations
http://harvey.psyc.vt.edu/Documents/SIOPhandoutBess-HarveyMBTI2001.pdf

That E/I is a continuum has been known since Eysenck (at least). Try googling "ambiversion".
The other MBTI dichotomies haven't been shown to have any scientific validity at all. Consequently, most psychologists work with a trait theory of personality rather than a type theory.
Hope this helps.
 

Coriolis

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Rest assured, I am quite able to be disagreeable without need of internal contradiction. My statements, in any case, are not contradictory. "For F women and T men, cultural conditioning reinforces innate tendencies" applies to contemporary U.S. society, and applies regardless of the proportions of men and women who are T and F. "Culture often follows the tendencies of those in power" is a general statement about societies that often plays out over time. When the imposed culture is significantly different from that of the majority, culture clash results. This is the situation documented by Eisler. Will a given individual follow the familiar, "native" culture, or the ruling culture? The answer to that question may itself be type dependent. In contemporary society, the ruling culture and the majority culture substantially coincide since any significant clash is in the distant past. Culture thus reflects not so much the innate tendencies of the majority, as the tendencies that the majority has been programmed, even bred to exhibit.

Regarding type theory, I was referring to the distinction between functions (N/S, T/F) and attitudes (E/I, J/P). Whether or not these terms are used by Jung, they are used in a number of MBTI books and articles. This is a separate question from asking whether the dichotomies are bimodal or continuous. The reference you linked is interesting, but by its own admission, does not resolve this question. It simply undercuts one argument used to support the bimodal distribution theory, by showing that the presence of bimodality is significantly influenced by how the questionnaires are scored. This is not surprising given the highly subjective nature of the topic. (It is interesting that this reference also criticizes prior studies based on college students for not using a representative/random population, but then gets its own results from managers in a leadership seminar. This population might easily be more homogeneous than college students.)

I have read more on the links between personality and physiology, specifically brain differences. The evidence so far seems most conclusive regarding the E/I scale, and suggests that the brains of introverts and extraverts are simply wired differently. See for example:

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/19990228212951data_trunc_sys.shtml


Less conclusive but still tantalizing results link physiology with traits generally associated with the J/P distinction:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/story?id=4508869&page=1

Finally, some researchers have results that point to four of the "big five" traits:

http://pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/22/personality-shows-up-in-brain-structure/

Some of these conclusions seem to go out on a limb a bit, but to the extent that personality difference is based in physiology, it might indicate a more bimodal nature of the distribution, as with gender and handedness. Yes, there are hermaphrodites and the truly ambidextrous, but these are small minorities.
 

Quinlan

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Even though I'm supposedly an F I still fail at the whole "just listening and being supportive and not going into problem solving action man mode" thing.
 

Salomé

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Some of these conclusions seem to go out on a limb a bit, but to the extent that personality difference is based in physiology, it might indicate a more bimodal nature of the distribution, as with gender and handedness. Yes, there are hermaphrodites and the truly ambidextrous, but these are small minorities.
Unsurprisingly, you miss the entire point of the study. Not only are the distributions NOT bimodal - they are normal, i.e. a "bell curve". Let me spell it out further: MOST people are in middle, not at either extreme. Your comparison is frankly, too ridiculous to entertain.
 

Coriolis

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Unsurprisingly, you miss the entire point of the study. Not only are the distributions NOT bimodal - they are normal, i.e. a "bell curve". Let me spell it out further: MOST people are in middle, not at either extreme. Your comparison is frankly, too ridiculous to entertain.
The point of the study is to examine one of the principal arguments in favor of the categorical theory of MBTI type. Quoting from the conclusions:

Our findings indicate that the enthusiasm seen among advocates of the MBTI based on the bimodal score distributions reported by Harvey and Murry (1994) needs to be significantly tempered in light of the fact that across all four dimensions, the results from the present study indicate that the earlier reports of bimodality were essentially artifacts caused by the particular number (and location) of quadrature points used by default in BILOG. Although we do not conclude that the absence of bimodality necessarily proves that the MBTI developers’ theory-based assumption of categorical “types” of personality is invalid, the absence of empirical bimodality in IRT-based MBTI scores does indeed remove a potentially powerful line of evidence that was previously available to “type” advocates to cite in defense of their position.

Fortunately, because the main effect of quadrature-point choice appears to be a relatively modest, and selective, shrinking-stretching of the θ scale around the location of each point, an overwhelmingly strong correspondence exists between the θ scores estimated using different numbers of quadrature points. Thus, as a practical matter, we are at a loss to envision a situation in which it would make much of a practical difference which method were used, given that the θ score estimates correlate in excess of r = .996 across all four MBTI scales.

Focusing on the quesion of bimodality misses the point. The real question is whether MBTI types are categorical or not. While bimodal distributions would support such a theory, their absence does not refute it. As the last paragraph explains, there is no appreciable effect on individual scores; it basically comes down to binning.

I would like to understand this better, and to see more evidence of correlation (or lack thereof) with physiology. If our brains are essentially hard-wired to be E vs. I, or T vs. F, that would support the theory that these traits are categorical: with a few exceptions, each of us is one or the other. In this case, if evidence continued to point to a standard gaussian distribution of scores, then it might be necessary to clarify just what the tests are measuring.
 

highlander

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This is interesting.

Read the entire article here.

Vive la différence!

A new technique has drawn wiring diagrams of the brains of the two sexes. The contrast between them is illuminating.

MEN and women do not think in the same ways. Few would disagree with that. And science has quantified some of those differences. Men, it is pretty well established, have better motor and spatial abilities than women, and more monomaniacal patterns of thought. Women have better memories, are more socially adept, and are better at dealing with several things at once. There is a lot of overlap, obviously. But on average these observations are true.

Suggesting why they are true in evolutionary terms is a game anyone can play. One obvious idea is that because, in the days of hunting and gathering, men spent more time wandering away from camp, their brains needed to be adapted to able to find their way around. They also spent more time tracking, fighting and killing things, be they animals or intrusive neighbours. Women by contrast, politicked among themselves and brought up the children, so they needed to be adapted to enable them to manipulate each other’s and their children’s emotions to succeed in their world.

Finding out why sex differences are true in neurological terms—in other words, how the brain is wired up to create them—is another matter altogether. To play this game you have to have a lot of expensive kit, not just a comfortable chair from which to pontificate. And that is exactly what Ragini Verma of the University of Pennsylvania and her colleagues do have. As a result, as they outline in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they have been able to map out differences in the ways male and female brains are cabled and match them, at least to their own satisfaction, to the stereotypes beloved of both folklore and psychology.

Sugar and spice or puppy-dogs’ tails?
Neurology has been revolutionised over the past couple of decades by a range of techniques that can scan living brains. Dr Verma’s technique of choice is diffusion tensor imaging. This follows water molecules around the brain. Because the fibres that connect nerve cells have fatty sheaths, the water in them can diffuse only along a fibre, not through the sheath. So, diffusion tensor imaging is able to detect bundles of such fibres, and see where they are going.

Dr Verma and her team applied the technique to 428 men and boys, and 521 women and girls. Their results are summarised in the two diagrams above, which show connection trends averaged from the sum of participants’ brains.

The two main parts of a human brain are the cerebrum, above and towards the front, which does the thinking, and the cerebellum, below and towards the back, which does the acting. Each is divided into right and left hemispheres. As the diagrams show, in men (the left-hand picture) the dominant connections in the cerebrum are those, marked in blue, within hemispheres. In women, they are those, marked in orange, between hemispheres. In the cerebellum (not visible because it is under the cerebrum), it is the other way around.

What this means is open to interpretation, but Dr Verma’s take is that the wiring differences underlie some of the variations in male and female cognitive skills. The left and right sides of the cerebrum, in particular, are believed to be specialised for logical and intuitive thought respectively. In her view, the cross-talk between them in women, suggested by the wiring diagrams, helps explain their better memories, social adeptness and ability to multitask, all of which benefit from the hemispheres collaborating. In men, by contrast, within-hemisphere links let them focus on things that do not need complex inputs from both hemispheres. Hence the monomania.
 

gromit

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There is a lot of overlap, obviously. But on average these observations are true.
Where are those t-tests...!
:nerd:


<< is studying for statistics final right now, can you tell?


Actually now I really do wonder how they determined how the differences were statistically significant.
 

kquirk

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Some threads are better left dead. Don't do what I did and start going through the earlier posts.
 

RaptorWizard

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Type is the ultimate measure, at least for one's personality. You can class people by race, gender, religion, age, culture, politics, education, jobs, and many other measures, but on the whole, I thought Dario Nardi showed that people in the same type, regardless of the other above categories tend to think most similarly.
 

Randomnity

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It's an interesting article. Here's the original research - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24297904. Unfortunately it requires a subscription, but if anyone's really interested I can send you the pdf. It's not an area of science I'm particularly familiar with, but PNAS is a high-level journal and I don't see any obvious problems from a quick skim of the paper.

Can't say I really understand the way they measured the connections they talk about, but it's interesting that there's such a clear difference between men and women. It'd be interesting to find out how much is due to hormones vs. brain structure vs. learning. I'd be curious to see what they'd find in older adults, where behaviour is far less gender-influenced as people mature out of hormone-driven adolescence - they looked at ages 8-22, and found the greatest differences were in mid-adolescents, suggesting some of it might be hormone-driven. It'd also be interesting to look at adults with altered hormones - transgendered people taking hormones, women undergoing menopause, hormone-related treatments for cancer, etc.
 

Randomnity

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Also here's the link to the study they mentioned showing behavioural differences in boys and girls - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=22251308 (this one is open access)

To summarize, they found statistically significant differences between the genders in several areas of cognitive performance, but the effect sizes were small for all of them - in other words, the averages are different, but not by very much. The effect of age was much more strong than the effect of gender (unsurprisingly). That's based on their descriptions in the text because I don't really understand the z-score that they used to generate their graphs, so I'm not sure how to interpret the error bars and so on.
 
G

Ginkgo

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It's a bit like asking: "Which matters more? What color your eyes are, or what color your hair is?" From a stringently objective POV, neither makes or breaks a person; both play a part in how they function on equal levels. If you believe differently, then it's due to your personal preference.

That said, I tend to notice gender first, which means that their gender is going to effect how I view them more in the long term because I'll be given more time to judge them by gender-related standards. Their personalities tend to overrule many preconceptions. I don't think my type-related standards pan out because... I don't really do type-related standards IRL.
 

Coriolis

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Type is the ultimate measure, at least for one's personality. You can class people by race, gender, religion, age, culture, politics, education, jobs, and many other measures, but on the whole, I thought Dario Nardi showed that people in the same type, regardless of the other above categories tend to think most similarly.
This has been my experience as well, namely that type vastly outweighs gender. These physiological differences may explain the unevenness in T/F distribution for men and women. Many stereotypical gender differences or conflicts seem to boil down to this dichotomy.

It's a bit like asking: "Which matters more? What color your eyes are, or what color your hair is?" From a stringently objective POV, neither makes or breaks a person; both play a part in how they function on equal levels. If you believe differently, then it's due to your personal preference.

That said, I tend to notice gender first, which means that their gender is going to effect how I view them more in the long term because I'll be given more time to judge them by gender-related standards. Their personalities tend to overrule many preconceptions. I don't think my type-related standards pan out because... I don't really do type-related standards IRL.
Not at all. This suggests the factors are equivalent, while they are clearly not. Yes, neither gender nor type "makes or breaks a person", but IME they do not play equal roles in influencing human behavior. I was going to write that judging people by gender is only a little more substantive than judging them by hair or eye color. Unfortunately that is not correct, given the strength of social and cultural expectations surrounding gender roles. None of this is innate to people, however.
 
G

Ginkgo

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Not at all. This suggests the factors are equivalent, while they are clearly not. Yes, neither gender nor type "makes or breaks a person", but IME they do not play equal roles in influencing human behavior. I was going to write that judging people by gender is only a little more substantive than judging them by hair or eye color. Unfortunately that is not correct, given the strength of social and cultural expectations surrounding gender roles. None of this is innate to people, however.

This begs the question - by what quantitative measure do we assess these factors?
 

baccheion

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Yea, type matters more than gender. Don't think you should go around slapping women on the butt though, unless you are their friend and another woman. That is, gender sets the tone for socially appropriate behaviour in interactions. But then again, I don't think a thinker woman would want her female friends slapping her ass, even if it's "harmless."

Men are from mars, women are from venus deals with the T vs. F divide.
 

Amargith

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I ask three things when i want to size someone up quickly online:

Age, gender and type.

Im pretty good at guessing the first and the last myself. Perhaps I have less experience guessing gender due to not having to irl and in most conversations gender will be irrelevant - meaning that it shows less obviously in their speech patterns than say age and type.

That said, when i map out someones personality of how they work, it is VITAL information. For instance, pressures they were under as a kid will be different which shapes their perception of reality and triggers different copng mechanisms in different situations, accounting for important behavioral tendencies and personality quirks. Just like type and age do -perhaps even moreso. In fact, the other stuff is less vital to me as gender is harder for me to get a read on atm. Still working on finetuning the behavioral markers for that.
 

INTP

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Both in different things. I mean you cant understand a woman completely if you dont understand women in general and i dont mean their psychology that much, but more like persona, societal pressures and stuff like that. MBTI on the other hand can help you understand the persons psychology, but doesent help to understand the nurture aspect of the person(which i claim varies usually quite much between genders and even if some girl acts like a jock, there is often some underlying reasons that effect the persona, but isnt genetic).
 

Salomé

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It's an interesting article. Here's the original research - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24297904. Unfortunately it requires a subscription, but if anyone's really interested I can send you the pdf. It's not an area of science I'm particularly familiar with, but PNAS is a high-level journal and I don't see any obvious problems from a quick skim of the paper.

I see at least one obvious problem: the widely cited conclusions are absurd. Not to mention, unfounded.
We have known about structural differences in the brains of men and women for some time : for example, that women have proportionally more grey matter (brain cells) and men more white (connective tissue). However, given that we have such limited understanding of how brains work, we have no basis for drawing conclusions about what any such structural differences might mean. To jump from "the left and right hemispheres are better connected in women" to "women are more analytical AND intuitive" is patently absurd. About as valid as the "science" of 19th century phrenology.

I am interested in brain lateralisation, and I find it unsurprising that women's brains might be more highly "integrated" than men's are, and we know of at least one mechanism for mediating such differences, in that testosterone is neurotoxic and effectively "prunes" adolescent male brains more severely than is the case for adolescent non-male brains, and that this process probably starts in utero. However, we don't know enough to draw sound conclusions about innate gender-specific abilities / disabilities that might arise thereby or whether these might be acquired more by nature or nurture, especially when research exists which overturns long-held assumptions about "innate" differences in, for example, math ability. (http://healthland.time.com/2011/08/30/the-math-gender-gap-nurture-can-trump-nature/)

What we can be certain of, is that human brains are highly plastic by default and that individual differences are much more significant than those that can be attributed to gender. Also that the effects of nurture on the postnatal brain are at least, if not more, important then those of nature in determining adult capacities. We know, for example, that a brain primed by nature to excel in the use of language will nevertheless result in a completely dumb, illiterate adult if the critical period for acquiring language does not include appropriate stimuli / learning experiences. Above all else, we are creatures with an enhanced capacity to learn from others. I believe that innate differences in our capacity to acquire different skills owe more to typological difference than to gender. In fact, statistics prove this to be the case. The best people in any field outperform the vast majority of the population (of either gender). This would not be true if gender were more highly deterministic than other factors.

What is odd is that highlander would try to use this study to support his prejudices, when it actually appears to do the opposite. I guess he got distracted by the headline and ignored the content. A common enough mistake.
 
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