MBTI test writers: can cognitive functions be tested as skills?

[Society]

looking over the various posted results from the cognitive function tests (appearing to break all the MBTI rules), i was thinking: what if the relativity doesn't stand for priority? what if we actually don't use functions by strength but by how good we are at mixing them or by how attuned we are?

first: instead of asking people about various stereotypical manifestations of what they use, we ask questions that demand the usage.

we formulate hypothetical social scenario's to place the subject in and perhaps even ask them to interpret photo's of various people in various situations body language and facial expressions. we ask about the person's values and in the next page choose ethical questions to see how they implement those values. we test for deductive reasoning and general reasoning, we test for the capacity to find the underlining patterns, we test for the capacity to make connections and extrapolations...

we do this on two levels:
we test for the individual usage of a function.
we test for various combined usage of functions.

comparing those two would be a huge step forward IMO, but the next level is testing for how attuned we are to each function's use:
we present images with both patterns and weird objects of interest, asking what pops in one's mind? or images with both objects of interests and things which are "wrong" or break the expectations, social scenario's in which consideration for others and values come into conflict, etc...

is this a feat we can deliver across this community? can we brainstorm the questions and scenario's and examine which functions they would use? also - do we have people with photoshop skills? anyone skilled at puzzle designs? have their being any previous attempts to do any of this we can draw upon?

 

[INTP]

Functions arent skills, so you cant test them as skills.

 

[Society]

Functions arent skills, so you cant test them as skills.

pfft, semantics: they are useful and applicable to various situations, meaning we can test their use.

 

[Savage Idealist]

1. Functions are technically a mind-set, not a skill-set; although one could theoretically redefine them as a Skill-set by tweeking the definitions of them.

2. There's no scientific was to measure them either way, since congitive functions are a theory that is unfalsiable IIRC.

 

[INTP]

pfft, semantics: they are useful and applicable to various situations, meaning we can test their use.

Lets say that im am ISTJ, meaning that my F is introverted and is tert. Now you imagine a scenario about social cues or stuff like that(which you seem to see as Fe) and my mother was an ENFJ princess, so she had to do ALOT of socializing when i was growing up and i followed her to those situations alot and learned about social cues. Voila, your method gave a false Fe reading, even tho i was just remembering things that happened.. Could make up similar examples to all functions, but no point in that.

 

[lunalum]

we formulate hypothetical social scenario's to place the subject in and perhaps even ask them to interpret photo's of various people in various situations body language and facial expressions. we ask about the person's values and in the next page choose ethical questions to see how they implement those values. we test for deductive reasoning and general reasoning, we test for the capacity to find the underlining patterns, we test for the capacity to make connections and extrapolations...

How would these be linked to functions though?

I think you are on the right track about instead testing for combined pairs of functions, and throwing in differents sorts of questions in there, but even the use of the term "usage" for functions is kind of misleading. Making the functions into things that are "used," and even more so, making them into quantifiable abilities, creates a whole new typology.... one that could be very different from one's psychological type.

 

[Society]

What does any of this have to do with functions though?

I think you are on the right track about instead testing for combined pairs of functions, and throwing in differents sorts of questions in there, but even the use of the term "usage" for functions is kind of misleading. Making the functions into things that are "used," and even more so, making them into quantifyable abilities, creates a whole new typology.... one that could be extremely different from one's psychological type.

sure, why not?

 

[lunalum]

sure, why not?

So..... you are making a new system?

 

[Society]

So..... you are making a new system?

i'm just saying we should to this for comparison with the current cognitive function test questions - at the very least so we can compare the results between the self-testifying questions of current cognitive function tests and the application of cognitive function tests (and yes like [MENTION=7595]INTP[/MENTION] said their will be false positives, but we probably have a lot of those anyway, we might actually have less), as well as map the connection between the two....

...and everything else i said, which so far hasn't included anything about me doing stuff. but... what about a "king of [insert cognitive function]" game? where people enter by putting their cognitive function use, and challenge each other by scenario's, questions, riddles, etc? this way we'll gradually have more and more cognitive function specific questions to test by...

 

[Owfin]

Cognitive functions are not skills. A dominant function is incredibly versatile. It is omnipresent; from ordering food at a restaurant to philosophical inquiry.

 

[Society]

A dominant function is incredibly versatile. It is omnipresent; from ordering food at a restaurant to philosophical inquiry.

same with math and verbal capacities, and we can still measure those in terms of capacities without resorting to asking "how attracted are you to numerical values". so why wouldn't we able ot do it for Ni? or Te? or even Fe? or any cognitive function? or any of their various combinations?

 

[garbage]

(appearing to break all the MBTI rules)

sure, why not?

Good on you. I think the most useful system resides somewhere between our currently untestable theories and our shallow models of behavior.

The closest existing analog to what you're talking about are some of the Socionics tests that have candidates choose from photographs to determine what their 'dual' type might be, which would give an indication of what their type is. It's bollocks in my opinion, but that's only because duality and intertype relationships are bollocks--the system winds up typing me all sorts of oddball things, and it varies more drastically than a simple self-report does.

I'd go about it differently than that, though. I would go about this not by testing skills, but by throwing up a bunch of hypothetical scenarios and having the multiple choice responses each being a 'solution' to "What would you do in this scenario?" Many type descriptions contain examples of what that type would do in some given scenario; it's simply a matter of starting from the scenario rather than from the type.

It'd be a cool experiment, at least. If someone were to pull it off, we could see how self-report differs from more indirect measures.

I'm struggling with something similar, in trying to measure people's values. The direct approach was fine, but we did have some problems with it--namely, we and the test-takers themselves felt as though measuring 'immeasurable' things in such a transparent way was problematic.

 

[Society]

I'd go about it differently than that, though. I would go about this not by testing skills, but by throwing up a bunch of hypothetical scenarios and having the multiple choice responses each being a 'solution' to "What would you do in this scenario?" Many type descriptions contain examples of what that type would do in some given scenario; it's simply a matter of starting from the scenario rather than from the type.

i like that idea... i think they can be combined though.

see what i really want to see is whether the development of a function or it's "relative strength" corolates to which ones we use first. because i am starting to suspect it doesn't: i think its a matter of priority, and not development.

the difference being that someone might have a very developed Ti for exmaple, possibly more then their Fe, but would innately choose to trust their Fe before trusting their Ti, thus still being an Fe-> Ti rather then Ti->Fe, whether it is because of one being more immidate then the other, more influencing over their information processing, more ingrained, etc... hypothetically one could even have very well developed shadow functions, and yet still have them functioning as shadow functions rising in states of stress.

if i am right, we might see many results where the relative development of each function is completely seperated from the priority in which they choose to use them. so we need to test both the development and the priority.

now, where are those testwriters...