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Is MBTI a pseudo-science in your point of view?

Turi

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Did you read my post? Did you look at the self-selection ratios in that Cal Tech sample?

No, Turi, the respectable (dichotomy-centric) districts of the MBTI are not pseudoscience. They're soft science — like the majority of psychology, economics, etc.

And they deal with probabilities (not "certain predictions," as you put it), and they use the scientific methods appropriate to the field of personality psychology, which involve reliability and validity, among other standards.

And in those departments, as I think you know, the official MBTI can claim to be more or less on a par with the leading Big Five tests.

And there's more on that in this TC Wiki article that I already linked to.

I have looked at the self-selection sample - can I challenge this? What if I or others don't agree those statistics are correct?
What if I don't believe those people are the types they claim to be, due to the MBTI being a self-assessment?
How can I dispute this? What are my avenues for challenging and disputing those claims?

There's either science, or uh, "not science". MBTI falls under "not science".

I've got a real issue with the forced dichotomies employed by the MBTI as well - it's like, someone asks you "what's your favourite colour, blue or red?" well, what if I prefer purple, gray, black, white etc ie an option that wasn't available?


For example:
"Are you usually
*E a "good mixer", or
*I rather quiet and reserved"

What if I'm not "usually" either? What if I'm "usually" a bit of both? What if I don't pay any attention whatsoever to my ordinary social habits?
What if I interpret this question in a way related to animals, and not humans? Good at mixing what? Drinks? What if I'm quiet, but not reserved?
What if I'm reserved, but not quiet? What if I'm not quiet, not reserved, and also not a good mixer?

Or this beauty:
"Do you usually get along better with
*N imaginative people, or
*S realistic people"

How would I know? Imaginative according to who? Me? What if my friend thinks he's imaginative and I think he's not imaginative, but I get along great with him - now what?
Realistic according to who? What's a realistic person? What's an imaginative person? What measurements are being used to define these terms?
Do I usually get along better with them compared to what? Each other? What if I don't pay any attention to how imaginative or realistic people are, and instead just see them as human beings?

Or this:

"Are you
*E easy to get to know, or
*I hard to get to know"

According to who? Me? I'm heaps chill. So chill. Easy to get to know for sure.
According to other people in general? I'm a rock. Impossible to get to know. Never speak. Not open at all. Defensive. Reserved. Not easy to get to know.
According to my friends? Kinda easy to get to know. They like me, I like them, I open up a little.

Etc etc there's no context, the whole thing is completely open to interpretation, and you can't dispute anything.
My friend could say I'm hard to get to know, I say I'm easy to get to know, who wins? What option is correct?
It's a self-assessment, so I suppose it's what I say. Well, what if that's not supported by reality, what if I asked everybody I've ever spoken to, and the majority of people said "hard to get to know" are they correct, or am I correct?

What if I'm kind of in between? What if I don't pay any attention to how easy or hard I am to get to know? What if that's never something I think about, outside of when it pops up in personality questionnaires to which I just provide my subjective as hell response that may or may not be accurately reflected in reality?

This crap isn't scientific. The whole thing is open to interpretation, and it's a self-assessment. There's nothing science about it. It's decidedly *not* science.
You can call it "soft science" if you want. As far as I'm concerned - there's either science or not science and that's the end.

This isn't to say there's no value in the MBTI, I'm not even saying the MBTI is wrong - I'm just saying, it's not science.
 

reckful

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What if I or others don't agree those statistics are correct?
What if I don't believe those people are the types they claim to be, due to the MBTI being a self-assessment?

If E/I and S/N aren't tapping into something real, or if, even if E/I and S/N are real, the test is doing a poor job typing people, then in either case, Turi, how could a sample of 705 Cal Tech science majors exhibit those kinds of spectacularly lopsided self-selection ratios?

Hint: it couldn't.

But as previously noted, because E/I and S/N are far from the only influences on whether somebody will become a science major, you can't unfalsifiably predict either than an IN will become a science major, or that a science major will be an IN.

But if that leads you to say, OK then, personality psychology ain't science, consider this...

Biology (generally considered one those hard sciences) tells us that human reproduction involves two sexes copulating, and so humans have evolved in such a way that males are sexually attracted to females and vice versa, right?

Except, oops, it turns out that you can't unfalsifiably predict that any particular human male will be sexually attracted to females. You can only say that it's a lot more likely than several other alternatives.

Do biological assertions that involve probabilities — rather than "certain predictions" (as you put it) — belong in the "not science" bin, as far as you're concerned?
 

GavinElster

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Turi said:
What if I don't believe those people are the types they claim to be, due to the MBTI being a self-assessment?

I think you're right to be skeptical of the idea that people can just unfalsifiably be right about their type, and I don't think either the Big 5 or MBTI have as strong point individual typings. I think they're a lot stronger at measuring trends than in typing individuals.

What this means is that in self and peer reports, the structure of the Big 5 keeps on turning up, but it can be dicey to type individuals. I think it's still something you can do a pretty decent job of after reading lots of statistics on the Big 5, though.

reckful said:
Do biological assertions that involve probabilities — rather than "certain predictions" (as you put it) — belong in the "not science" bin, as far as you're concerned?

I think part of his question would be, though, that even granting the predictions are probabilistic, are they dealing with anything definite at all. That is, his complaint might be what's 'friendly' to me isn't 'friendly' to you, so at the end of the day, you're never feeding anything close to objective into the system -- it isn't just an issue of admitting we can only tell how likely it is that someone is friendly, but rather that the term is sufficiently vague as to be hard to rate someone on, particularly for all but the most black-and-white casees. Ditto for stuff like 'imaginative'.

I think that's a reasonable point worth addressing (vs complaining about probabilistic predictions would simply be dumb).


HOWEVER, interestingly, the answer to the vagueness issue is related to the probabilistic issue. I'll go back to my usual example of the idea of 'general intelligence' -- there's support for the idea that there's such a thing, yet it's still pretty vague what it actually says in terms of what intellectual tasks you can achieve specifically. It just makes the general claim that you'll succeed at a lot of 'hard' but relatively unrelated tasks if you're high in general intelligence.
The emphasis here is the specific ways you measure the overall construct may differ quite a bit, but the overall construct may remain quite stable despite the differences.


What it turns out is that despite the vagueness of terminology, we still see very similar trends on aggregate scores for the 5 main variables of the Big 5, and at that, these trends replicate across multiple populations, which suggests the vagueness of specific terms isn't wildly screwing with things on a broader level and that it's likely the vagueness is intentionally not being corrected. And in particular, I think the vagueness becomes significantly less of an issue the more pronounced a difference there is between people. If someone rates someone who rarely wants to talk to people, shoos them away, etc as friendly, and rates someone who is always happy to have people around and entertain them as not-friendly, I'd say that someone is already not in the norm, and this is reflected in the statistics.

That is, even if there is subjectivity in the self and peer reports, i.e. it's ultimately "someone who considers himself/herself friendly and is considered friendly by many peers," you're still going to see trends that replicate, meaning you'll get a construct called Extraversion with some broad trends going with it.

There are also more definite questions out there like whether you're likely to say yes or no to going to parties (also, there are more definite predictions than is-he-friendly -- e.g. you can predict majors and careers, which are actually definite things, so even if the questions are vague on the tests, if the overall construct can predict definite things probabilistically, vs only predict indefinite things probabilistically, I think it's again clearly real). The point is sure it might depend which party, but that's the whole point -- if you're saying no to more than 50%, you're being more selective with your social energy, and that adds some introvert points.
Similarly, we could ask for scenario questions to measure Agreeableness to as to get something more definite than 'are you generally considered compassionte'

However, there's still something to Turi's point, in that other statistical instruments like standardized tests have one advantage, in that there are objective answers to their questions, and you can't really 'lie" because you either get it or not. Still, if it's actually the case that instruments like the Big 5 show that the same person will average roughly the same 'percentile range' if they take multiple implementations of the Big 5, whether the person or peers report, it does suggest there is something to the measurements.
But it does make it seem like personality may be even fuzzier than your percentile range in a well-constructed standardized test (intended to test aptitude, not mastery, since mastery can be changed with practice)... (though even those seem to fluctuate enough that I'm not going to bet my life on it)

This does have an implication for individual typing for the following reason: while it might be that if Turi has a really wild interpretation of the word 'imaginative' by which he thinks Newton is TRULY imaginative but Einstein isn't, and he associates imaginative with more-like-Newton's-style.....it's likely his idiosyncratic preference won't s how up in the statistics.....however, it may actually show up in self-reports!

I've noticed a fair number of weird self-ratings among friends who take the Big 5! And I'm kind of not surprised due to the vagueness of many of the test items. Also, the fact that differences in inventories tends to show up more at the individual level than at the broad statistical trend level.

Turi said:
What if I'm not "usually" either? What if I'm "usually" a bit of both? What if I don't pay any attention whatsoever to my ordinary social habits?

I think there's nothing stopping in-betweens. Some are pronounced and some are in between. This issue obviously doesn't exist in the Big 5, though many of the other ones you mention do exist with it.
 

reckful

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This does have an implication for individual typing for the following reason: while it might be that if Turi has a really wild interpretation of the word 'imaginative' by which he thinks Newton is TRULY imaginative but Einstein isn't, and he associates imaginative with more-like-Newton's-style.....it's likely his idiosyncratic preference won't s how up in the statistics.....however, it may actually show up in self-reports!

Well, of course, but who's ever argued that any personality test isn't subject to error in plenty of individual cases, for a wide variety of reasons?

That's one of the reasons respectable personality type data is generally based on suitably large samples.

But if the self-reporting aspect of any particular personality test is causing an unacceptably large proportion of mistypings, then when you use it to do correlational studies, you're not going to end up with the kinds of dramatic self-selection ratios shown in that 705-student Cal Tech sample.

To end up with 30-to-1 self-selection ratios in a large sample, it's not enough that the underlying personality aspects have a substantial impact on whatever you're correlating them with. You also need to be using a test that does a good job (on average) of typing the subjects.
 

GavinElster

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reckful said:
Well, of course, but who's ever argued that any personality test isn't subject to error in plenty of individual cases, for a wide variety of reasons?

Sure, but (and I obviously do think the Big 5 is soft science, not BS, but I want to try to explain the point fully) the basic point is how do we know whether someone is in error? Someone might think "well, I had a reasonable interpretation of the test items -- who is to say i'm wrong when there is no criterion clearly given for knowing when the result is accurate?" The question is really does the Big 5 just give you a nice way of knowing what correlates with what, but doesn't really tell you what percentile-range you likely are with some very useful level of certainty?

At some point, it helps to have definite, non-subjective markers -- and note that I'm *not* saying non-probabilistic predictions, so much as probabilistic predictions that someone has a trait with an objective meaning. That is,stuff like major or career -- because, while we can only predict with some probability whether someone high in Extraversion and low in Agreeableness, say, will go into a certain career, at least it's not a subjective thing whether someone goes into a given career.
I'm sure that there are such 'objective' markers, by the way, but are there enough to actually type someone with, or are these pretty fuzzy rules of thumb that won't work for a pretty large number of people?

When it comes to something like "how pragmatic is so and so," it's quite conceivable two people will rate the person quite differently on a Likert scale, after considering the exact same data point about the same person! For instance, a metaphysician may be inclined to shrug and say "well, an experimental scientist is very pragmatic! 4/5!" Whereas, the experimental scientist may think of himself as more like a 2/5, having faced a family full of money-minded folk who encourage a career in some finance-oriented field.
And we're talking real, psychological difference: the metaphysician may be aware there are business-minded people out there, but may see them as 5/5 vs anyone of an applied field dealing with tangible (vs purely logical) facts as less than a 3/5.
It's kind of like one teacher's B+ may be another's A.

Obviously, what's going on is the metaphysician is probably just in a lower percentile for valuation of pragmatism, even if both may well be below average (and thus generally turn out to be Ns).

My general point is, despite believing the Big 5 is getting at something real, I *still* am often a little hazy on typing people besides some of the more black-and-white cases with much finality. I don't know, for instance, what the 'resolution' of the test is: for instance, I think we all know we can't say for sure if someone is exactly in the 88th percentile, but what about something like 40-60 vs 40-50 with 80-ish percent likelihood? Presumably your likelihood of being right increases by asking for many peer reports, a self report, and pursuing many different inventories.

I think to some extent, having studied a lot of stats on the Big 5, I do have an intuitive feel for the Big 5, and I can probably guess quite a bit about where someone stands on it, but I feel this part is still left to something of an art in the current state of affairs, again because of the subjectivity-of-test-items issue.


The real TL;DR version of this is I sort of think the Big 5 could use a resolution upgrade, so as to be a little more definite on the individual level. I doubt this changes anything about personality seeming to have the structure the Big 5 says it does -- that is, generally, personality clusters into 5 main macro-variables. It seems like there's enough to show the Big 5 is real stuff, but it's more a question of making it more useful to the individual -- it's clear that there are objective correlates of the Big 5, including biological ones and also including things like career, major, etc, which rules out that feeding in fuzzy stuff with vague definitions implies the output is of questionable reality status....but the point is to go farther than that.
 

Point148

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It's pseudo science. There's not any studies to support the ideas of MTBI. It was developed by some people with no formal use of science.
What is scientifically viable is the study done on various trait levels found in men in women.

Men tend to prefer working with things and women tend to prefer working with people, hence the reason why men dominate in fields such as technology and women in nursing.
 

brightflashes

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MBTI is a pseudo-science for the following reasons:

- It's based off of information gleaned from a psychodynamic theorist. Psychodynamic theory is famously unscientific. It's extremely hard to test and research as any breakthroughs in the field are spontaneous and can't be predicted.

- It's not a theory that is unified. While I believe there is reference in Man and his Symbols to Jung's being aware of his students' further study of typology, the original theorist (Jung) didn't work with Myers and Briggs to unify a theory that correctly interpreted the foundation: typology. In other words, MBTI was born of typology, but it is also subject to Myers and Briggs' understanding of typology.

- It has not been refined and put to rigorous testing the way other, more popular theories have been. For instance, Erikson's psychosocial stages of development has been tested over and over and it has even been found to be a theory that only really pans out in the Western world, it's not universal, and it is more likely to show up in English-speaking countries. MBTI has been studied, but not rigorously like this.

- In the past 10 years or so, MBTI has degenerated from a pseudo-scientific on the cusp of scientific theory into stereotypes and anecdotes. It has been sold by armchair psychologists as a parlor trick and is sometimes compared to something as vague as Astrology or other forms of divination.

MBTI is scientific for the following reasons:

- It can be tested, studied, and refined (this is generally the University text-book definition of whether a thought qualifies as a scientific theory or not).

- It is something prominant people in the Psychological scientific community take seriously (peer reviewed): Jung, Von-Franz, Beebe, Kiersey, etc

- It falls within the trait theory category of theories and can be measured accurately via the MBTI published by CPP inc based on trait theory tests and measures (the presence/absence of certain traits).

My take? I don't know. It's right there on the cusp for me. There are definite ways of improving it and I'm excited about seeing this be improved upon. But, then again, before the Internet (yes there really was such a time), I didn't have the knowledge that people could run so far with a theory to be completely opposite of the way that theory was intended. What laypeople have done with MBTI is stunning.
 

BlueScreen

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I still stand by the types being merely classifications and predicting nothing. Even for I/E, you couldn't reliably use the classification to predict a further trait that the person had not given an answer in relation to, and any time you could even use it to guess another trait, it would most likely be a result of something they answered already being closely related. For example, "I like to stay in and read books and dislike people" might mean they are not a socialite. Obscuring this by using classifications does not make it a science.

And unlike biological classifications, for instance, there is no common or reliable set of traits for any type or even I/E. Most people show some of the traits and are classified I/E based on which they have more of. Any combination of compatible traits is possible, and by compatible traits I dont mean the magical sets people fantasise about on here, just the plainly obvious like I mentioned above. In MBTI there is no this creature has characteristic 1 and characteristic 2 and therefore is a pig and most likely has the other chatacteristics of a pig. Any member of any type can have any set of characteristics that give that type as the result of the test.

MBTI is just classifications to use as a tool. Use it, enjoy it, but stop believing it means anything more scientific.

I'm sure someone will write a two page response to this campaigning and citing some dubious sources and addressing not one point I made above. But that is almost the best argument that this is not science.
 

Maou

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Unreliable, but not 100% bullshit. IT is an attempt to classify as many personalities as you can.

It could always go the same way as gender :p So lets not bitch about the 50 shades of INTJ.
 

reckful

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Even for I/E, you couldn't reliably use the classification to predict a further trait that the person had not given an answer in relation to, and any time you could even use it to guess another trait, it would most likely be a result of something they answered already being closely related.

There are 60 years of studies correlating MBTI preferences with countless things that "the person had not given an answer in relation to" on the indicator.

As one example, the 705-subject Cal Tech sample in this post indicates that introverts are substantially more likely to become science majors than extraverts — and the E/I items on the MBTI have nothing to with interests in science (or academics).

And twin studies have shown that identical twins raised in separate households are substantially more likely to match on the personality dimensions that the MBTI and Big Five are tapping into than genetically unrelated pairs — which indicates that the MBTI dichotomies correspond to real, relatively hard-wired underlying dimensions of personality that were presumably selected for by evolution (just as Jung presumed). Anyone who thinks they're just arbitrary theoretical categories is misinformed.
 

BlueScreen

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There are 60 years of studies correlating MBTI preferences with countless things that "the person had not given an answer in relation to" on the indicator. As one example, the 705-subject Cal Tech sample in this post indicates that introverts are substantially more likely to become science majors than extraverts — and the E/I items on the MBTI have nothing to with interests in science (or academics). And twin studies have shown that identical twins raised in separate households are substantially more likely to match on the personality dimensions that the MBTI and Big Five are tapping into than genetically unrelated pairs — which indicates that the MBTI dichotomies correspond to real, relatively hard-wired underlying dimensions of personality that were presumably selected for by evolution (just as Jung presumed). Anyone who thinks they're just arbitrary theoretical categories is misinformed.
I find it amusing that you conclude so much from so little. You've correlated some statistical categories. Have you identified anything that is even reliably repeatable? Have you identified a cause and effect that must be specific to those categories rather than another process. For example, what if only two things tested for I/E make introverts prefer science? Is it right then to put I/E on a pedestal and start talking about the things you have?

Personality is complex and most likely influenced by genetics and the environment. I'm not sure that knowing there are similarities between the personality traits of identical twins tells you anything specific about MBTI. More similar traits equals more likely to fall in the same categories.

Also, I'm not sure about your statement that traits tested have nothing to do with science. A person is likely to like science if they enjoy studying the world around them. There are many personality traits that could lead them to do that and some fall in the introvert category. You lose all that insight though when you start praising the statistical category instead of searching for a specific cause and effect. For example, what are your thoughts on a 7w6 ENFP studying science?

There are probably also cultural factors that influence who studies what. For example, in some places it might be harder to be sporting and sciency than others. In my country it was fine, but I get the feeling that in parts of the US it is harder to be in the football team and be a science obsessed nerd.
 

reckful

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Personality is complex and most likely influenced by genetics and the environment. I'm not sure that knowing there are similarities between the personality traits of identical twins tells you anything specific about MBTI. More similar traits equals more likely to fall in the same categories.

Also, I'm not sure about your statement that traits tested have nothing to do with science. A person is likely to like science if they enjoy studying the world around them. There are many personality traits that could lead them to do that and some fall in the introvert category. You lose all that insight though when you start praising the statistical category instead of searching for a specific cause and effect. For example, what are your thoughts on a 7w6 ENFP studying science?

Like the rest of your post, and most of your other posts, you're not really addressing my points, and what you're saying makes little sense.

You previously posted (more than once!) that typing someone as an MBTI introvert told you no more about them than what was in the E/I test items, and I pointed out that that's not true, and that E/I has been correlated with lots of stuff not described in the test items.

Now you say, "There are many personality traits that could lead [people to study the world around them] and some fall in the introvert category." True dat, and certainly not inconsistent with anything I said. But there aren't any MBTI E/I test items that ask about studying the world around us.

And you say, "You lose all that insight though when you start praising the statistical category instead of searching for a specific cause and effect." Say what? Pointing out that introverts exhibit X tendency (based on correlational studies) doesn't "lose" any "insight," or prevent anyone from "searching for" (or otherwise pondering) "a specific cause and effect."

What it often does, tho, is reveal things about introverts that aren't in the test items.

You also said, "I'm not sure that knowing there are similarities between the personality traits of identical twins tells you anything specific about MBTI." But of course it does.

You'd previously said that the MBTI dimensions were just arbitrary "trait" collections — "like any meaningless statistical category I could create," as you put it — which corresponds to your notion that the stuff in the test items is all that someone's MBTI type tells us about the person.

But if the MBTI and Big Five dimensions are tapping into real, non-arbitrary, biologically hardwired (to a substantial degree) clusters of personality characteristics, then there's no particular reason to expect that the test items would necessarily cover the waterfront (or even come close to covering the waterfront) with respect to the aspects of personality associated with those hardwired clusters.

So what "knowing there are similarities between the personality traits of identical twins tells you" is that the MBTI is tapping into categories that actually exist in reality, rather than simply imposing on reality a set of theoretical categories that's as arbitrary as "any meaningless statistical category [you] could create" — and accordingly, that the MBTI is the kind of typology where the type can end up telling you a lot more than just what's in the test items.
 

GavinElster

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Blue Screen said:
There are many personality traits that could lead them to do that and some fall in the introvert category. You lose all that insight though when you start praising the statistical category instead of searching for a specific cause and effect.

Sometimes, the statistical category is measuring something potentially a lot more important either to some purposes or overall than the test items used to measure it.

The fact that it can predict things not expressly measured in the test items is the trivial part -- that's just saying things you didn't think were correlated could be correlated! That is really just a statement about our ignorance.

However, this fact can have profound consequences in some cases. To reiterate my general intelligence example, the fact that you can test for it potentially using some pretty arbitrary stuff, and then predict someone's performance at apparently unrelated tasks...suggests a very deep thing, which is that intelligence needn't be task-specific....that there actually seems to be such a thing as being able to learn arbitrarily hard stuff, even if not directly related.

That is, if there's an interpretation of the predictions the statistical scale can make which suggests it may be measuring something more profound than its parts, that's when you're really talking a nontrivial discovery about how human beings work.

You're not wrong to be somewhat dismissive that we might find introverts have this or that trait. It shows there's something objective going on, because there are probabilistic predictions being made of objective traits like studying science....but you could reasonably say OK, so what?
However, if understanding introversion offers a deeper explanation of what is going on biologically as a survival or evolutionary strategy, which is what might seem to be suggested by the repeated extraction of the 5-factor structure, then we might pay attention.
 

BlueScreen

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You'd previously said that the MBTI dimensions were just arbitrary "trait" collections — "like any meaningless statistical category I could create," as you put it — which corresponds to your notion that the stuff in the test items is all that someone's MBTI type tells us about the person. But if the MBTI and Big Five dimensions are tapping into real, non-arbitrary, biologically hardwired (to a substantial degree) clusters of personality characteristics, then there's no particular reason to expect that the test items would necessarily cover the waterfront (or even come close to covering the waterfront) with respect to the aspects of personality associated with those hardwired clusters. So what "knowing there are similarities between the personality traits of identical twins tells you" is that the MBTI is tapping into categories that actually exist in reality, rather than simply imposing on reality a set of theoretical categories that's as arbitrary as "any meaningless statistical category [you] could create" — and accordingly, that the MBTI is the kind of typology where the type can end up telling you a lot more than just what's in the test items.
I agree that some aspects of personality seem hardwired, but I'm not sure that you're provided enough evidence to convince me that groupings of these hard wired traits have any further meaning than just being a grouping of similar things. Of course grouping things can be useful, but to be scientific it needs to give some further insight into something real.

From the examples that you have used already, it appears that in this field people are happy to conclude things about personality from correlations without looking very far into what is really going on. The associations seem likely to be external to anything to do with brain mechanics, and sometimes are even socially driven behaviours.

When you mention things about an introvert not being in the test answers, can they be derived from certain test answers without the need for the classification? Or is the classification the only means of determining (somewhat unreliably) that a person "might" have a certain trait?
 

GavinElster

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BlueScreen said:
When you mention things about an introvert not being in the test answers, can they be derived from certain test answers without the need for the classification? Or is the classification the only means of determining (somewhat unreliably) that a person "might" have a certain trait?

I'd guess that you can infer at least a fair number of them as having basis in good reasons. Like, for instance, studying science and a willingness to pursue solitary, non-sociability-oriented relatively quiet activities like reading seem related.

The key though is often these kinds of inferences that seem 'natural' won't be born out by the facts. It may not be surprising that they are often, but it's certainly the sort of thing you need to gather some data to be sure of.

But more importantly, sometimes the fact THAT you can make such natural-seeming inferences is the remarkable thing. Again with the idea of overall general intelligence, it's still a nontrivial thing that the natural idea that maybe there's some overall thing driving being good at various skills actually winds up having some basis in reality. and indeed, there's fierce contention from some scholars as to how limited the merit of the idea is.

This once again highlights that your goal in measuring introversion may not be to predict someone's likelihood of going into science. The science part may not be the important thing -- the 5 variables measured in the Big 5 may be more fundamental, just like general intelligence may be more fundamental and more interesting than physics skill.



Another point -- there's a lot of work on the neuroscientific basis of the Big 5, so it's not just at the stage of statistical theory.
 

BlueScreen

Fail 2.0
Joined
Nov 8, 2008
Messages
2,668
MBTI Type
YMCA
I'd guess that you can infer at least a fair number of them as having basis in good reasons. Like, for instance, studying science and a willingness to pursue solitary, non-sociability-oriented relatively quiet activities like reading seem related. The key though is often these kinds of inferences that seem 'natural' won't be born out by the facts. It may not be surprising that they are often, but it's certainly the sort of thing you need to gather some data to be sure of. But more importantly, sometimes the fact THAT you can make such natural-seeming inferences is the remarkable thing. Again with the idea of overall general intelligence, it's still a nontrivial thing that the natural idea that maybe there's some overall thing driving being good at various skills actually winds up having some basis in reality. and indeed, there's fierce contention from some scholars as to how limited the merit of the idea is. This once again highlights that your goal in measuring introversion may not be to predict someone's likelihood of going into science. The science part may not be the important thing -- the 5 variables measured in the Big 5 may be more fundamental, just like general intelligence may be more fundamental and more interesting than physics skill. Another point -- there's a lot of work on the neuroscientific basis of the Big 5, so it's not just at the stage of statistical theory.
I agree the statistical categories are chosen because they are interesting areas to study. For example, the categories may be quite important in other social studies, understanding group dynamics, etc. So I suppose that makes the Big 5 scientifically useful. Whether you can call the categories scientific, I'm still not sure. I'm guessing aspects of the brain won't directly align with the categories unless they are linked to something physical such as strongest processing routes, differences in vision or other senses. Scientifically, for that purpose it would be preferable to come from the other direction and analyse brain differences to see what personality traits align with each common brain trait. Fiddling the personality model to fit can work sort of, but it is far from best practice. Setting out to prove a theory is typically bad science.
 

AnnaSarita

New member
Joined
Oct 16, 2018
Messages
0
MBTI Type
ISFP
Enneagram
4
was just watching this video - MBTI is real or not. I guess it answered at least for me YouTube
 

Nomendei

Elegance of chaos
Joined
Jan 8, 2018
Messages
652
MBTI Type
ENTP
Enneagram
3w4
Instinctual Variant
sx
Here’s what I think of the MBTI.
It can be useful, but it is not absolute. I think each type and it’s description are a generality. There might be the Forer effect, but only for a minority. Most of the people’s behavior fit the description given because it is based on the description given by the majority of those who took the test. And there are clichés that are very different from one type to the other. Like stereotypes. There is always a bit of truth behind a stereotype. For example, I do procrastinate. The other three ENTPs I know do also procrastinate. But there is no ISTJ I know who does. And when you google the Type of a character, there must be some truth if 90-100% of the votes are for the same type.
To test the MBTI, I went multiple times out with some old friends and observed their behavior. Then, I typed them myself using only descriptions. Then, I asked them to take the test. I typed 11 right and 1 wrong. I had an accuracy of 91.7%.
However, what I think is wrong, or often misused, is the linking between MBTI and cognitive functions. The MBTI is based on preferences. Preferences can change with time. I know it out of personal experience. When I was a kid I was a typical INFJ. I didn’t talk a lot, stayed aside, thought with my feelings, and I was organized. But now, I talk a lot, base my chose on logical reasons, and am more chaotic than ever before. My desk looks like Einstein’s. Like for the descriptions for the Types, the match between MBTI and the cognitive function only works for a majority and can have exceptions.

It’s like zoology. Cats and lions are totally different, but they are both from the Felidae family. There are not only 16 personalities, but 16 personality types. It’s not because you share the same type as R2D2 that you are the same person.
 

Norexan

Quetzalcoatl
Joined
Jul 2, 2017
Messages
2,222
MBTI Type
ENTJ
Enneagram
8w7
Instinctual Variant
sp
Only reason why MBTI is not recognize by science (Te) is because it pushes etiquette to people (literally high Fe stuff). It is focused on ability and other BS instead with REASON why someone act as he/she acts! Instead better understanding of people we etiquette them how people should be (Fe-Si)! So MBTI as typing system is ESFJ which make sense because ESFJs are natural students of psychology.


Easiest way to type someone is not by his ability, nor he/she is done his/her life but exposing inferior function.
Why? Pick any celebrity person!
1. Does he/she think about him/herself as efficient? Yes.
2. Does he/she think about him/herself as traditionalist (S)? No
etc.

Or you still believe that Kim Kardashian with her sense for style think about herself as simple and normal ISFJ? ;)
 
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