Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless

[Null]

Gotta love how they're comparing mbti to fortune telling. Honestly this video is just incredibly lazy and lacks research imo. Obviously we're only using type indicators to put people into categories, what else.

 

[/DG/]

Is there a reason you see the mentioned studies as invalid?

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

They should read Nardi.

 

[Null]

Is there a reason you see the mentioned studies as invalid?

I don't necessarily see them as invalid. I don't doubt that 50% of the people who did the test twice got different results, my results also change every time I do. My problem with the whole video is that they only scratch the surface and dismiss the whole system, just because it might not work for companies and some people get different results. There are a lot of aspects that could lead to a different result, like bias of the test creator, people not really knowing themselves, changing their behavior from time to time or being in the middle of two traits. Not to mention the complete ignorance of the cognitive functions.

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

I don't necessarily see them as invalid. I don't doubt that 50% of the people who did the test twice got different results, my results also change every time I do. My problem with the whole video is that they only scratch the surface and dismiss the whole system, just because it might not work for companies and some people get different results. There are a lot of aspects that could lead to a different result, like bias of the test creator, people not really knowing themselves, changing their behavior from time to time or being in the middle of two traits. Not to mention the complete ignorance of the cognitive functions.

My thoughts exactly. No theory or system should be dismissed without extensive scrutiny first.

Whenever I see one of these articles, they never mention cognitive functions, let alone other Jungian-based systems or proponents of Jungian functions who have expanded upon MBTI or taken it a step further. They can blast it for lacking any solid neuroscientific basis, but there is continual research in that area which might validate the functions as they are mapped to the brain.

That said, I have no problem with criticizing Myers Briggs as a money earning scheme aimed at people and companies who crave "self-help" materials.

 

[Poki]

People go to psychologists to understand themselves...we seriously expect these people to be able to accurately take a test that asks them about themselves? This is my biggest issue with the tests.

 

[Swivelinglight]

My thoughts exactly. No theory or system should be dismissed without extensive scrutiny first.

Huh? It's the other way around. No theory or system should be accepted without extensive scrutiny first. Most theories or systems should be, for the most part, ignored until they've proven themselves.

 

[EcK]

People go to psychologists to understand themselves...we seriously expect these people to be able to accurately take a test that asks them about themselves? This is my biggest issue with the tests.

No. I agree with OP I didn't read.
The MBTI completely exaggerates positive traits in types. I feel only the entp description is accurate

On a more serious note: the mbti is OF COURSE not hard science. But for some people it's an uncanny description of their overall personality, strengths and weaknesses.

I distrust 'special snowflake' test results usually as they make me think of astrology. (okey now the video talks about it. yeah astrology too. anyway).

Oh no. Now they're going into 'BUT WE'RE ALL SO COMPLEX AND ALL UNIQUE AND SPECIAL'

godammit this is boring


That's horse crap. you can't base anything on that. It's that pernicious belief that we can all win the world cup, and how dare someone compare us to someone else or say we're not all just as precious etc. people are different, we all know it, we all admit it ... until it hurts someone's feelings.
They are doing the exact same thing they say the MBTI does: assign positive traits to people (oh how mysterious and complex we all are: so no system can apply to me because I'm magic) and skip on the negative (yes someone who tests ENTJ will on average earn more money than an INFP, there are reasons for that, based on personality)

The mbti is far from perfect, yet it does work for alot of people. I mean it's pretty simple: if you cluster answers in groups it is to be expected people who answer in the same way are more likely to have things in common than people who's answer are the opposite. Try to answer the opposite of what you want to answer and see if it ressembles you in anyway.

When I was in school, at some point some unfamiliar chinese astrology stuff came up. So I went to the front of the class and started asking ppl for their birth date etc. and reading them the wrong descriptions, and oh, surprise, overall people were like 'oh yeah i'm like that. That's not how the mbti works for most people. It's based on preference, not magic, in the same way that people who show the exact same preferences in movies are more likely to get along (statistically) (ok that's just my experience) than people who like diametrically opposite movies (i'm not saying it's a huge correlation but i'm pretty sure it's there)

It doesn't matter how they came up with the mbti, you could cluster people into groups the way you want and you could come up with similarities within groups and write a description and people would be like 'yeah that seems more like me than this guy who 's in that other group'.
That extends to everything:
an earth life form that answers "i don't like places with air' is not likely to be much like you is it.

People who tend to score similarly in IQ tests tend to have more in common ON AVERAGE than people who score way differently. Try putting 140-160 iq kid in a 90-110 iq class and ask them which group they identify with most (you don't even need to reveal the iq scores)

Put super tall people and super small people in a room, and see who's going to interact with whom the most.

Put star wars geeks and civil war reenactment people in a room... (I'd talk to the reenactment people for a bit, because I'm a curious person but u see my point)

Also if the test is so unrealiable, HOW COME YOU CAN PREDICT MBTI TYPE PRETTY RELIABLY BASED ON BIG 5 RESULTS. and correlates with intelligence, behavior, hell even mating preference etc. etc. etc. I don't think that the fact that I have to regularly beat off infjs with a stick is a coincidence. They stalk me
etc. etc. etc. etc.

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

Huh? It's the other way around. No theory or system should be accepted without extensive scrutiny first. Most theories or systems should be, for the most part, ignored until they've proven themselves.

None should be accepted nor dismissed without scrutiny.

 

[Bush]

Hm. Our sacred cow. Welp:

• Psychometrics is an established field in and of itself. There's a collection of methods that can be used to devise, analyze, and validate tests; whether ranging from some self-report thing to a graded work. The field isn't exactly bunk.
• Test-retest reliability (testing the same thing more than once and getting similar results) is huge.
• Their understanding and interpretation of MBTI in terms of dichotomies ≠ our understanding and interpretation of MBTI in terms of JCF. It's almost as if they're measuring something different than we are.
• So, even if the test itself is meaningless or otherwise bunk, that doesn't outright slaughter our sacred cow. It's not dead. Yet.
• However, our JCF understanding doesn't really have much of a solid scientific base. Yet. And that's okay.

Huh? It's the other way around. No theory or system should be accepted without extensive scrutiny first. Most theories or systems should be, for the most part, ignored until they've proven themselves.

This.

I feel only the entp description is accurate

No, it isn't. They give us too little credit. We're far better than we're portrayed. In every aspect. Ever.

 

[tkae.]

This stems from a basic misunderstanding of what the entire test is supposed to be

1.) It is not predictive. In fact, Jung's entire theory revolves around the idea that we develop our strengths in our youth and our weaknesses in our adulthood. By old age we should be neutral types. How can something be predictive when it's based on the idea of lifelong development?

2.) It is not defining. You are not either an introvert or an extrovert. We're all both. But we tend to be one or the other to varying degrees. Some of us are much more introverted most of the time, while some of us are only kind of introverted some of the time. It's a complete misunderstanding of what this test is to say it's categorical and defining of the entire Self. It is not. It looks at general aspects of personality to attempt to categorize them into a system based on one man's view of the human Self.

3.) They are correct about the history and the incorrect implementations of the test today, but are wrong about what those things mean. The test isn't "meaningless", it's just not applicable to how we're using it. There is a very key difference. If it were meaningless, it would have no validity. The test has very strong construct validity, and enough descriptive validity to be defended. Just because it was turned into a business and sold to dumbass I-O psychologists doesn't mean it's "meaningless". It just means we've hijacked the entire purpose of it and flown it into a mountain. That isn't the test's fault, that's society's fault.

 

[reckful]

My l-o-n-g (two-post) response to the shoddy article that video is based on can be found here.

 

[/DG/]

I don't necessarily see them as invalid. I don't doubt that 50% of the people who did the test twice got different results, my results also change every time I do. My problem with the whole video is that they only scratch the surface and dismiss the whole system, just because it might not work for companies and some people get different results. There are a lot of aspects that could lead to a different result, like bias of the test creator, people not really knowing themselves, changing their behavior from time to time or being in the middle of two traits. Not to mention the complete ignorance of the cognitive functions.

But that's not really the point I'm getting at. They are raising some valid concerns. Why does it make it okay to be just as dismissive here as you believe them to be in the video? Don't point and laugh, find out what the criticisms are and address them.

 

[Seymour]

But that's not really the point I'm getting at. They are raising some valid concerns. Why does it make it okay to be just as dismissive here as you believe them to be in the video? Don't point and laugh, find out what the criticisms are and address them.

If you actually care, I'd read through Reckful's Debunking the MBTI Debunkers article, which gives a pretty good overview about what's empirically supported and what's not.

 

[Unkas]

The same unintelligible critique, time and time again. ©

 

[Null]

But that's not really the point I'm getting at. They are raising some valid concerns. Why does it make it okay to be just as dismissive here as you believe them to be in the video? Don't point and laugh, find out what the criticisms are and address them.

I can see now how I may have sounded dismissive, although that wasn't my intend.

I've read through the article by [MENTION=18736]reckful[/MENTION] and realized I could never say it as eloquently and intellectually as he did. Read it, if you haven't already.

 

[Mole]

The Red Book and False Pretences

Mrs Briggs and her daughter Mrs Myers plagiarised mbti from Carl Jung's book called, Psychological Types.

Carl Jung suffered from a florid psychosis that is evidenced in his book called, The Red Book**.

The followers of Jung knew he was psychotic but kept it hidden from the public for 79 years by hiding, The Red Book, in a locked safe.

So we have been sold mbti and Carl Jung under false pretences.

** The Red Book is a red leather‐bound folio manuscript crafted by the Swiss psychologist and physician Carl Gustav Jung between 1915 and about 1930. It recounts and comments upon the author’s imaginative experiences between 1913 and 1916, and is based on manuscripts first drafted by Jung in 1914‐15 and 1917. Despite being nominated as the central work in Jung’s oeuvre, it was not published or made otherwise accessible for study until 2009.

- Wikipedia

 

[reckful]

Mrs Briggs and her daughter Mrs Myers plagiarised mbti from Carl Jung's book called, Psychological Types.

As I told you on another occasion when you made the same silly "plagiarism" charge:

As for "plagiarizing" Jung: on the contrary! Plagiarizing involves trying to take credit for someone else's work. Gifts Differing is actually disingenuous in the other direction. Myers made countless improvements, both large and small, to Jung but, because Jung had a name and she didn't, she exaggerated the extent to which her typology was simply derivative of Jung's original conceptions. She gave herself too little credit, not too much credit.

As David Keirsey has explained:

Myers must have accomplished her feat of developing Jung's distinctions into sixteen type portraits by dint of considerable observation of people in action, as well as a great deal of imaginative speculation. Salvaging the useful parts of Jung's cumbersome and self-contradictory theory of psychological types and making it available to scientist and layman alike was quite a feat. So the debt owed Isabel Myers by students of human conduct is truly enormous.

McCrae and Costa are the most prominent Big Five psychologists, and they've acknowledged that the MBTI is effectively tapping into four of the Big Five personality dimensions and noted that the Myers-Briggs typology passes muster in the psychometrics department in a way that Jung's original conceptions never did. Here's some of what they had to say in this 1989 article:

Although it provides rich insights into some aspects of individual differences, Jung's theory also creates formidable obstacles to the development of an inventory for assessing types. Much of his description concerns the unconscious life of the individual, which is not directly accessible to self-report. ... Descriptions of attitudes and functions sometimes seem to overlap ... and all classifications are complicated by the intrusion of unconscious elements of the opposing function when the dominant, conscious function is overdeveloped. Finally, 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. ...

Jungians might question the addition of the JP scale, or even the enterprise of constructing a self-report type indicator. From the psychometric perspective, however, the MBTI may be looked upon as an advance over Jung's largely untested speculations. However one chooses to evaluate the instrument, it is crucial to realize that it is not isomorphic with the theory on which it is based. ...

[The present study] found no support for the typological theory the instrument is intended to embody. ... The correlates of individual scales were consistent with their item content, but would probably not have been predicted from Jungian theory. ... Yet how can the MBTI be interpreted or employed without reference to Jung's psychological types? One alternative is to adopt the perspective of the five-factor model of personality. Each of the four indices showed impressive evidence of convergence with one of the five major dimensions of normal personality. It is these convergences that probably account for the many meaningful associations between MBTI scales and external criteria such as occupational preferences, creativity, and educational performance.

 

[Mole]

As I told you on another occasion when you made the same silly "plagiarism" charge:

As for "plagiarizing" Jung: on the contrary! Plagiarizing involves trying to take credit for someone else's work. Gifts Differing is actually disingenuous in the other direction. Myers made countless improvements, both large and small, to Jung but, because Jung had a name and she didn't, she exaggerated the extent to which her typology was simply derivative of Jung's original conceptions. She gave herself too little credit, not too much credit.

As David Keirsey has explained:
McCrae and Costa are the most prominent Big Five psychologists, and they've acknowledged that the MBTI is effectively tapping into four of the Big Five personality dimensions and noted that the Myers-Briggs typology passes muster in the psychometrics department in a way that Jung's original conceptions never did. Here's some of what they had to say in this 1989 article:

​

Just as the Western Enlightenment is under attack by radical Islam throughout the world, it is important to remember that astrology, and mbti, and the work of Jung, are anti-Enlightenment.

 

[reckful]

Just as the Western Enlightenment is under attack by radical Islam throughout the world, it is important to remember that astrology, and mbti, and the work of Jung, are anti-Enlightenment.

Well, if you take "the Enlightenment" to stand first and foremost for the advancement of human knowledge by means of respectable scientific methods, then as further discussed in this TC Wiki page (which Seymour just linked to), the respectable districts of the MBTI are basically in the same category as the Big Five, and are part of the Enlightenment (as so defined), rather than "anti-Enlightenment."

Your repetitive, know-nothingish posts, on the other hand, which deal in cartoonish slogans and consistently refuse to meaningfully address the substance of my (and others') replies to them, can make a much better claim to belonging in the anti-Enlightenment camp.

I'd say the reason you've made so few converts here in your multi-year crusade, and have instead exasperated —and OK, sometimes amused — so many of us, has more to do with the faultiness of the "enlightenment" you purport to be peddling than with any failure of understanding on the part of the forumites who you've repeatedly characterized as childishly gullible cultists with damaged psyches.