Is the MBTI science, or is it bullshit?
This question is germane for MBTI is used extensively by the military and business but no psychology department in any university will touch it.
And since WW II MBTI has been enormously popular with the public.
Perhaps to understand this we need to understand the history of MBTI.
For the father of MBTI is Carl Jung. And he freely and enthusiastically supported the wrong side in WW II. He personally applied sexual therapy to his patients, but note, only to his female patients. And if he did this today he would be immediately struck off and would not be able to practise as a psychiatrist anywhere in the civilized world.
And on top of this two opportunists, Mrs Briggs and her daughter Mrs Myers, with no psychometric education or training whatsoever, invented a bogus personality test called MBTI.
And Mrs Briggs and her daughter Mrs Myers invented this test for the purpose of inducting women into the war effort. And as you know the military still use MBTI today to induct recruits for war. And business, seeing how useful it is to the military, adopted it to recruit staff for business.
However I would emphasise that every psychology department knows MBTI is bogus.
However MBTI is very appealing. It is appealing as astrology, and for the same reason. Both MBTI and astrology tell you what you want to hear. Both astrology and MBTI work on confirmation bias. Both are self validating. And how much we want to be validated.
But no matter how appealing and validating MBTI and astrology are, no astronomer believes in astrology and no psychometrician believes in MBTI.
But we all long to be validated so we believe.