Mbti and Astrology

[Mole]

Why is mbti so much like astrology?

Mrs Briggs and her daughter Mrs Myers plagiarised mbti from Carl Jung's book Psychological Types. And Carl Jung was an astrologer.

Astrology is an ur-religion, the basis for many subsequent religions. And Carl Jung was in rebellion against his minister father, and Carl Jung competed with his father by founding a new religion. So naturally Carl Jung reached back to the template of subsequent religions, he reached back to astrology.

As well Mrs Briggs and Mrs Myers had no education at all in Psychometrics so in founding a new cult it seemed natural to them to use astrology as a template.

And so we have the saying that mbti is astrology for the college educated.

 

[Jeremy8419]

They're both extremely superstitious views at people.

 

[reckful]

Why is mbti so much like astrology?

Mrs Briggs and her daughter Mrs Myers plagiarised mbti from Carl Jung's book Psychological Types. And Carl Jung was an astrologer.

Astrology is an ur-religion, the basis for many subsequent religions. And Carl Jung was in rebellion against his minister father, and Carl Jung competed with his father by founding a new religion. So naturally Carl Jung reached back to the template of subsequent religions, he reached back to astrology.

As well Mrs Briggs and Mrs Myers had no education at all in Psychometrics so in founding a new cult it seemed natural to them to use astrology as a template.

And so we have the saying that mbti is astrology for the college educated.

Oh, look, here's Mole again, with the same tired nonsense he's repeated in so many previous Typology Central posts.

As I told him on another occasion when he 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.

Anyone who's interested, can read quite a lot about the scientific respectability of the MBTI, and about several other issues often raised by people claiming to "debunk" the MBTI, in this TC Wiki page.

As one example, here's a large-sample 2003 study that summed up the MBTI's relative standing in the personality type field this way:

In addition to research focused on the application of the MBTI to solve applied assessment problems, a number of studies of its psychometric properties have also been performed (e.g., Harvey & Murry, 1994; Harvey, Murry, & Markham, 1994; Harvey, Murry, & Stamoulis, 1995; Johnson & Saunders, 1990; Sipps, Alexander, & Freidt, 1985; Thompson & Borrello, 1986, 1989; Tischler, 1994; Tzeng, Outcalt, Boyer, Ware, & Landis, 1984). Somewhat surprisingly, given the intensity of criticisms offered by its detractors (e.g., Pittenger, 1993), a review and meta-analysis of a large number of reliability and validity studies (Harvey, 1996) concluded that in terms of these traditional psychometric criteria, the MBTI performed quite well, being clearly on a par with results obtained using more well-accepted personality tests.

...and the authors went on to describe the results of their own 11,000-subject study, which they specifically noted were inconsistent with the notion that the MBTI was somehow of "lower psychometric quality" than Big Five (aka FFM) tests. They said:

In sum, although the MBTI is very widely used in organizations, with literally millions of administrations being given annually (e.g., Moore, 1987; Suplee, 1991), the criticisms of it that have been offered by its vocal detractors (e.g., Pittenger, 1993) have led some psychologists to view it as being of lower psychometric quality in comparison to more recent tests based on the FFM (e.g., McCrae & Costa, 1987). In contrast, we find the findings reported above — especially when viewed in the context of previous confirmatory factor analytic research on the MBTI, and meta-analytic reviews of MBTI reliability and validity studies (Harvey, 1996) — to provide a very firm empirical foundation that can be used to justify the use of the MBTI as a personality assessment device in applied organizational settings.

And I've pointed out all the stuff in this post to Mole on multiple previous occasions, and he never addresses any of it in any meaningful way. He just scurries back into his hole, and then pops up a few weeks or months later with another steaming heap of Mole poop that smells pretty much like the last batch, and the batch before that, and the batch before that.

 

[Arctic Hysteria]

Recently I started to notice that most Cancers I've met bear very strong SJ traits, when most people seem to think Cancer must be NF.

 

[Smilephantomhive]

I'm sagittarius.

 

[Mole]

Oh, look, here's Mole again, with the same tired nonsense he's repeated in so many previous Typology Central posts.

As I told him on another occasion when he 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:

Anyone who's interested, can read quite a lot about the scientific respectability of the MBTI, and about several other issues often raised by people claiming to "debunk" the MBTI, in this TC Wiki page.

As one example, here's a large-sample 2003 study that summed up the MBTI's relative standing in the personality type field this way:

...and the authors went on to describe the results of their own 11,000-subject study, which they specifically noted were inconsistent with the notion that the MBTI was somehow of "lower psychometric quality" than Big Five (aka FFM) tests. They said:

And I've pointed out all the stuff in this post to Mole on multiple previous occasions, and he never addresses any of it in any meaningful way. He just scurries back into his hole, and then pops up a few weeks or months later with another steaming heap of Mole poop that smells pretty much like the last batch, and the batch before that, and the batch before that.​

This is a strange polemic when we consider mbti is taught in no Psychology Department in any registered university in the world, for exactly the same reasons astrology is taught in no Astronomy Department in any registered university in the world.​

 

[reckful]

This is a strange polemic when we consider mbti is taught in no Psychology Department in any registered university in the world, for exactly the same reasons astrology is taught in no Astronomy Department in any registered university in the world.

Exploring Your MBTI Type

"Exploring Your MBTI Type" is a follow-on course from the "Introduction to MBTI" course and gives you the opportunity to explore your MBTI type further. (NB it is pre-requisite to have completed the "Introduction to MBTI" course before this follow-on course)

The University of Edinburgh
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[Kanra Jest]

I am a Pisces. Which is the archetypal INFP. So is my ISTJ friend..

But there's not just the sun sign in astrology that people don't seem to know here.. there's a moon sign also. And a rising.

I know my Pisces is sun, my Cancer is moon. According to this I'm 'The Ultimate Empath'.

Highly unlikely.

...But hey, if the shoes fits.