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Pittenger (1993) wrote: "Reliability refers to the consistency in measurement of a test. Tests that are highly reliable are preferred because we can be sure that we will get the same result each time we measure the same thing. If the test is not reliable, we do not know if the changes in the score are due to changes in the person we are measuring or to some type of error in the testing process."
After admitting the truth of this factor, you wrote:
As a final note, it should also be kept in mind that a typical MBTI test-taker is someone with little or no familiarity with the typology who simply takes the MBTI test along with a group of fellow employees or students. It's reasonable to assume that, to the extent that a person actually has four reasonably-well-defined preferences, they're likely to come up with a result that's considerably more accurate if, rather than just accepting the test result, they spend some time reading about the preferences and the types — which is something the MBTI Manual (among other sources) has always encouraged people to do.
But a test with high gravitas known as the MMPI does not have to be studied before taken. Would that not invalidate the test result by introducing a certain amount of bias?
I don't consider "gravitas" to be an objective factor in measuring validity, do you? I don't know why it was even mentioned. I didn't mention it myself. The validity of the MMPI is not due to its gravitas, but (among other things) the fact that there are scales to test for deception, especially, faking good or bad. There are other scales designed to watch for randomness in selecting true or false, and answering all true or all false.
Another factor is that the MMPI has been found to be very useful in the psychotherapy field. Whether or not the MBTI has been found to be useful beyond parlor games and forum discussions is a question yet to be answered.
What does "gravitas" mean to you, Mal? Harvey didn't put "gravitas" in quotes, and Pittenger didn't use that exact term, but if you're suggesting that Pittenger's take on the MBTI isn't reasonably characterized as asserting that it's lacking in gravitas, I'm afraid I'm going to have to question the gravitas of your assertion. Among other things, Pittenger suggests that MBTI personality descriptions are examples of "the Barnum Effect, named in honor of the great entertainer."
Similarly, various of the qualities that Pittenger (inaccurately) accuses the MBTI of lacking (e.g., reliability and validity) are unquestionably qualities that are, as Harvey says, "associated with traditional assessment instruments (e.g., MMPI, CPI, 16PF, NEO-PI)." Harvey doesn't say Pittenger specifically referred to those other instruments. But Pittenger does say that "the MBTI does not conform to many of the basic standards expected of psychological tests" — and by contrast, Harvey points to an impressive body of data that suggests that, as he puts it, the MBTI is more or less "on a par" with the leading Big Five tests.
You say Harvey refers to Pittenger as an example of the MBTI's detractors, but that he wasn't aware of any other detractors that had made the charges addressed in his article. Well, just for starters, Mal, how could you possibly know that? And second, since your OP was all about the same Pittenger article Harvey cited, even in the ridiculously unlikely (IMHO) event that Harvey really wasn't familiar with any of the MBTI's other critics, what difference would that make for purposes of the present discussion? Why, it's almost as if you seized on that bogus non-issue because you didn't have any meaningful responses to offer to the rebuttals to Pittenger (and other critics of the MBTI) that Harvey offers in his article, and that I offer in that long, two-part TC post I linked to.
The Myers-Briggs typology had existed for many years as a "family hobby" — based on a combination of Jung's ideas and a personality typology that Briggs had been working on before she read Psychological Types — before Myers put together a first version of the MBTI instrument for potential use by a third party. And as previously noted, Myers was moved to put that first test together for at least two "purposes" that have been reported: "the suffering and tragedies of the war stirred Myers's desire to do something that might help peoples understand each other and avoid destructive conflicts"; and "she noticed many people taking jobs out of patriotism, but hating the tasks that went against their grain instead of using their gifts."
And furthermore, and also as previously noted, that first version of the MBTI instrument — put together before Myers had done the vast majority of the data-gathering and psychometric analysis that contributed to the first published version of the MBTI around 20 years later — was never used.
So if you want to say that there was a crude and very early "first draft" of the MBTI instrument that was never used, and that was partly aimed at "help[ing] peoples understand each other," and that was also offered to the U.S. military to help them avoid putting people in jobs that "went against their grain," you would be correct.
But simply saying that "the original intent of the MBTI was to provide jobs to women" is a major distortion of the story, and it's most often heard from internet sources who cite that "fact" as a way of (wrongly) implying that job placement issues played a major role in the development of the typology itself.
It sounds like you missed my follow-up post (which I also linked to), where I admitted that I should have used the word "reliability" when I was discussing that part of Pittenger's article. (Those posts are from 2011, and I was relatively new to the psychometrics biz.)
Pittenger does indeed "haul out the old complaint" that the MBTI is weak in the test/retest reliability department, and Harvey addresses that misguided charge in his article, and I address it in the two-part TC post I linked to. As previously noted, Harvey concludes that the MBTI is essentially "on a par" with the leading Big Five tests in both the validity and reliability departments. And as explained in my linked post, it's not uncommon to find forum posters who've been misled on that issue because they've confused test/retest percentages on individual dimensions (the way Big Five stats are often reported) and test/retest percentages for four-dimension MBTI types.
For anyone else who's interested, I've put that part of my linked post in the spoiler.
Reliability
The idea that the Big Five is substantially superior to the MBTI in the test/retest reliability department is another canard that periodically pops up in these kinds of articles. And claims to that effect are often accompanied by statistics that confuse retest rates on single dimensions with retest rates for a complete four-letter type.
I once corrected a forum poster who'd noted that the MBTI "has a test-retest rate of some 60%, meaning two out of every five people get different results when retaking the test," while the NEO-PI-R's "levels of consistency are incredibly high (N= .92, E= .89, O= .87, A= .86, C= .90)." In my reply, I explained:
That 60% MBTI statistic relates to a retest standard that says you got a different result if any one of the four dimensions is different. That corresponds to an average test-retest rate of 88% for the individual dimensions.
If you apply the same test-retest standard to those Big 5 statistics you gave us, you get .92 * .89 * .87 * .86 * .90 = a 55% test-retest rate (or 60% if you leave out Neuroticism).
It's probably also worth noting that if you assume (as previously discussed) that most or all of the MBTI and Big Five dimensions exhibit something like a normal distribution, and if you assume (accordingly) that a large portion of the population is in or near the middle on at least one dimension, and if you add to that the many potential sources of error in self-assessment personality tests — from the fact that personality type is a relatively young science and psychologists are quite a long ways from nailing down exactly what the temperament dimensions consist of, to flaws in particular tests (including items that tap into more than one dimension), to multiple kinds of misunderstanding and other human error on the part of the individuals taking the test — it would strain credibility if the test-retest statistics for any personality typology didn't indicate a significant percentage of cases where at least one of the dimensions came out with a different preference on retesting, and one letter change is all it takes to constitute an MBTI retest "failure."
As a final note, it should also be kept in mind that a typical MBTI test-taker is someone with little or no familiarity with the typology who simply takes the MBTI test along with a group of fellow employees or students. It's reasonable to assume that, to the extent that a person actually has four reasonably-well-defined preferences, they're likely to come up with a result that's considerably more accurate if, rather than just accepting the test result, they spend some time reading about the preferences and the types — which is something the MBTI Manual (among other sources) has always encouraged people to do.
Anyway, did I say anything about the Big 5? Is this even about the Big 5? Do you want to know what I think of the Big 5? Here it is.
Sample Big 5 question: "Are you an idiot? (yes) (no)"
That's the Big 5 to me, maybe not in reality, but that's how it felt when I took the test.
From Pittenger's 1993 article:
It is important that the MBTI be reliable for many reasons. As Tieger and Barron-Tieger note in their article, "The Type to which you are born will be the one you take to your grave." In other words, once an INTJ, always an INTJ.
I have seen ample evidence on this forum of people who say their personality changes, so the "type is innate" theory is only an assumption not born out by the facts of reality. The MBTI is therefore not a reliable test instrument if it assumes that nobody's type changes.
I'm still waiting for your response to this part of Pittenger's 1993 article, unless you have a link to your response somewhere else:
Relation Between MBTI Type and Occupation.
Many people have examined the relation between type and
occupation by examining the proportions of type within each profession. For example, one might observe that many
elementary teachers are ESTJs and conclude that ESTJs prefer to be elementary school teachers or to work in a
related occupation. Although it sounds appealing, such a conclusion runs into many fundamental problems.
First, we need to examine the normative data to judge the relation between type and profession. For example, the
proportion of ESTJs in the teaching profession is the same as the proportion of ESTJs in the general population, or
12 percent. This similarity suggest that there is nothing special about the type of person who becomes an elementary
school teacher.
Another problem stems from jobs that are dominated by men or women. Nursing is a good example. If we compare
the distribution of type for nurses against managers, there appears to be a different pattern of type. We could
conclude that certain types are more likely to enter nursing while other types are more likely to become managers.
There is, however, an alternative interpretation. Nursing has been and remains a profession dominated by women.
There is a high correlation (r = .91) between the percentages of types for all women and people in nursing. The
correlation between all men and people in nursing is, by contrast, small (r= .21). In a male dominated profession such
as management, there is a high correlation between types in management positions and men in general (r=.92), but
a smaller correlation for women (r = 60). If it is true that certain types are attracted to certain professions, then
these correlations should be much smaller. Instead, these data suggest that the proportion of MBTI types within each
occupation is equivalent to that within a random sample of the population.
Finally, there is no evidence to show a positive relation between MBTI type and success within an occupation. That
is, there is nothing to show that ESFPs are better or worse salespeople than INTJs are. Nor is there any data to
suggest that specific types are more satisfied within specific occupations than are other types, or that they stay longer
in one occupation than do others.
But simply saying that "the original intent of the MBTI was to provide jobs to women" is a major distortion of the story, and it's most often heard from internet sources who cite that "fact" as a way of (wrongly) implying that job placement issues played a major role in the development of the typology itself.
Its development occurred over years or decades. If the original intent was to produce a parlor game, then you are correct. This is well-known historical fact. But its development began during WWII for a specific purpose which was mentioned in the Pittenger article, and that was my context. The scope of my comment had nothing to do with Myers using it to wipe her ass back in 1935 or anything like that. The article was my context.
okay why not use it for dating services then- oh wait.... WHERE'S THE THEORY ABOUT INTERTYPE RELATIONS okay I guess you're right then. Still fun I guess.
I should give that comment more attention, although I can't tell if you were serious or not. Intertype relations depends on individual focus. If I simply want a relationship with someone who likes the same kind of music I like, then the MBTI doesn't matter. Or I could find someone who is typologically compatible, but they smell bad. There's too much involved in this to make typology relevant to finding a relationship that works.
But a test with high gravitas known as the MMPI does not have to be studied before taken. Would that not invalidate the test result by introducing a certain amount of bias?
I don't consider "gravitas" to be an objective factor in measuring validity, do you? I don't know why it was even mentioned. I didn't mention it myself. The validity of the MMPI is not due to its gravitas, but (among other things) the fact that there are scales to test for deception, especially, faking good or bad. There are other scales designed to watch for randomness in selecting true or false, and answering all true or all false.
Another factor is that the MMPI has been found to be very useful in the psychotherapy field. Whether or not the MBTI has been found to be useful beyond parlor games and forum discussions is a question yet to be answered.
I don't know what you mean when you say that "the MMPI does not have to be studied before taken."
The MBTI doesn't "have to be studied before taken" either, and usually isn't.
If you're saying that the MMPI has better test/retest reliability than the MBTI, first, can you point me to a source for that? And second, it's understood that psychological tests are capable of achieving better test/retest reliabilities to the extent that the actual psychological characteristics that they're measuring are relatively lacking in various kinds of potential ambiguity and messiness. Both the MBTI and Big Five involve broad clusters of personality characteristics that are at least arguably messy (at the reality level, not just the theory level) in multiple respects, including multifacetedness and potential middleness.
So in setting the reliability bar for a psychological test, you need to be realistic about what it's reasonable to expect, given the nature of the particular aspect of psychology that the test is attempting to measure.
But in any case, I've never claimed that the MBTI doesn't have plenty of room for improvement in various departments — as does the Big Five. My point is that, as Harvey concluded, and contrary to that Pittenger article, the data puts the MBTI in very respectable company when it comes to what Pittenger refers to as "the basic standards expected of psychological tests."
Actually, you know what's really really funny? I've looked into astrological intertype relationships and found it to be more accurate than the MBTI. Just based on personal experience.
Do you want to know what I think of the Big 5? Here it is.
Sample Big 5 question: "Are you an idiot? (yes) (no)"
That's the Big 5 to me, maybe not in reality, but that's how it felt when I took the test.
I was responding to this: "...they're likely to come up with a result that's considerably more accurate if, rather than just accepting the test result, they spend some time reading about the preferences and the types."
And second, it's understood that psychological tests are capable of achieving better test/retest reliabilities to the extent that the actual psychological characteristics that they're measuring are relatively lacking in various kinds of potential ambiguity and messiness. Both the MBTI and Big Five involve broad clusters of personality characteristics that are at least arguably messy (at the reality level, not just the theory level) in multiple respects, including multifacetedness and potential middleness.
So in setting the reliability bar for a psychological test, you need to be realistic about what it's reasonable to expect, given the nature of the particular aspect of psychology that the test is attempting to measure.
But in any case, I've never claimed that the MBTI doesn't have plenty of room for improvement in various departments — as does the Big Five. My point is that, as Harvey concluded, and contrary to that Pittenger article, the data puts the MBTI in very respectable company when it comes to what Pittenger refers to as "the basic standards expected of psychological tests."
On a personal note: I'd say my preferences are all reasonably strong and it's fair to say that, when I first stumbled onto the MBTI, I had a major "aha!" reaction. Anytime I read good MBTI "dichotomy" descriptions — including combination-of-dichotomy descriptions like NT and SJ — I pretty consistently have what I'd call recognition reactions, where I recognize my side of the dichotomy as capturing me pretty well while the other side seems to capture those other people who tend to make me scratch my head. By contrast, and consistent with the INTJ results on Nardi's test that I discuss in
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, when I read typical descriptions of Te/Ti and Ni/Ne, I don't have anything like the kind of me/not me reaction that I have when I read I/E, N/S, T/F and J/P descriptions. Instead, I tend to feel like each of Ti, Te, Ni and Ne is more me than not me.
No Forer effect was apparent to you then, correct? You didn't *feel* like there was any Forer effect involved?
Five years later, the 1985 edition of the MBTI Manual, co-authored by Myers, was even more lopsided in favor of the dichotomies. In a 1990 article ("Review of Research on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator." Perceptual & Motor Skills, 70, 1187) in which John B. Murray concluded that the MBTI's "indices of reliability and validity have been extensively investigated and have been judged acceptable," Murray noted that over 1500 studies were included in the 1985 Manual — many of them either discussed in the text or included in one or more tables of statistics. And good luck finding any results in that manual that are framed in terms of the cognitive functions. The 1985 Manual is full of statistics correlating type with interests, occupations, scholastic achievement, other personality measures, etc. — and the reported correlations almost exclusively involve the four dichotomies, the sixteen types and/or dichotomy combinations with no meaningful function correspondence — with the combinations most often included (by a wide margin) being ST, SF, NT and NF. So, on top of the fact that Myers and the rest of the official MBTI establishment were predominantly dichotomy-focused, it's also clear that the independent psychologists conducting many of those studies weren't laboring under any misconception that the MBTI dichotomies were relatively superficial indicators (convenient for testing and/or labeling purposes) while the cognitive functions were what the typology was really about.
Didn't it occur to you that this whole present obsession with functions over dichotomies is a later development? I don't even think there was any interest in functions even as late as 1996.
The third edition of the MBTI Manual was published in 1998 and, according to the Reynierse article I linked to above, it cites a grand total of eight studies involving "type dynamics" (i.e., the functions model) — and Reynierse summarizes them as "six studies that failed, one with a questionable interpretation, and one where contradictory evidence was offered as support." He then notes, "Type theory's claim that type dynamics is superior to the static model and the straightforward contribution of the individual preferences rests on this ephemeral empirical foundation."
And finally, I think it's also worth noting that the 17-page report that an ENFJ (for example) receives after taking the relatively recent MBTI Step II test includes page after page of dichotomy-based analysis (including five separate subscales for each of the four dichotomies) and not a single mention of "extraverted feeling" or "introverted intuition" other than a diagram near the end that shows that "ENFJs like Feeling best, Intuition next, Sensing third and Thinking least," and one brief note about tending to use Feeling in the "outer world" and Intuition in the "inner world." All the rest of the ENFJ descriptions in the report — after the brief initial profile, which isn't broken down by components — are descriptions of N (not Ni or Ne), F (not Fi or Fe) and so on, and they're the same descriptions of N and F (and the five subscales of each) that ENFPs receive in their reports (notwithstanding the fact that ENFJs are Fe-Ni and ENFPs are Ne-Fi). And Nancy Harkey
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that "there is no discussion in the Step II manual of applying type dynamics (dominant, auxiliary etc.) to the overall preferences. I really don't know what that means at the moment, but it is curious."
Do you think that the present obsession with functions over dichotomies was even a thing in 1998?
The more I reread Psychological Types, the more I appreciate the extent to which getting from Jung to the Myers-Briggs typology involved substantial adjustments and additions. I think the formidable job Briggs and Myers did in separating the Jungian wheat from the chaff and modifying and supplementing Jung's theory is grotesquely underappreciated by many internet forumites. Myers may not have been as smart as Jung, and she may not have had a psychology degree, but she and her mother had the benefit of standing on Jung's shoulders, and Myers then spent many years, as a labor of love, designing and refining her test instrument and gathering data from thousands of subjects, leading her to conclude — among other things — that the four dichotomies (as she conceived them), and not the functions, were the main event.
Exactly. When someone is reading Foreresque descriptions, they're no more likely to relate to one side than the other, since the essence of what makes a description Foreresque is that you can hand it to anyone (because they were born on August 18, for example) and they'll read it and say, oh, yeah, that sounds like me! By contrast, people with reasonably strong MBTI preferences tend to feel like they relate reasonably well to the corresponding type descriptions and don't relate well to descriptions that correspond to the opposite preferences.
Studies have shown that people are less likely to relate to MBTI descriptions the more preferences you flip from their "best fit" type.
Here's part of a recent post by Teybo at INTJforum:
In fact, researchers have used the actual MBTI type descriptions and methodically measured how true people perceive the type descriptions to be when considering themselves. Overwhelmingly. people pick the type description matching their assessed MBTI results as most often being the most accurate, and with each "flip" of a letter (for example, flipping the I in INTJ to E), the profiles are rated less accurate, and the more letters that are flipped or mismatched to the person's assessed type, the less accurate the person rates the profile descriptions.
If a profile elicits the Forer effect, it should elicit the effect among all or most people, and it should not matter what the person's MBTI results are. Clearly the science shows that the MBTI profiles are not eliciting the Forer effect, as some profiles are better matches than others.
Carskadon, T. G., & Cook, D. D. (1982). Myers-Briggs Type Indicator characterizations: a Jungian horoscope? Research in Psychological Type, 5, 87-94.
Carskadon, T. G., & Cook, D. D. (1982). Validity of MBTI type descriptions as perceived by recipients unfamiliar with type. Research in Psychological Type, 8, 89-94.
Ware, R., & Yokomoto, C. (1985). Perceived accuracy of Myers–Briggs Type Indicator descriptors using Keirsey profiles. Journal of Psychological Type, 10, 27-31.
To be blunt, all categorizations are purely abstract, and have no inherent reality. The real question is whether the categorizations are useful, not whether they're correct. In terms of logic, they're always correct: "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary, and those who don't." The categorization between understanding binary is always "correct", but it's remarkably useless. The categorization of types and functions is remarkably useful, in spite of the debates about whether they're "correct."
This is related to Pittenger's point which is being ignored time and time again. If 12% of teachers are ESTJ types, and this corresponds to the 12% of ESTJs in the general population, then the statistic is useless for career seeking -
First, we need to examine the normative data to judge the relation between type and profession. For example, the
proportion of ESTJs in the teaching profession is the same as the proportion of ESTJs in the general population, or
12 percent. This similarity suggests that there is nothing special about the type of person who becomes an elementary
school teacher.
Exactly. When someone is reading Foreresque descriptions, they're no more likely to relate to one side as the other, since the essence of what makes a description Foreresque is that you can hand it to anyone (because they were born on August 18, for example) and they'll read it and say, oh, yeah, that sounds like me! By contrast, people with reasonably strong MBTI preferences tend to feel like they relate reasonably well to the corresponding type descriptions and don't relate well to descriptions that correspond to the opposite preferences.
Studies have shown that people are less likely to relate to MBTI descriptions the more preferences you flip from their "best fit" type.
Here's part of a recent post by Teybo at INTJforum:
In fact, researchers have used the actual MBTI type descriptions and methodically measured how true people perceive the type descriptions to be when considering themselves. Overwhelmingly. people pick the type description matching their assessed MBTI results as most often being the most accurate, and with each "flip" of a letter (for example, flipping the I in INTJ to E), the profiles are rated less accurate, and the more letters that are flipped or mismatched to the person's assessed type, the less accurate the person rates the profile descriptions.
If a profile elicits the Forer effect, it should elicit the effect among all or most people, and it should not matter what the person's MBTI results are. Clearly the science shows that the MBTI profiles are not eliciting the Forer effect, as some profiles are better matches than others.
Carskadon, T. G., & Cook, D. D. (1982). Myers-Briggs Type Indicator characterizations: a Jungian horoscope? Research in Psychological Type, 5, 87-94.
Carskadon, T. G., & Cook, D. D. (1982). Validity of MBTI type descriptions as perceived by recipients unfamiliar with type. Research in Psychological Type, 8, 89-94.
Ware, R., & Yokomoto, C. (1985). Perceived accuracy of Myers–Briggs Type Indicator descriptors using Keirsey profiles. Journal of Psychological Type, 10, 27-31.
But remember, it's important that the test subjects be ignorant of the MBTI (or whatever they are being studied for). For example, there is a famous enneagram test with a +90% reliability rating, but it consists only of nine type descriptions and whether or not people can relate to them. So the more you have people who are already familiar with the enneagram and their type take the test the more "reliable" the test.
Pittenger (1993) wrote:
"The MBTI reminds us of the olvious [sic] truth that all people are not alike..."
I agree that it's "olvious," but it's not necessarily an *applied* truth. Since I learned this "olvious" truth, I have observed that people will admit it but they don't practice it. They act like people do (or should) think they same way, particularly, the same way they do. They either don't observe or they don't respect the differences.
I didn't learn that lesson from the MBTI, however.
Although the MBTI was developed to indicate to Jung's typology, it
identifies components of type, not type dynamics: e.g. whether a person is an introverted intuitive with
feeling etc.). Isabel Myers developed the type formula (i.e. a letter identifying a preference from each
scale) as a means of providing a result from the completion of the form and an indicator of the dynamics
of the whole type result: a result of INFJ indicated dynamics of introverted intuition with feeling.
"...as a means of providing a result from the completion of the form and an indicator of the dynamics
of the whole type result."
This is another fallacy underlying the MBTI. The test uses a formula designed to give a result and a dynamic - but what they can't admit is that this result is circular because it is self-validating (kind of like saying the Bible is true because it says so in the Bible).
From the standpoint of utility, the Enneagram and Big 5 get it right - not because they can help you find a better job or the perfect relationship, but because they allow some insight into your level of mental well-being.
This is another fallacy underlying the MBTI. The test uses a formula designed to give a result and a dynamic - but what they c7an't admit is that this result is circular because it is self-validating (kind of like saying the Bible is true because it says so in the Bible).
okay I guess you're right then. Still fun I guess.
