Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

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Felix
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by Felix »

Is saying ESFPs don't believe in Myers-Briggs types like saying that cancers don't believe in horoscopes?

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GandK
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by GandK »

Ian wrote:
jennypenny wrote:I'm not saying that awareness of a person's type influences their self-assessment, although there is lots of evidence of that with astrological signs. I'm wondering if the test is more suited to I N T J types, and therefore more accurately identifies those people and predicts their behavior.
I don't have hard evidence, but I'd strongly suspect that INTJs and a few other personality types agree more with their results.I also feel as though the MBTI did a lot of provide validation for certain personality types - you don't have to go very far back in history to find social books that describe things we'd call introverted as simply bad. I could be wrong about this, but I think it's plausible that the test has been embraced partially because it provides a significant segment of the population with a way to legitimize their experiences.
It's more about lack of utility for people whose world view happens to match society's. Our culture itself is extraverted sensing. So when my husband, an ESTJ, takes the test and hears about his tendencies, his response is "Of course that's how I see things!" Our culture - business culture, especially - validates and values his point of view, his strengths, and even his weaknesses. It wasn't less accurate for him at all, or less predictive, or that he didn't agree with his results as much as I agreed with mine (INFJ). The test results simply held no new information for him. It was like taking a lengthy test to inform him that the sky is blue. And equally useful. He was much more intrigued by my results. "You really think like this? And other people do too?! That's... weird."

jacob
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by jacob »

This! --- That's what I wanted to write.

First and foremost---and I believe this was part of the original intention of, at least, Keirsey's books (Please Understand Me I && II)---was to provide this validation of other types. As you say, extraverts and sensers, and in particular the combination, are automatically validated by western society. In particular, being the majority, they don't even had to try to understand most other people and in turn be understood by most other people.

Prior to MBTI and personality typing in general, I thought that all humans had opinions that were logically derived by reason following from basic axioms. If we had a disagreement it should consequentially be a simple matter of tracing the reasoning back to these axioms to figure out where the divergence was. I naturally assumed that everybody operated this way and that everybody had a natural interest in deep exploration of their own personal thinking.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered---after long arguments from my dorm neighbor---that apparently some people reach decisions based on a completely alien technology called "feelings". That, in fact, most people do not build elaborate mental systems of the world. That, most people can't readily explain why they hold a particular opinion. That, in fact, most people DO NOT enjoy picking apart arguments and building them back up.

Frankly, before that I naively thought that people who didn't make reasonable sense simply suffered from some kind of dimwitted craziness. Maybe their reasoning was a fault. Maybe their systems were broken. Maybe they had issues. That was pretty much the lesson I took away from almost 15 years of "English"-classes; why don't we ever get to read about normal people [like me, an intj].

Well, turns out, I was the odd one.

Also I think NTs, maybe INTJs the most, have a very easy time taking the test. Do you prefer this or that? That's not a hard question to me. I know exactly what to answer because the answer is quickly available to me in one of those mental systems I've built up. I also understand the test so I know the intention of what's being asked. For example: "Do you prefer facts or theory?" This is an S vs N question. Now, personally I prefer facts, but that's because I make my own theories. So while technically, I should answer facts (S), I need to answer theory (N).

Now ask an SJ or SP the same question, and they need to remember particular instances of when they did this or that? Maybe they need to check their legal compass (the SJ compass is more a question of law than ethics I find) or tradition or what's supposed to be right? Or what their employee training told them was the right thing to say. And so on. This makes it easy to get the wrong answers.

In any case, I've found it very helpful on an interpersonal basis. It helps me understand why my SJ wife will cross a street in front of a car "because there's a stop sign so it has to stop" and I hold her back "because traffic law in itself does not prevent the car from running you over if the driver hasn't seen you". As well, why I worry "that the dog theoretically could run out in front of car because the leash is long enough" and she doesn't "because he's never done that before". And so on.

Chad
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by Chad »

jacob wrote: Frankly, before that I naively thought that people who didn't make reasonable sense simply suffered from some kind of dimwitted craziness.
I'm not sure MBTI fixed this for me. :D

akratic
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by akratic »

I found this article pretty weak.

His support for finding the MBTI "totally meaningless" is essentially:
1) ad hominem attacks
2) appeals to authority
3) a mistaken belief that MBTI forces things into binary choices such as E or I. Yet what the test gives you is specifically a place on the E - I spectrum, etc. Core texts on the subject like Please Understand Me hammer the spectrum thing in over and over. Just because the book then goes on to discuss caricatures of each type doesn't mean that you then throw the whole spetrum thing out the window. Specific test givers might fail to emphasize the spectrums, but that's a problem with the test giver not the test.
4) an unsubstantiated appeal to the Forer effect when the MBTI categories are neither vague nor broad nor particularly positive.
5) low test-retest reliability

1) and 2) above are just textbook logical fallacies and can be discarded. 3) and 4) just tell me that the author doesn't really understand the MBTI (or that I don't?). 5) is the only point I see any merit in. Yet I find it hard to wrap my head around as I personally have near perfect test-retest reliability down to the specific part of each spectrum... across different decades of my life, across different versions of the test, across times when I was a student or times when I was a vagabond.

If I had to guess the low test-retest reliability is downstream of people not understanding the spectrum thing. Like if I score just on the I side of E-I one day, and then just on the E side the next, it would be wrong to conclude that the test is unreliable (I then E). The correct interpretation is that both tests I was near the center of that spectrum.

All that said, here's what I think is actually the biggest problem with the MBTI:
6) less insightful for people near the center of the spectrum(s)

For each spectrum, the closer you are to the middle, the more you kind of naturally understand both sides, and the less a description of the ends of the spectrum applies to you. You could still use the descriptions to help understand other people that aren't in the middle, but you could already kind of do that on your own given where you started.

My personal theory of people who fully understand the categories and the spectrums etc., but just plain don't get anything out of them is that these people are middle-of-the-MBTI-spectrums people. There's nothing wrong with that and plenty of people should be in the middle of every personality dimension anyway. Obviously though you couldn't claim that MBTI is useless for everyone just because the four dimensions in it aren't particularly useful for you.

saving-10-years
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by saving-10-years »

@Jacob I _so_ enjoyed that answer. It has taken me a lot longer than it took you to figure that I was the odd one. I still forget this when I get out into the 'real world' or move beyond the 'sanity' of my 100% INTJ/INTP household.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Jacob said: It helps me understand why my SJ wife will cross a street in front of a car "because there's a stop sign so it has to stop" and I hold her back "because traffic law in itself does not prevent the car from running you over if the driver hasn't seen you".
Interesting. I guess that's why somebody like me who tests as having practically zero S finds herself unable to walk across a railroad track when the gate is down but there is no train coming without first doing a quick calculation to reassure herself that only a cartoon train could possibly go that fast.

Devil's Advocate
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by Devil's Advocate »

There's another thread in these forums where changing MBTI scores have been discussed at length. Briefly, their official position is : types don't change.

Post-adulthood (that is, barring unformed personalities), types never change, except in case of extreme traumas and actual psychosis. So if your type seems to have changed, you've done this wrong. Mistaking situational responses for intrinsic responses is the commonest error.

As for mainstream psychology's non-acceptance of MBTI, I hadn't known. Good that we know this. But my personal opinion : psychology's something of a pseudo-science even today, so their not vetting this system, while not totally irrelevant, is best taken with a grain of salt.

I liked akratic's response, above. Seems to address all the points raised.

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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by jacob »

@cael - You completely misunderstand my point. I'm saying neither of the above. I'm also not saying that feelers have an inability to explain their opinions.

I'm saying that like most people I was previously and naively under the impression that everybody else operated within the same framework as myself. That is, I was trying to explain other people based on my understanding of myself. In other words, that my understanding of other people used to be one-dimensional because everybody else was projected onto the INTJ-framework but that MBTI changed that so that I now project people onto 16 different frameworks, more or less.

Now anyone who operates under the assumption that other people are like themselves will draw unfortunate conclusions whenever they encounter people whose behavior is inexplicable within their framework. For example, extraverts tend to presume that introverts are simply a shy kind of extravert. They do not allow for a different preference.

jacob
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by jacob »

@cael - No, I don't think you got it. I was describing how I used to see the other people _BEFORE_ learning about MBTI. Since I subsequently changed the way I understand other people, you have no cause to feel insulted. I was using before vs after to explain how MBTI has helped me. I think you misread what I originally said.

Furthermore, the idea that MBTI should serve to set up boundaries between the types and pigeonhole people into 16 exclusively types is a somewhat naive application of the basic ideas behind the test. I don't think very many people believe this. I certainly don't.

Lucas
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by Lucas »

Ego wrote:Yeah, I can see how it can be useful. But there is a downside to myers briggs that I don't like at all and was not mentioned in the article. Expectations. The moment I learn that I am an ENTJ, the subject-expectancy effect can strengthen and solidify those characteristics.
Indeed, that can happen if the understanding of each type is predominantly based on general descriptions—for instance, I've seen a number of INFPs fancying themselves as INFJs because "the article states that INFJs are sensitive and like to help people, and I'm sensitive and like to help people; Q.E.D!"

However, what Myers and Briggs did was to come up with an interface and a framework for Jung's theory of cognitive functions, which are the building blocks for each type, as it were, and if we focus on those, I think it's harder to be led astray by expectations.

Returning to the INFJ/INFP example, despite the similar acronyms, they don't have any common function, so they're actually very different types, and it's easier to discern the behavioural difference between extraverted and introverted feeling than measuring levels of sympathy as compared to empathy.

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Ego
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by Ego »

Pagliaccio wrote:
However, what Myers and Briggs did was to come up with an interface and a framework for Jung's theory of cognitive functions, which are the building blocks for each type, as it were, and if we focus on those, I think it's harder to be led astray by expectations.
That's just expectations of a different sort. My brain works this way vs that way so I am the kind of person with a brain that makes me a blah vs a bloop.

Like everything else in our bodies, our brains are constantly changing. They are part of a complex system operating in a complex world where a million small factors like a slight change in the microbes in our gut or how much sleep we got last night or whether a pretty girl smiled at us on the bus, can influence how it functions. Lock a woman in an office with grumpy coworkers for a year and her brain will get rewired. Bless a guy with four outgoing daughters and his brain will get rewired.

It is not fixed. It is constantly growing and changing. About half the people who take Myers Briggs score differently when taking a second test just five weeks later.

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C40
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by C40 »

Ego wrote: It is not fixed. It is constantly growing and changing. About half the people who take Myers Briggs score differently when taking a second test just five weeks later.
How much differently?

7Wannabe5
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Ego said: It is not fixed. It is constantly growing and changing. About half the people who take Myers Briggs score differently when taking a second test just five weeks later.
I agree that whatever MBTI measures is not set in stone, and it actually should show some change if/when you are striving towards personal growth, but it is also true that humans are born with some innate tendency towards temperament and/or personality characteristics. I think the tendency to score differently when retested in just 5 weeks can easily be explained with the fact that most people do not like their initial results, so they work the second test away from first results. Also, it may be rather difficult to direct this sort of change towards preferred personal growth. My choice of name for this forum (based on even simpler enneagram model) is reflective of my desire to attempt to direct my growth from XNtP towards INTJ, but what happened instead is that I went from XNtP towards ENxP. IOW, hanging out with a bunch of serious introverts who are willing to discuss the utility of allowing babies to starve in Africa may be tending towards causing me to place greater value on whatever idealistic people-person tendencies I possess ;)

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Ego
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by Ego »

C40 wrote:
Ego wrote: It is not fixed. It is constantly growing and changing. About half the people who take Myers Briggs score differently when taking a second test just five weeks later.
How much differently?
Good question. I don't know.

Miss Lonelyhearts
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by Miss Lonelyhearts »

It's definitely psuedo-science, in that I don't believe it's even represented as science. What it is is a useful framework for talking about personality and temperament, much as the terms "right-wing" and "left-wing" are useful, but not scientific, terms for discussing political choices. I consider the question of test-retest repeatability moot, because official MBTI dogma is that each person's final type is self-determined*. In practice, though, I think there is plenty of fudging of the kind 7w5 identified above, as well as pushback against being pigeonholed and therefore answering somewhat mischieviously. I recall a discussion here about the correct response to the query, "When you are in a room, do you tend to stand near the center or along the sides?" The question was trying to gauge socialability, but the respondent believed it was trying to measure his preference for direct or meandering paths through vacant rooms and did not understand how to answer. Also problematic is the already identified bias among testmakers towards NT and NF thinking. A test query like, "I tend to see the big picture more clearly than the details" is gauging respondents on the intuition-sensation spectrum, but our culture has so deeply fetishized "big picture thinking" and "being the smartest guy in the room" that almost no one is willing to admit a preference for detail over big picture, regardless of their personal like/dislike of theory and abstract thinking.

*Source: The Myers & Briggs Foundation, Ethical Use of the MBTI Instrument: Ethical Feedback. http://www.myersbriggs.org/myers-and-br ... edback.htm

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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by EMJ »

Uncovering The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs
"To obtain a hard copy of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®), the most popular personality test in the world, one must first spend $1,695 on a week-long certification program run by the Myers & Briggs Foundation of Gainesville, Florida.

This year alone, there have been close to 100 certification sessions in cities ranging from New York to Pasadena, Minneapolis, Portland, Houston, and the Foundation’s hometown of Gainesville, where participants get a $200 discount for making their way south to the belly of the beast. It is not unusual for sessions to sell out months in advance. People come from all over the world to get certified."

http://digg.com/2015/myers-briggs-secret-history

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Ego
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by Ego »

↑ Read that article ↑

I was initially hesitant to start this thread. The article made me glad I did.

BRUTE
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Re: Myers-Briggs Pseudoscience?

Post by BRUTE »

tl;dr?

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