The questionable Myers-Briggs test

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Nothing personal: The questionable Myers-Briggs test

The Myers-Briggs personality test is used by companies the world over but the evidence is that it's nowhere near as useful as its popularity suggests

My employer did a lot with MBTI. I found it spot-on and a big help in working with others. I still benefit from the better understanding of my own personality that it gave me.

Tests like this and their results are a guideline or approximation, not a doctrine result.

In psychology, there are many different theories of personality and its structure ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_psychology ), with one or more inventories designed to "measure" the hypothesised personality attributes. (There are several different versions of the MBTI, both official and unofficial.) These inventories usually consist of a bunch of questions or statements which researchers think are related to the theorised personality attributes. These researchers then collect and analyse data, which is used to refine the inventory. Data collection typically involves having a convenience sample (often undergraduate students) respond to the questions/statements in the inventory using some sort of structured response scale (e.g. the "strongly agree", "agree", "disagree", and "strongly disagree" check boxes). These responses are converted into numbers in a largely arbitrary fashion. Statistical analyses are conducted using these numbers (e.g. computing so called coefficients of reliability and validity), and the results are used to evaluate the inventory and the hypothesised personality attributes.

Serious methodological problems exist throughout this process (ranging from the untested assumption that the personality attributes are quantitatively structured, to issues about the phrasing and wording of the questions/statements, to erroneous use and interpretation of statistical techniques), but this process is standard practice in psychology and hence these problems are routinely ignored. In other words, there are serious problems with the MBTI, but that is true of most "measurement" instruments used in psychology and related fields.

If you look into the broader field of personality psychology, you will find some commonalities across the different theories and their associated research. As I recall, a lot of of them posit something along the lines of an introversion–extroversion dimension. Its exact form differs depending upon the particular theory. Many theories of personality also include some sort of emotional stability–instability (or neuroticism) dimension, but this is absent from both the Myers-Briggs personality theory (MBPT) and the Jungian personality theory (JPT) upon which it is based. So at best JPT and MBPT/ MBTI may be (crudely) tapping some aspects of human personality, and missing other aspects.

My MB type INTJ describes me very accurately.

ruveyn

It's as accurate as any other personality test, which is to say it's flawed in a lot of ways. The last result I got (ISTJ) seems to be pretty accurate, however.

I don't think it's accurate at all. And it is flawed for the reason all personality quizzes are flawed. It relies solely on subjective account.

It's a test, not a crystal ball. What people choose to do with that information says more about their own desperation for convenience. To be clear, a test is never going to fully define anyone. We are discovering ourselves every day... from birth until the day we die.

I always found this suspiciously similar to astrology. People often say the results apply to them: is this because they do, or because people are not good at self-description? They have done tests with zodiac signs by giving people a personality description that did not match their zodiac sign, yet they still thought it was accurate.

at least the Jungian system has some ideas behind it. unfortunately, he was also overly fond of quaternities as an intellectual icon. that sort of handicaps the empirical side of post-Jungian typology. there have to be exactly four functions, & two have to be opposites of the other two. and of course, a person has to be this way consistently (if not invariably), so that it can make sense to talk about psychological types as if they were phenotypes. not to mention what factors one's personal history can contribute. none of this is entailed by consideration of the functions themselves, as a scientific theory would require. in that sense it's an ideology.

i think used with flexibility & a fair bit of intuition, they can help make sense of the infinite complexity of human personality. the truth is, it does have regularities. and i believe it is not only possible to recognize some of these particular patterns in individuals, the patterns even appear in fictional characters. unfortunately the use of this mapping-system has been taken over almost exclusively by a bunch of literal-minded people who think that to pigeonhole is to understand, & a lot more who never even bother to read the books before they start flinging the jargon around. maybe one day a more sensitive mapping (i like to say: "256 personality-types") will be devised, & that too will be a service to humanity--just as long as it isn't built into an app that types everyone you point your camera-phone at!

WOW! A lot of uninformed comments! The MBTI tracks PREFERENCES on 4 domains: introvert-extrovert; sensing-intuition; thinking-feeling; judging-perceiving. Contrary to psychology, which is based in ideology, the MBTI does not label personalities as abnormal or defective. No one personality type is better/worse/good/evil etc. It simply clues you in to your preferences - a guide to choosing work, living conditions and relationships THAT SUIT YOU, not what someone has told you that you must do to be "normal."

And yes, there is quite an overlap between INTJ (my type) and Asperger's. The difference is that what are judged to be "symptoms" (problems) in psychology are "preferences" or normal human variations in the MBTI. Coincidentally, I just finished posting about the psych. / MBTI differences in my blog:

http://www.aspiemanifesto.blogspot.com