Is Myers-Brigg Sound

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INTJ

That seems to fit me pretty well. It doesn't change for me. The problem might be that each trait really rests on a continuum and not a discrete position. The theory and test assumes that there are exactly 16 personalities. It might be more accurate to consider these as four dimensions instead.
I know there are many different personality theories. I think it helps a lot so people can understand where other people are coming from. I learned a lot about myself and others by studying personality traits.
A good example might be that I may or may not like or agree with another INTJ but I will think similar to one. It is very useful to know all of this.

No, it doesn't describe things well at all. The best way I have to describe it, is if you have reality on one hand, and the MBTI on the other hand, any little piece of the MBTI will be at some kind of angle to reality where it occasionally dips into it, mostly is outside of it, and is totally random as to whether it's actually true. I absolutely detest it.

This is interesting. How can people have different personality types throughout their life. I just cannot picture this.
I think the problems with changing personality types can be attributed to the tests themselves.
I understand debating the merits of MBTI, but I am puzzled why some would disagree with the concept of personality testing itself.

The biggest flaw (in my opinion) of the Myers-Briggs test is that it can only measure how a person PERCEIVES themselves to be, not necessarily how they actually are.

Also, a person's "personality" often has to adapt to external circumstances. For example, I "type" as an INTP, but, after six years of being in the military, I've developed an ISTJ alter-ego. Introverts are often forced to be more extroverted, perceivers are forced to act more like judgers, intuitives typically have to develope a stronger sensing side...ect. Enviornment can skew results as to how a person "really" is.

Is a litmus paper test flawed because the thing I test has a ph of 8 today and 6 tomorrow?

Is it flawed because it doesn't test for electrical activity?

We know about acid levels, ph, ect. and what can cause them to rise and fall in various substances. It's observable.

Personality tests are guesswork based on self-perception. However, as long as you understand that Myers-Briggs is, at best, a ballpark figure that can vary over time, you're good. However, when employers start using it to hire/fire employees, I get the willies.



Not if it's not supposed to test for electrical activity.

I don't know how flexible personality really is. You can operate as an ISTJ for example, but that doesn't change your basic preferences. At 'heart' you are still INTP, right?

I mean, I'm an I, but sometimes I will act Eish.

I imagine there are personality tests that ask the people around you to answer for you, or that measure behaviour, rather than self perception. But they are more complex, require more resources to run, and that makes the MBTI attractive as a ballpark indicator. I have always personally found it rather accurate, and I always test as an INTP.

What I'm interested in now is the question of lying to or gaming a personality test, what would one get out of it, apart from perhaps as an evaluation for work or something.

If a job wanted me to be an ESFJ then I wouldn't want to subject myself to that job in the first place, it would be doing me a big favour to be screened out before I and my employers learn that I'm totally unsuitable.



I think my point there was more directed at earlier conversations, but linked to the current one. The MBTI tests what it tests, and doesn't test what it doesn't. And that's okay.

Sorry this is all so rambly and disjointed.

Any test that is self reported is very likely to have reliability problems; it's very difficult to separate forthright from deceitful answers.

I think they're a farse. I've taken them, and talked with others who have, and I think they're causing a lot of people to be rejected for employment, and conversely causing incompatible-with-job people to get hired. I wonder how many people whose M-B score shows they're a great candidate for a pre-school teacher, are actually harboring mass murderer personalities?

Charles

I assume I'm still an INTP "at heart", but there is a school of thought that subscribes to the notion that you are what you do, meaning how you act is who you "really" are and there is no personality "at heart."

But that is more of a philosophy discussion, and I suck at those.



I'm not talking about conscious "lying" so much as I am people simply not having accurate perceptions of themselves. INTPs tend to be very introspective, but most people, I've learned, are not. A person who is a "feeler" may think they are a lot more logical than they actually are, so they lean towards "thinking" answers; therefore, they pop as a "thinker." Also, there can be any number of factors affecting a person's choice. Someone may have been raised to believe that academic types are all useless eggheads, so they select "sensing" answers when, in fact, they are "intuitive."



Yes and no. Personally, I've come to distrust employer's notions of who they think is "suited" for what job. They ALL seem to want ESFJs for EVERY position. Not to mention, a "different" personality in a job not traditionally suited to that personality might be able to make unique contributions. I know I would have been pissed if the military refused to accept me based on nothing more than INTPs aren't "military types." Additionally, I've developed an interest in emergency medicine, which is also not an INTP job; should I not at least be able to TRY?



I'm currently high on caffeine. No worries.

This will be long but there's no easy way to explain the problem without detailed examples.


I don't think it even tests what it claims to test, though. 

If you look at each letter, for instance, it doesn't represent a real trait generally. It represents a collection of traits that are said to go together with each other even though in reality there's no proof whatsoever that they do. 

For instance, where's the connection between (as I have often seen written about for F) making decisions based on values, making decisions based on gut feelings, and desiring harmony among people (and being uncomfortable with disharmony or in some cases even disagreement)?  

There is no strong connection between these traits. But you would be shocked the number of people who don't question this at all. If the MBTI calls all of those things and more one concept, there are many people who simply believe it is. And from there, it's only a short step to convincing them that "F" is the polar opposite of cold, methodical, (pseudo-)objective reasoning "T". 

Then there's S and N. Where you're supposed to believe in a whole other pile of unrelated things. 

S, you see, is supposed to be about the following things which are all supposedly connected:

Concrete, sensory reality. Seeing things in details rather than the big picture. Seeing things in terms of facts. Being oriented to the present rather than the future. Practicality. 

N is supposed to be its opposite and involves the following:  Ideas. Patterns. Concepts. Living in your head. Being oriented to the future.  Seeing what could be instead of what is. Seeing the big picture rather than the details. Abstraction. 

And of course those two loose collections of traits are supposed to be polar opposites. 

Here's what irritates me a lot:  Despite knowing they're not real, I have some clue what they're trying to get at. And to me the two things they're getting at are both more similar than different, and both of them are equally distant from how my mind works. 

See, what they call "sensing" is still quite abstract. The people they are talking about work in abstractions all the time. What they call "facts" are actually not that close to the five senses. They're the five senses heavily filtered through a ton of abstraction. It's different (though certainly not opposite) than the kind of abstraction they describe in terms of intuition, where they're talking about a different level of abstraction. But it's still abstraction. 

Meanwhile, I truly experience the world in a way that has been called sensing, more accurately than the MBTI term. 

I have far less abstraction-filtering on my sensory data than an MBTI-sensing person does. I am flooded with that data to the point where even the abstraction necessary for "table", "cat", and other supposedly "concrete facts" is a difficult stretch for me. If I look around me visually, I see colors and shapes (not the concept "purple" though, just raw purpleness). I don't see the identities of objects or even the separateness of objects because that too would be an abstraction. All of my senses work this way and I have to strain to get conventional meaning out of them when I can get it at all. 

But then, I also see patterns. Not the abstract, mathematics-like patterns hinted at with the iNtuitive category. But ultra-concrete patterns of which sensation goes with each other sensation. Having lived thirty years in a primarily sensing realm (climbing out for some things when possible but never being able to stay long in abstractionland), I am quite adept at dealing in these concrete-patterns to the point where it seems that I have an intensely well-developed... intuition. Another word spoiled by the MBTI into meaning something other than it means. I understand things best through a sort of sensory resonance developed this way. 

Forest vs. trees doesn't even apply in this realm. Those are both ways of dealing with ideas. 

Anyway, my ultra-concrete sensing and equally ultra-concrete intuition and capacity for resonance are one and the same. They are not opposites the way those two words are in MBTI-land. You can't choose one "tendency" over the other because each one is part of the other. It's a very difficult thing to explain to idea-thinkers, whether those idea-thinkers think in supposedly concrete ideas or supposedly abstract ideas. Because both of those are hopelessly abstract compared to what I am discussing. 

It's by the way this non-idea-based way of relating to the world that makes many of the flaws of the MBTI incredibly clear to me. Each piece of the MBTI is an abstract idea, and people who deal in abstractions (whether they call themselves N or S) tend to accept abstractions. But they're a really annoying form of abstraction. The best abstractions help people understand reality. The worst abstractions obscure reality. The MBTI terms are the second kind. 

At any rate, I can't properly call myself N or S. My way of dealing with the world is radically different from either. And that's besides the fact that both N and S confuse several different things that don't have to truly go together. Like all MBTI ideas. 

One of the best ways I have found to show how ill-suited the MBTI is to describing a real person is to simply go down the longest descriptions (even short ones will do, but the most detailed and in-depth show it better) of the different letters, and highlight the parts that unambiguously are accurate of me. I know myself pretty well so this isn't very hard to do. 

What I usually find, is that it's only a few sentences here and there that actually apply to me. Scattered seemingly randomly throughout the descriptions. There may be more weight toward one side than another. But what's the most obvious is not that I am, say, more S than N, when I do this. It's that, of all the qualities that make up my strongest of the two letters, I almost always have only chosen a small minority. If these things had meaning then I would expect that if I had highlighted one side more than the other, then I would fit a majority of the ideas on that side. But usually I don't. And when I do it seems more like chance than that these traits must go together.

Nor is it that I must be in between these two ideas. Nope. Not in between, but just not truly fitting any of them. Once I use this to choose a letter, I am simply choosing which one I am least unlike, rather than more like.  I guess I'm not much susceptible to that thing where if most people see a vague description of common personality traits, then they will feel it agrees with them in total just because bits of it do.

Anyway, generally if I do this painstaking process of highlighting stuff I end up somewhere near ISFP. I do it that way because it's easier than answering a boatload of vague meaningless questions that presume the reality of their answers. If I try to take the awful tests, and this includes official Myers Briggs, I can end up with nearly anything introverted, with nearly any degree of strength, because most of the questions fall into the realm of "This doesn't even apply to my life and yet I am being forced to make a choice."

As for I and E, those are also a little weird. They purport to measure three things that don't have to be related at all -- whether your attention to the world is internal or external, whether you recharge best by aloneness or socializing (or internally vs externally), and whether you prefer aloneness or socializing. Oh, they'll claim not to measure the last, and yet the tests and descriptions clearly describe all three, not just the first two.  It should be obvious that while the three can be related, they don't have to be. The MBTI and similar things presume they are related though. 

So basically:

1. The different types presume that clusters of traits are related, that don't have to be. 

2. The different types presume things are polar opposites, that don't have to be. 

3. The different types presume that everyone fits into a continuum between one type and another, and many people (perhaps most people if looked at accurately without filtering through ideas) are off on another plane entirely. 

And that's besides the common assumptions that these traits are fixed, and that if you don't fit the types then you must not know yourself well enough to get anything useful out of them, "it only gives you what you put into it", etc. 

And all that is just a small part of why these tests irritate the crap out of me. Because they mislead a lot of people.

Oh and by the way when employers use these tests, it's not because the job is only suited to someone who scores a certain way.

Last edited by alone on 21 Feb 2011, 7:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

I am an INFP. I identify with the descriptions I have read of my type. Anyway they are positive and affirming, as they are for all MBTI types, which is why I like them. I agree to a large extent with the explanation by anbuend of the problems relating to the MBTI, but believe there is a good deal of value in it.

The MBTI is based on empirical research and I believe has a scientific foundation. It has not been plucked out of thin air.

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The Myers Briggs is IMHO at least not well done and repeating a test can land you in the opposite category. For more info see here: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4221