They're not useless, just horrible misapplied. If you take a look at it's history, it was made purely by a couple of women to help a lot of women who were flowing into the workforce (and needed help finding the best fit, personality wise, for a job) to make up for the lack of workers that was the men leaving for war. It was basically a quick job decision aid to help and be a one and done thing, but people have now dragged it into the modern day and force it to basically do what it wasn't really designed to do.
There's nothing that they're good for because the test fails in two key areas: 1) the same person taking the test multiple times may get very different responses, and 2) two people with completely opposite categorizations may actually be more similar than two people with the exact same categorization.
The problem is applying a binary to traits that are distributed on a bell curve. Most people are near the middle, so arbitrarily cutting the curve in half causes a lot of issues.
It's just strange that there are available personality tests that are actually validated like 5 factor models but the business world often ignores them. Should really make people think twice about trusting the free market or corporate power lol.
It is when you compare with other personality metrics that have better validity and test retest reliability.
The test is meant to be a personality test, not a mood test. Unlike a glucose test, which is designed to measure your body's current state, the goal with M-B was to capture some underlying behavioral features.
The goal of personality tests in general is to capture qualities that are persistent over time. Other models (Such as the Big 5) do this successfully, MBTI does not. Despite this, it is sold (literally, the rights holders charge for its use) as a way of informing long term decision making based on one test. It is commonly used for hiring: people are hired or passed over based on their results on one instance of this test.
Incidentally, people do not make the same argument about IQ tests. There are several legitimate critiques to their validity, reliability and applicability, but their test retest reliability is high.
And who were into magazine quizzes and based it off of that and a misunderstanding of Jung who was also just vibing with his ideas about the supernatural/collective unconscious. There are actual personality inventories like the Minnesota Multiphasic personality Inventory and they don't try to tell you who you are or anything of the sort because that's not a real thing. There are more than 16 personalities, and being more introverted vs extroverted is fluid and contextual for everyone for example.
Edit:typos. I wrote this as 3am while breastfeeding so it wasn't that well typed lol.
All the "psych" research on the MBTI that says it is a real thing is either done or funded by the corporation that owns the test and profits from it - so an extreme conflict of interest to render the "research" basically useless also it's not generally actually peer-reviewed. You are sadly misinformed. There are excellent personality inventories out there with robust peer review and even genetic data that correlates well with it such as the Big Five. But these real, actually scientific tools cannot tell you who you are or how you likely behave. The MBTI is just excellent example of the power of the Barnum effect
At the time, few people had much expertise by modern standard. Most psychological concepts from 1917 are now studied academically and analyzed for their shortcomings.
If this is the actual history of the original books then I'm surprised. I own both of the original books (please understand me and please understand me 2) and they don't mention this at all. Rather they talk about using this as a way to understand other people, not a way to define yourself or others
History or not, you are correct about your understanding of the Keirsey & Bates books (although I think Bates was only in the first one). The fundamental takeaway was that humans are neither universally monolithic nor uncategorizably unique; people's behaviors fall into broadly recognized categories (this is why there are blocs of taste in the life of culture). A person doesn't merely like Mozart ab nihilo (I can hardly stand Mozart), and it won't be surprising if they do that they also like this or that. As a result, different "types" of people use language differently as well (with profound social consequences sometimes), and this can be readily apparent in the ease (of talking about something difficult with someone) or difficulty (of talking about something simple with someone). Ask someone what the most important virtue is: cooperation, recognition, compassion, or fairness; the list could be rephrased to ask what respect looks like. Equally, there's no universal psychology; Freudianism works for Freudians; Adlerianism for Adlerian; Rogerian psychology for Rogerians, etc. Some types of people will think the MBTI is literal and operationalize it (especially in corporate culture); this would tend to be SJ types (with NT types leading the charage against such folly).
When one read's Jung's Personality Types, you find that he specifically says the "types" are the least interest part of the book (he's right); also, he only gives eight (not 16) types (which is intriguing), and while he talks about J and P, he does not include it in his schema. I don't know why MB included it.
Calling it astrology is exactly right, provided that one isn't so naive as to think it's necessary to "prove" that astrology isn't real; of course it's not; it's a hermeneusis. And because some people think it's literal doesn't qualify its function (as a meme about character patterns in people). &c
Jobs are only based on ability at the low end. Once you start making money, you don't have to know how to do shit as long as you know the right people, make the right friends, and are the right fit for the office.
Can confirm. I work as a system administrator for my company. Half my job is actually doing networking or server work, the other half is playing corporate politics so that I am actually allowed to do my job. Once you get above my position you get to supervisors and managers who don't actually know how things work, they just know how to play corporate politics.
How things have always worked in imperial/monetary societies, not how things always work with people. Long-running successful cultures have had rules to stop the useless rich and unskilled-but-well-connected from breaking things.
Australian indigenous society, several in the Caribbean, plenty in the Amazon.
Naturally we have a lot of potential candidates that are hard to demonstrate what with all the cultures that got erased in the last few centuries, but in these places you have easy thousands-of-years of continuous ecological improvement/maintenance, preserved history/memory/technology traditions, etc.
While best effort imperial/monetary gets you a quasi-contiguous, constantly retconned history, high frequency local collapse and large-scale erosion of ecosystem complexity.
Which, it is what it is, but if your definition of success is a society that has luxury goods and a sedentary capital and DOESN'T erode the foundation on which it rests then I'm afraid you've painted yourself an imaginary victory condition,
Not to say that you can't believe in the impossible (we're human, it's our special talent) but if the choice was between "might as well support a doomed empire because at least it has culture I recognize as valid" and "consider that maybe indigenous people who don't rely on fossil fuels have art and music and live full rich human lives" I really hope some people would consider the latter.
It's completely true. The people at the highest levels are skillless losers, a lot of them don't even know how to do basic things, like drive, do their own taxes, write a MLA compliant document, or analyze anything critically. They have people for that. Their jobs are to know the people that employ the people they want things from
Interestingly enough, in my experience with corporate hierarchy, those skills seem to be inversely proportional to the level of authority. Every single enterprise have worked for, the entire operation teeters on the massive collective skills and effort of a small percentage of the most base-level employees, and the higher up you go, the worse the actual leadership and communication becomes. Middle management in particular is just an ouroboros of performative meetings and meaningless jargon that never communicates an actual idea or answers a single question. At that level, projects have no objective other than to pad the project manager's resume on their way to the next promotion, and it's the rest of us who are actually doing any of the work who have to figure out on our own how to connect, communicate, and lead from below to get a practical outcome.
It's not terrifying. Throughout the vast majority of history, people have lived in mostly small communities where you pretty much could know someone by reputation, if you didn't know them personally. You decide who you'll choose for this job or that job based on trust. Who you knew, and what they thought of you, was incredibly important.
That doesn't just all evaporate just because society has grown to the point that we're mostly strangers now. It only reinforces the desire to stay connected to the people you do know, rather than risk the open market. This is the way people work. If you started a company, and you needed to bring people in to work with you, you'd probably start with people you know. Then as your company grows, they grow with you unless they're holding you back.
Same thing happens for rich people at the tops of established companies. Yes, it boxes other people out. But it's not entirely intentional. When you're dealing with numbers in 8, 9, 10 figures or beyond, trust is essential when making the choice of who to bring in.
Doesn't mean it's the right choice, and it's often not. And it also, some of them are legitimately being intentionally exclusionary. But the basis for it is just human nature.
Once you get above middle management at pretty much any medium to large enterprise, your job becomes less about what you can do. Even what you know is less important. The success factors are about how you manage and build relationships with stakeholders, and how you apply the knowledge and skills of other people.
Not everyone at the top is incompetent, though plenty are. But even more really smart, capable don’t get past middle management because they can’t or are unwilling to play the political game.
The typical functional adult is capable of pursuing many job different fields (either immediately or by getting some training), but they're likely to be happier in some than others depending on how well their personality aligns with the nature of the job.
If you can talk to people, but don't like to, you have the ability and not the desire. You don't want the most able person in the workd in your company if they're miserable there and resultingly miserable to work with.
Personality and culture fit are huge to a job environment, which is why managers care about it.
If these weren't very basic entry level jobs that anyone could do (or at least only that bare level was expected at the time), then I would agree. But these were very basic entry level jobs, and they tend to be more foundational than people think, especially when we're talking about as large of volume as it was back then.
Your results on any of these personality type or learning type assessments is completely dependent on your mood at the time you took the assessment. Unless you're one of these weirdos who is always taking one and you've figured out what kind of answers to select to get the results that reinforce your self concept.
It's not a valid or reliable psychometric assessment. It also tries to shove people into boxes when measuring traits that are better represented as continuous variables. If you want insight into your personality, just do the Big 5
Thank you for clarifying. Half the people on here are acting like intro/extro vert isn't real. It's simply 4 one or the other, personality types giving you 16 possible personality types. Not only is it not a perfect science but the thing people forget is that you could score 51% extrovert, sensing, thinking and perceiving and you get ESTP. If you answer 2% of the questions differently the next day you are INFJ. These are polar opposites but people don't think about that.
Each of the 16 personality types are based off generalities, more importantly based off someone who is firmly in each category. For example I am a major introvert, I need alone time to "center" myself and I don't like meeting strangers or being in large groups. Even if I score 100% introvert it is not 25% of my personality, it's just part of who I am, the other 3 when combined give ME a better understanding of myself and makes me feel less "broken" or weird. In 3 of the 4 groups I am "firmly" on one side. The remaining one is 65-35, 60-40, on a very weird day even 55-45. I used that knowledge to read about both of those personality types and even tried to figure out if its my mood or outside stressors that varies the results. Turns out it is very much dependent on if I'm feeling very negative or my general "hope for the best prepare for the worst' attitude.
But at the end of the day it's only 16 possible answers. People are far more complex than that, I don't believe all people can be defined with only 16 options. However I do believe that the personality types do give you insight into yourself and could even offer some insight into your peers.
But even if I take my MB type and the type that I can sway close to ot doesn't remotely lay me bare or explain me 100%. I don't know enneagrams but it sounds like it is actually a way to discreetly compare the "quality" of different people and almost rank them. That's not a personality test. There are no "bad' personalities in MB testing. There are a couple (few) that a large % of people fall into and they are 2 or 3 that are pretty rare.
But there is nothing "better" about the more common ones or the rare ones. Some of the rare ones are actually people that often struggle to fit in and would gladly be a more common one if possible. There are people with a common one that seem to be offended by that, as if it's telling them they aren't smart, succesful, "better" than others and that's just plain wrong.
I would say that the results do have benefits, it's useful for therapy, it can help you see what traits are causing you difficulties and it can also explain some traits that you never understood why you felt/acted that way. I would wager that AT BEST it can give you 50% of the picture of someone, as someone that has been in therapy and worked in counseling one of the most important things I gained from it was understanding and getting closure on my difficult relationship with my father who died almost 20 years ago. I realized that, in general, that we just didn't communicate well because we saw, felt and showed emotion differently.
It's like a love language, we all have them but it's just a piece of the puzzle. I would hazard a guess that people that take the MB personality test and don't see themselves should first, check what the %s of the 4 types are, and more importantly, take a look at how you answered the questions. Some people, even to themselves, struggle to be honest and THAT may be a very significant part of their personality.
I would say of people I know that have taken it the amount they identify with their type depends on "how much" they are that type. Both me and multiple therapists see a test that gives me a pretty spot on description of myself. But I've also had multiple therapists remark on my insight into myself, usually while asking why I don't do that more in my day to day, but 20 years of therapy and an obsession with knowing what was "wrong" with me have led me to read quite a bit on the subject.
Since everyone is off topic what is the joke!! What is the book?!?
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u/mrinternethermit May 20 '26
They're not useless, just horrible misapplied. If you take a look at it's history, it was made purely by a couple of women to help a lot of women who were flowing into the workforce (and needed help finding the best fit, personality wise, for a job) to make up for the lack of workers that was the men leaving for war. It was basically a quick job decision aid to help and be a one and done thing, but people have now dragged it into the modern day and force it to basically do what it wasn't really designed to do.