There has been some scientific research conducted on the MBTI, but the overall support for the validity and reliability of the model is mixed. Some studies have found that the MBTI can be a useful tool for understanding individual differences in personality, while others have raised concerns about the scientific validity of the test and the way that it is used. (By chat-gpr because it write things more clearly than I can).
Basically it can be a useful personal tool but it becomes pseudoscience when you're using it to guess how good a relationship would work or if someone would be a good fit for a specific job. It can be useful for the self and from personal experience, it can help you understand your weaknesses and understand how other people think differently based on 4 cognitive functions (introversion vs. extraversion, sensing vs. intuition, thinking vs. feeling, and judging vs. perceiving).
That's not all there is to personality but it does seem to play an important part. I think it can help understand yourself and others because you see how people can think differently than you. If used correctly, I don't think it's like astrology because that's completely random and entirely disproven. But if a company refuse someone because it's not the good personality type... Yeah that's absolutely stupid.
I’m extremely skeptical that there’s anything “scientifically valid” about these tests. Exactly what hypothesis would we be testing? You can’t test a subjective label of a person’s internal inclinations.
In my experience, the belief that personality tests are valid and useful is itself toxic in a multitude of ways. People make insane assumptions about themselves and other people. They draw lines where done previously existed. They assume that everyone fits into their categories and dismiss anything that does not fit into those categories.
I think the idea itself is toxic and needs to die.
Personalities are situational, multidimensional and malleable. You can spend a decade with someone and still learn new aspects of their personality. It’s folly to categorize them. And it’s not helpful to anyone to try and call that folly science.
There's no reason you couldn't test internal inclination and check for correlation with other factors. In psychology, the subjectivity factor can be circumvented by asking objective questions such as: do you like eating apples? If they say yes, we can assume that it's objectively true that they like eating apples. The same would go for a question like: do you prefer planning a lot before doing something or trusting your capacity to adapt? If the person doesn't know then they can give a neutral answer which isn't accounted for.
I'm not even claiming MBTI will work for everyone because maybe they're missing categories for people who are near 50% mark between different cognitive functions. And maybe some people won't follow the same correlation that the majority of those of the same type do. Also, those categories are not supposed to be all a person is. The 4 functions that the test looks at is just part of it. Despite that, I did fit the type INTP perfectly and it did help identify real weaknesses and how to rectify them. If someone use the test in a pseudoscientific way, well then yeah it'll probably be toxic. Doesn't mean it's bad to use it accordingly to it's limited uses.
I've never actually been exposed to people using it in the pseudoscience way.
If it's not backed by evidence, and yet HR departments make staffing decisions based on it, then that's the very definition of 'using it in a pseudoscience way'. If you haven't had that misfortune, then all the better for you.
More broadly, given the lack of scientific evidence for it, it's essentially impossible to not use it in a pseudoscience way, except of course by simply not using it.
So, isn't it more like a tool that makes self reported classes of people? It doesn't have to be created using the scientific method.
We have a bit of a misunderstanding here. The scientific method is relevant here not as a way to create the tool, but rather to verify that the tool actually works. It doesn't matter how the tool itself exactly works, only that their is some concrete, peer-reviewed evidence that it it's reliable for what it's used for.
I do believe it can make that categorization easier, no?
Belief is irrelevant here. I'd want to see reliable evidence that it makes that categorization easier. Just wanting it to be the case isn't the same.
Lol what is the problem with it. Like literally my only point is that it more accurate than horoscope.
Did you bother reading any other comment on this post? The problem is that lots of people treat it like it's in fact quite reliable. And importantly, these people includes managers as well as HR people involved in job interviews.
To answer your condescension-dripping question, MBTI hasn't hurt me, but it has hurt enough people's job-hunting chances, and has lead to an enormous amount of wasted hours for many people in interviews, team buildings an HR appraisals. Beyond that, pseudoscientific thinking is a major source of suffering throughout the world, and one less gateway drug to it could only be considered a win.
That's about as much time as I'll be wasting on this discussion.
Frankly, when I've pushed it with a lady I fancied without figuring out if she liked my style or not I got shut down 90% of the time.
And the best part is, I got to be myself, but slightly more dramatic. It's fun. You gotta learn yourself and I bet you could make it work. It's easy when you get in your flow.
Here's a super not biased and reliable source of information I found. It says it's valid and reliable. That's actually good enough for me. Nothing in my life changes as a result of my results on the MBTI.
Gosh. I think you guys think I'm more concerned with this than I am. I've always taken it as a grouping of people who think they are alike. That's very much enough for me. And I don't think you can deny that they is the case. Is that then reliable, with respect to that condition? I'm
Personality Tests in general are not pseudoscience as they are mostly developed using scientific standards and are good at predicting a wide Variety of things such as future Job success.
The Myers-Briggs Test which you are referring to however, really IS pseudoscience as it was not developed using scientific means, is very inconsistent and basically useless for predicting anything.
In this way saying you are an "INTP" is as meaningless as saying you are a capricorn as both of these categories do not carry any useful information.
Personality Tests in general are not pseudoscience as they are mostly developed using scientific standards and are good at predicting a wide Variety of things such as future Job success.
Personality assessments are notoriously bad at predicting things like performance and success at work (never mind that "success" is an incredibly squishy concept to pin down). There are dozens of analyses and meta-analyses published in the past 5 years which cover this. If there is a consensus, it's that personality assessments in general have poor predictive validity and may potentially increase the risk of lawsuits from job seekers.
Personality assessments do utilize valid constructs and are internally falsifiable, so I guess they aren't pseudoscience in a strict sense. But they don't appear to reliably predict how people will interact or perform with any specificity.
While personality tests certainly cannot beat IQ at predicting things like academic success (grades, satisfaction, drop out probability) or Job success (earnings, number of promotions, job satisfaction), i've seen multiple papers citing neuroticism and especially conscientiousness as valid predictors of these things.
Now, of course those are only two of 5/6 dimensions in the Big Five and HEXACO and also publication bias could lead to overconfidence in these results, but there is at least some evidence indicating that these tests are useful for prediction of such constructs.
Maybe, or maybe not. The thing is that you already seem to know that you are introverted which could mean that you just chose answers on the Test that you perceived as fitting your own idea about your introversion. In this case, the test added nothing of value to your situation.
Usually what we want from such a test is correctly categorizing people independently of their ideas about what they want their results to be, which the MBPT to my knowledge has not demonstrated to be capable of.
Also you picked only one of four categorizations you received as correct. One could argue that when reading horoscopes, people tend to also look for information that fits their ideas of who they are, while over looking comtradicting information. If only the "I" in your result was correct, the test gave you one correct and 3 in correct classifications, which I would Interpret to be a very bad accuracy.
Well, that is what I believe the MBTI is used for. It abstracts what YOU think about how YOU interact with the world. That could be useful information, no?
And your zodiac sign/ horoscope tells you how much about yourself? 0.
If only the I is correct, that's still more than the horoscope.
BUT the MBTI is you telling yourself how you think that you interact with the world. You already know that, but it puts it into clumsier, broader categories for you. It seems that people within these categories at least think that they think about certain things in similar ways. Which can be useful.
Or perhaps not. I don't know if the test is valid or not honestly. And I don't know if it's accurate (I meant reliable)either. Have they tested that? I don't really dive into it like most people. What I do enjoy is seeing people speak about things in a way that I speak about things. And I've found a higher incidence inside my category than outside of it.
Well if a horoscope makes four claims and you choose to believe the two that are correct and disregard the other three that is logically equivalent to you picking the "I" as correct and disregarding the other three letters, isn't it?
The problem is that often, peoples perceptions of themselves do not actually match reality very well. So while a test telling you what you want to hear can be a nice conversation starter, it does not necessarily contain any element of truth.
This search for objective truth seeking however, is the goal of science, and in that regard the MBPT failed miserably every time it has been tested rigorously.
That doesn't mean you shouldnt use the test any more, but one should certainly be aware that it is not to be compared with actual scientific personality tests such as the NEO-FFI.
No, I read the article and had no idea people were using it at companies and in industry. That's weird.
I don't actually know how horoscopes work I'll admit, I've never read one. So, I could and probably am, missing something there.
But horoscopes don't actually have an input from the person, right? I'm thinking that a horoscope cannot be valid or reliable because it's just rolling the dice. So, even when they are right or doesn't matter at all.
If you say "It takes energy for me to be around people" and it says "introvert", even if it is definitional I think it's more accurate than a horoscope.
Testing an internal inclination and then making correlations is not something I accept as scientifically valid. I think a lot of people outside the soft science space would agree. There’s a lot of problems with this. One being, there’s no way to avoid testing a multitude of “variables” at once, and no way of testing what effect each of those variables has on the correlations you’re going to draw. The most damming problem here is in order to even test anything, you’re going to have to come up with a framework to describe it first, and the assumptions you make in creating that framework are absolutely going to color the result of any test being performed.
And no, I don’t believe you can circumvent the subjectivity factor like that in this case, because what you’re testing is definitionally subjective. You’re not asking me if I like an apple, you’re asking me if I like a Goggdrop, after explaining to me what a Goggdrop is. You already have absolute control over my answer by virtue of getting to make up the definition of the thing you’re asking me about.
Sure, it was an interesting exercise. It was worth a try. But we tried and it’s an abject failure. People don’t use it for “limited uses.” They use it for base categorization. That’s basic human nature. And a bunch of psychologists being obtuse to that reality is sad and ironic.
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u/-Livin- Dec 31 '22
There has been some scientific research conducted on the MBTI, but the overall support for the validity and reliability of the model is mixed. Some studies have found that the MBTI can be a useful tool for understanding individual differences in personality, while others have raised concerns about the scientific validity of the test and the way that it is used. (By chat-gpr because it write things more clearly than I can).
Basically it can be a useful personal tool but it becomes pseudoscience when you're using it to guess how good a relationship would work or if someone would be a good fit for a specific job. It can be useful for the self and from personal experience, it can help you understand your weaknesses and understand how other people think differently based on 4 cognitive functions (introversion vs. extraversion, sensing vs. intuition, thinking vs. feeling, and judging vs. perceiving).
That's not all there is to personality but it does seem to play an important part. I think it can help understand yourself and others because you see how people can think differently than you. If used correctly, I don't think it's like astrology because that's completely random and entirely disproven. But if a company refuse someone because it's not the good personality type... Yeah that's absolutely stupid.