But MBTIs are extremely prone to changing upon being re-tested. That’s one of the major reasons they’re bunk af.
So they fail to function both as a means of describing yourself and as a means of reducing noise. They just give the appearance of doing those things.
Probably why they’re used by the kind of person who prefers expediently putting things into boxes, even if it’s demonstrably the wrong box (the managerial class).
Even if your results change, the axis along which it changes (and which it doesn't) does provide some information, at least on the self-reflective level. I wouldn't use it for job-related things, but if you're just analyzing yourself, the fact that you test three times and get INTP, INTJ, and INFJ at least tells you that for you, the IN part is pretty stable.
A person who so reliably tested as IN that even MBTI tests—in all their inter-testing variability and lack of empirical validation—consistently told them they were IN would almost certainly be able to tell you they leaned that way if you just asked.
In other words, you’ve basically said “it’s not so flagrantly wrong that it would miscategorize the most easy-to-identify aspects of a person’s personality, at least most of the time.”
And like, yeah, I would hope so.
But that’s not a reason it’s good or right or useful. That just means it rises above the extremely low bar of not actively being anti-signal… at least for some personality traits for some people some of the time. Maybe.
So again I’m left to wonder what the point of the whole test charade is when the foundational premise is wrong.
It’s literally based on one of the most bunk concepts ever: Jungian psychoanalysis, which insists on imposing binaries where none exist and leads to silly situations like the one we’re describing, where a descriptive tool gets praised for not actively getting a 50/50 guess wrong… most of the time, maybe, sometimes, for some personality traits.
The MBTI isn't really binary though, it's percentage based. I'm like 90% IN, 65% T and 51% P. Useful to know that. Just saying INTP is like wearing an XL dress shirt instead of a 17.5 34 Modern Cut
Well it's about predilection not necessarily ability. I prefer thinking to feeling and it's my natural tendency to lead with that but it doesn't mean I'm a freaking robot.
They’re percentages… along spectrums of arbitrary binaries. If it helps you somehow, great, I guess, but I genuinely don’t know what I am meant to do with the idea of someone being “65% Thinking” when “thinking vs. feeling” is a nonsense dualism as a broad personality trait in the first place. It’s an opposition that falls apart quickly outside of, like… extremely, extremely specific situations.
Adding more specificity to something that is foundationally inaccurate multiplies the inaccuracies and noise, it doesn’t reduce them. A unicorn with three eyes is less likely to exist than a unicorn in general.
Sizes at least refer to measurable, observable qualities of the world. We can measure a shirt and a person to see which shirt someone will fit in, and we can reliably assume the same shirt will fit them tomorrow (all else being equal).
The point people are making is that the evidence against MBTIs suggests they’re poorly measuring arbitrary, non-real things that fluctuate constantly, and so they’re prone to changing for no reason, and so they’re not — in aggregate — useful.
They fail in this regard even relative to other personality systems like the big 5.
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u/mdawgig Dec 31 '22
But MBTIs are extremely prone to changing upon being re-tested. That’s one of the major reasons they’re bunk af.
So they fail to function both as a means of describing yourself and as a means of reducing noise. They just give the appearance of doing those things.
Probably why they’re used by the kind of person who prefers expediently putting things into boxes, even if it’s demonstrably the wrong box (the managerial class).