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As an individual (INFJ) thoroughly interested in Myers-Briggs, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who t

As an individual (INFJ) thoroughly interested in Myers-Briggs, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who tout Myers-Briggs as a comprehensive personality test fail to understand what the Myers-Briggs attempts to identify. While the "value-add" is more subjective, I'm going to go ahead and say it's not as useless as this article claims. While I don't think anyone (especially employers) should rely heavily on Myers-Briggs, I think it can provide a decent framework (or starting point) outlining basic facets of an individual's personality based on their own perspective. Though I often distrust individual claims about belonging a certain type, given my interest in understanding myself and facets of my own personality, I enjoy discussing why a person may claim to be a part of a certain type. For me, Myers-Briggs tends to be little more than a starting point for discussing the finer parts of my own personality, values, and perspectives. I find that those who are equally interested in Myers-Briggs share similar values in self-understanding, thus a starting point for some interesting discussion.

jfoutz 10y ago
That is a completely reasonable approach. Like astrology or tarot cards. Getting people thinking about big questions in a non threatening way can spark interesting conversations. There are a lot of cultural norms that prevent people from talking about themselves in that kind of way. A little hocus pocus can help cut through that. In that same spirit alcohol is a pretty great social lubricant. A little bit of booze lowers people's inhibitions enough to have fun conversations.
- triplesec 10y ago
  When you say 'reasonable', you mean something orthogonal: rather it's 'rhetorically useful', or 'a social hack '. This does not make it scientific, nor based in reason, and more dangerous because it masquerades as reason much more truthily than tarot and other pretence magic
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
    > more truthily than tarot and other pretence magic Depending on where you are from I suppose. Edit: I believe "pretense" was the incantation you were after.
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    I don't mean it's rational, i mean good enough, at least it's in the same ballpark of getting someone drunk. It's not scientific, it's totally based in reason. It's reasonable to deny global warming because winters are getting colder than ever. It's not reasonable to deny climate change because winters are getting colder than ever. There's nothing wrong with someone drawing a conclusion from their personal experience, that's going to be full of emotion, opinion and hopefully some logic. I get your concern, but the same folks who make hiring decisions based on Myers Briggs will tell you angels were watching over them when they narrowly avoided a car crash. Or their relative visited them a month after they passed away. it's mostly benign. When it's not benign, they're unreasonable. Only then is it possibly worth the effort to persuade them to be a bit more rational. But, yes. I mean 'rhetorically useful' or 'a social hack'
- raverbashing 10y ago
  No Because those mentioned deal with random events, where X and Y are uncorrelated (being X a date of birth or card drawn from Tarot and Y is some personality characteristic) MB do ask you questions from which you can predict - to some degree - some outcomes (how do you think a strong Extrovert changes from a strong Introvert)? Just don't do something stupid like "this job requires a INTJ only" or think that the distribution is bimodal or that their behaviour will follow a strict pattern. (It's not like the rest of "behavioral science" can make repeatable predictions and reproduce papers compared to other scientific branches)
  - xkcd-sucks 10y ago
    Astrology is correlated to seasonal climate change etc. which can plausibly affect life outcomes, though
    - arde 10y ago
      Considering the planet has two hemispheres, no, it's not correlated.
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    That's such a J thing to say.
  - eastbayjake 10y ago
    I don't think about M-B or Tarot or astrology as predictive, they are mindfulness prods: interesting frameworks to break up and reframe the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are. A horoscope that tells me "this week will present challenges at work about money" is likely to prod me into mindfulness about work and money than I would be otherwise. Similarly, my ESTJ M-B type is more likely to make me mindful about where I get my energy and the ways in which rigorously analytical thinking may not be the way lots of other humans approach decisions.
- Simon321 10y ago
  It's much more than 'astrology or tarot cards'. MBTI correlates with the big five personality traits. Which are backed up scientifically.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    It correlates poorly with any of the competing empirically-supportable models; e.g., as I recall, the I-E axis seems to be a blend of the extraversion and neuroticism axes shared by the EPQ (3 factor) and Big Five (5 factor) models. Better to use one of the scientific models directly than MBTI.
    - arde 10y ago
      Indeed. But that doesn't mean MBTI is really meaningless, only that there are better models.
Bartweiss 10y ago
My primary concern with even cursory usage of Myers-Briggs is that retest consistency isn't as high as I'd like. Plenty of people retest very solidly, of course, but there's a large-percentage chunk of the population that walks or more boundaries and doesn't put up consistent tests. That makes it hard to say anything about the results, at least in simple "my type" terms. A nuanced discussion would probably accept that these are continuous axes, but instead they get treated as clusters, distorting even casual analysis.
- Kunix 10y ago
  The goal of the test is just to give an approximation. The test is not accurate (and is not claiming to be). The core of the theory is to highlight natural preferences in the way we use cognitive functions. It's a pretty good and useful model. It's not a definite one though, like all the models we have it's meant to be improved and replaced over the years (like in physics). 99% of the critics about MBTI are focusing on the tests (which I agree are not accurate) and the authors don't understand the theory behind it - which is the really useful part. (Carl Jung's work, cognitive functions preferences, etc)
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I think there's a cross-purposes argument happening here. I, for one, am totally alright with MBTI-style questions as a tool for analysis/introspection. RibbonFarm has some great writing about identifying 'dominant' cognitive functions based on magnitude data from MBTI. Strictly accurate? No. A useful framework for planning? Absolutely. MBTI is also an organization, though. It charges money for training, issues education materials, and gives trainers strict guidelines on what assessments are ok to make. That system is hideously inaccurate and deserves criticism. It asserts that the test is accurate to reality, that the personality types are 'opposed', and that people are bimodal on the four axes. Many of those claims explicitly contradict the Jungian theories that inspired them. So it's easy to overreach when criticizing the MB model, and most articles like this aren't clear about their target. But the actual MBTI organization - which is still popular with big companies in its original form - is wrong in terms of its own theoretical foundations, defended with bad data, and deserves extensive criticism.
ivan_gammel 10y ago
What about considering other starting points and comparing the added value of them with MBTI? How differs "So, you are INFJ, let's talk about your personality" from "So, you are Captain America/Hobbit/Sith Lord, according to this online test. Let's talk about your personality"?
- Declanomous 10y ago
  If you have a reasonable methodology to generate the comparison, I think being able to tell someone they are a Sith Lord can be helpful. I think tests can help provide a different perspective to people. I think tests are an issue when they present traits as concrete and unable to be changed, or only present the positive aspects of your personality.
  - spennant 10y ago
    I would never tell anyone that they are a Sith Lord.
    - JorgeGT 10y ago
      Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  I expect you get about the same utility out of any 4-dimensional, 16-choice bucketing strategy. The MBTI is mostly just useful in that it's one of the few things that actually sorts humans in a hyperdimensional way, which is really how we're best categorized. We're all slight wobbles (well, statistically speaking) around the center of a like 20-100 dimension distribution. MBTI is basically just PCA on that space in to a 4-dimensional one, and while we can argue how evenly its bucketing split the actual distribution of people (not ideally, but not terribly), or how much information was lost in that downcasting (a lot!), I think the basic premise of viewing people as a composite of slight differences across many dimensions is a useful viewpoint we don't normally engage in. So if you could pick 16 LotR characters that form a hypercube of traits, then assigning LotR characters is the same as the MBTI. The problem is usually that LotR quizzes and the like are a) much smaller than that (4-8 characters) and b) not laid out in a hypercube (ie, there's not 4+ dimensions of wobble, there's 2 or 3).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dbcurtis 10y ago
I think the M-B is useful, but I only apply it in the area of communication styles. As an INTP engineer, I run into a lot of ISTJ engineers. ISTJ and INTP viewpoints are markedly different in what information is considered critical, how and when to make decisions, and how they like information summarized. So I use M-B to help understand the audience I am writing for or presenting to. When I first encountered M-B it rescued a sour relationship with an ISTJ boss who thought I wrote content-free status reports, where I thought I wrote well-summarized round-ups that avoided meaningless minutia. Later, the table was reversed when I had an ISTJ report who drowned me in more details than I could (or needed to) process. I used M-B to help us workout guidelines for talking with each other so that we were productive instead of both frustrated. So M-B has been useful to me. But it should not be used for making hiring/placement decisions. I really see it as an information processing styles inventory and little more.
ebbv 10y ago
Your assertion that it is good for anything is based on the idea that the data is valid in any way. It isn't. When people are retested the results are very inconsistent. Results being independently reproducible is the foundation of science. Meyers-Briggs fails that simple metric.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  If the test is judging mindset, something that changes very regularly, of course the results will change as well. This is akin to saying testing blood sugar is worthless because the result varies throughout the day.
  - Graphon1 10y ago
    Well sure, but the point is that saying "I am INTJ" is like saying "My blood sugar is X." It may be true at the moment, but it's not a useful statement about the general prevailing conditions. But people take the test once, and then use the results for a long period of time. Guess what? At night, blood sugar level goes down. it's no longer X. And likewise with this test.
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      True, but by noting your blood sugar readings over a long period of time, taking note of the spikes, drops, and so forth, you gain some insight into your health and diet. Same thing, here. I wouldn't put much stock into a single result on a single test, but I think there's some broader value to be gained by examining the trend, the fluctuations, and what you wind up as more often than not.
  - ebbv 10y ago
    C'mon man. It purports to test personality, not mindset. It doesn't say "Run this after meals and first thing in the morning between meals to get an idea of your mindset throughout the day." Sheesh.
    - 10y ago
zzleeper 10y ago
I read your first paragraph and there is absolutely no information in those 851 characters (!). I actually had to go through your comment history to see that your account is not some sort of Markov generator. On a more productive point, your post gave no evidence at all about why M-B is useful
- reitanqild 10y ago
  I suggest reading it again.
ck425 10y ago
I used MBTI in a similar way when I was younger. I identified strongly with the INTP type and wanted to become more outgoing and confident so I studied the descriptions of the ENTP type and deliberately cultivated some of those behaviours. It actually worked fairly well (though admittedly this was also around my 18th birthday so maybe it was just alcohol), nowadays I don't find it particularly useful nor the descriptions at all accurate but as a starting base for self analysis and improvement it's great.
taplogger 10y ago
Myers-Briggs is incredibly useful for people who fall into INFJ because the categorization is relatively rare and can help them place a few of their more socially maladaptive tendencies in context. Admittedly, the test is arbitrary in many ways, but you can't deny the questions -- about introversion, how logical, emotive, and judgmental you are, etc -- represent the subjective experience we have of others' personalities, even if the categories are incomplete, nonlinear, redundant, or transient.
- robobro 10y ago
  yes, I always score very very strongly in INTJ. It may not be as useful as a full psychological evaluation for describing my personality, but unlike Tarot/astrology, if you know what INTJ means, you can understand how I function and how I see myself. (not very social/emotional, very logical, stubborn, aptitude for systems-building)
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Your comment works surprisingly well like this: As an individual (Taurus) thoroughly interested in astrology, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who tout astrology as a comprehensive personality test fail to understand what astrology attempts to identify. While the "value-add" is more subjective, I'm going to go ahead and say it's not as useless as this article claims. While I don't think anyone (especially employers) should rely heavily on astrology, I think it can provide a decent framework (or starting point) outlining basic facets of an individual's personality based on their own perspective. Though I often distrust individual claims about belonging a sign, given my interest in understanding myself and facets of my own personality, I enjoy discussing why a person may claim to be a part of a certain sign. For me, astrology tends to be little more than a starting point for discussing the finer parts of my own personality, values, and perspectives. I find that those who are equally interested in astrology share similar values in self-understanding, thus a starting point for some interesting discussion. Your comment can be distilled to "it's fun to talk about".
- whitehouse3 10y ago
  No, that doesn't work at all. OP is saying that he draws conclusions about someone's personality based on the Meyers-Briggs type with which they identify. That logic doesn't apply to the zodiac because your star-sign is based on your birthday. People don't lie about their birthday to become a Virgo. But they might fudge the answers to the Meyers-Briggs survey so they appear more "introverted" and "thinking". If you compare someone's self-view ("I'm an introvert!") with their behavior (definitely an extrovert), you can draw conclusions. This is more than "fun to talk about". It's standard practice in psychology.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    That logic doesn't apply to the zodiac Sure it does. I've met people who will say things like "My sun sign is Virgo, but my personality is dominated by my Sagittarius moon", and then later say something like "I'm going through Saturn return, no wonder Pisces is such an influence". If you compare someone's self-view ("I'm an Aries!") with their behavior (definitely a Gemini), you can draw conclusions. It's standard practice in astrology.
novaleaf 10y ago
I am an INTP, and while a lot do consider Myers-Briggs as glorified Barnum statements, I do consider it somewhat valuable for self-introspection. The main reason I don't think Myers-Briggs can be a true-ism is that each dimension is actually a spectrum. For example I am about 60% "I" (and thus 40% "E") so the various "I" true-isms only slightly factor on my personality.
- brianmartinek 10y ago
  Self-introspection is also where I find the most value in M-B. It gave me perspective on my ISTJ personality preferences (preferences is the key word) that I didn't understand about myself prior to having these results.
bunderbunder 10y ago
As a conversation piece, sure, it is an interesting framework. As a tool, though, its utility remains doubtful. Its test-retest reliability is very low, meaning that, if you give the same person the test at two different times, you're likely to get two different results. This strongly suggests that, while the test might capture aspects of a person's personality, it's also functioning like a glorified mood ring. Without some way to separate those two aspects, its utility as an indicator of anything useful about any one individual is highly suspect.
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  Seems like a great tool for a science that draws conclusions first and looks for evidence later, as I've been led to believe has been happening in psychology.
  - bunderbunder 10y ago
    I wouldn't drop this one on psychology's doorstep - the MBTI has been pretty consistently critcized by the mainstream psychology community for decades.
c3534l 10y ago
If you feel that way, why not just go for a scientifically-developed personality test like the Big 5? It seems to me that there's an alternative that is real, but there's an almost astrological appeal to Myers-Briggs because (not in spite of) it is opaque.

jfoutz 10y ago

That is a completely reasonable approach. Like astrology or tarot cards. Getting people thinking about big questions in a non threatening way can spark interesting conversations. There are a lot of cultural norms that prevent people from talking about themselves in that kind of way. A little hocus pocus can help cut through that. In that same spirit alcohol is a pretty great social lubricant. A little bit of booze lowers people's inhibitions enough to have fun conversations.

triplesec 10y ago
When you say 'reasonable', you mean something orthogonal: rather it's 'rhetorically useful', or 'a social hack '. This does not make it scientific, nor based in reason, and more dangerous because it masquerades as reason much more truthily than tarot and other pretence magic
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  > more truthily than tarot and other pretence magic Depending on where you are from I suppose. Edit: I believe "pretense" was the incantation you were after.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  I don't mean it's rational, i mean good enough, at least it's in the same ballpark of getting someone drunk. It's not scientific, it's totally based in reason. It's reasonable to deny global warming because winters are getting colder than ever. It's not reasonable to deny climate change because winters are getting colder than ever. There's nothing wrong with someone drawing a conclusion from their personal experience, that's going to be full of emotion, opinion and hopefully some logic. I get your concern, but the same folks who make hiring decisions based on Myers Briggs will tell you angels were watching over them when they narrowly avoided a car crash. Or their relative visited them a month after they passed away. it's mostly benign. When it's not benign, they're unreasonable. Only then is it possibly worth the effort to persuade them to be a bit more rational. But, yes. I mean 'rhetorically useful' or 'a social hack'
raverbashing 10y ago
No Because those mentioned deal with random events, where X and Y are uncorrelated (being X a date of birth or card drawn from Tarot and Y is some personality characteristic) MB do ask you questions from which you can predict - to some degree - some outcomes (how do you think a strong Extrovert changes from a strong Introvert)? Just don't do something stupid like "this job requires a INTJ only" or think that the distribution is bimodal or that their behaviour will follow a strict pattern. (It's not like the rest of "behavioral science" can make repeatable predictions and reproduce papers compared to other scientific branches)
- xkcd-sucks 10y ago
  Astrology is correlated to seasonal climate change etc. which can plausibly affect life outcomes, though
  - arde 10y ago
    Considering the planet has two hemispheres, no, it's not correlated.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  That's such a J thing to say.
- eastbayjake 10y ago
  I don't think about M-B or Tarot or astrology as predictive, they are mindfulness prods: interesting frameworks to break up and reframe the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are. A horoscope that tells me "this week will present challenges at work about money" is likely to prod me into mindfulness about work and money than I would be otherwise. Similarly, my ESTJ M-B type is more likely to make me mindful about where I get my energy and the ways in which rigorously analytical thinking may not be the way lots of other humans approach decisions.
Simon321 10y ago
It's much more than 'astrology or tarot cards'. MBTI correlates with the big five personality traits. Which are backed up scientifically.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  It correlates poorly with any of the competing empirically-supportable models; e.g., as I recall, the I-E axis seems to be a blend of the extraversion and neuroticism axes shared by the EPQ (3 factor) and Big Five (5 factor) models. Better to use one of the scientific models directly than MBTI.
  - arde 10y ago
    Indeed. But that doesn't mean MBTI is really meaningless, only that there are better models.

Bartweiss 10y ago

My primary concern with even cursory usage of Myers-Briggs is that retest consistency isn't as high as I'd like. Plenty of people retest very solidly, of course, but there's a large-percentage chunk of the population that walks or more boundaries and doesn't put up consistent tests. That makes it hard to say anything about the results, at least in simple "my type" terms. A nuanced discussion would probably accept that these are continuous axes, but instead they get treated as clusters, distorting even casual analysis.

Kunix 10y ago
The goal of the test is just to give an approximation. The test is not accurate (and is not claiming to be). The core of the theory is to highlight natural preferences in the way we use cognitive functions. It's a pretty good and useful model. It's not a definite one though, like all the models we have it's meant to be improved and replaced over the years (like in physics). 99% of the critics about MBTI are focusing on the tests (which I agree are not accurate) and the authors don't understand the theory behind it - which is the really useful part. (Carl Jung's work, cognitive functions preferences, etc)
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I think there's a cross-purposes argument happening here. I, for one, am totally alright with MBTI-style questions as a tool for analysis/introspection. RibbonFarm has some great writing about identifying 'dominant' cognitive functions based on magnitude data from MBTI. Strictly accurate? No. A useful framework for planning? Absolutely. MBTI is also an organization, though. It charges money for training, issues education materials, and gives trainers strict guidelines on what assessments are ok to make. That system is hideously inaccurate and deserves criticism. It asserts that the test is accurate to reality, that the personality types are 'opposed', and that people are bimodal on the four axes. Many of those claims explicitly contradict the Jungian theories that inspired them. So it's easy to overreach when criticizing the MB model, and most articles like this aren't clear about their target. But the actual MBTI organization - which is still popular with big companies in its original form - is wrong in terms of its own theoretical foundations, defended with bad data, and deserves extensive criticism.

ivan_gammel 10y ago

What about considering other starting points and comparing the added value of them with MBTI? How differs "So, you are INFJ, let's talk about your personality" from "So, you are Captain America/Hobbit/Sith Lord, according to this online test. Let's talk about your personality"?

Declanomous 10y ago
If you have a reasonable methodology to generate the comparison, I think being able to tell someone they are a Sith Lord can be helpful. I think tests can help provide a different perspective to people. I think tests are an issue when they present traits as concrete and unable to be changed, or only present the positive aspects of your personality.
- spennant 10y ago
  I would never tell anyone that they are a Sith Lord.
  - JorgeGT 10y ago
    Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes.
SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
I expect you get about the same utility out of any 4-dimensional, 16-choice bucketing strategy. The MBTI is mostly just useful in that it's one of the few things that actually sorts humans in a hyperdimensional way, which is really how we're best categorized. We're all slight wobbles (well, statistically speaking) around the center of a like 20-100 dimension distribution. MBTI is basically just PCA on that space in to a 4-dimensional one, and while we can argue how evenly its bucketing split the actual distribution of people (not ideally, but not terribly), or how much information was lost in that downcasting (a lot!), I think the basic premise of viewing people as a composite of slight differences across many dimensions is a useful viewpoint we don't normally engage in. So if you could pick 16 LotR characters that form a hypercube of traits, then assigning LotR characters is the same as the MBTI. The problem is usually that LotR quizzes and the like are a) much smaller than that (4-8 characters) and b) not laid out in a hypercube (ie, there's not 4+ dimensions of wobble, there's 2 or 3).

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dbcurtis 10y ago

I think the M-B is useful, but I only apply it in the area of communication styles. As an INTP engineer, I run into a lot of ISTJ engineers. ISTJ and INTP viewpoints are markedly different in what information is considered critical, how and when to make decisions, and how they like information summarized. So I use M-B to help understand the audience I am writing for or presenting to. When I first encountered M-B it rescued a sour relationship with an ISTJ boss who thought I wrote content-free status reports, where I thought I wrote well-summarized round-ups that avoided meaningless minutia. Later, the table was reversed when I had an ISTJ report who drowned me in more details than I could (or needed to) process. I used M-B to help us workout guidelines for talking with each other so that we were productive instead of both frustrated. So M-B has been useful to me. But it should not be used for making hiring/placement decisions. I really see it as an information processing styles inventory and little more.

ebbv 10y ago

Your assertion that it is good for anything is based on the idea that the data is valid in any way. It isn't. When people are retested the results are very inconsistent. Results being independently reproducible is the foundation of science. Meyers-Briggs fails that simple metric.

Karunamon 10y ago
If the test is judging mindset, something that changes very regularly, of course the results will change as well. This is akin to saying testing blood sugar is worthless because the result varies throughout the day.
- Graphon1 10y ago
  Well sure, but the point is that saying "I am INTJ" is like saying "My blood sugar is X." It may be true at the moment, but it's not a useful statement about the general prevailing conditions. But people take the test once, and then use the results for a long period of time. Guess what? At night, blood sugar level goes down. it's no longer X. And likewise with this test.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    True, but by noting your blood sugar readings over a long period of time, taking note of the spikes, drops, and so forth, you gain some insight into your health and diet. Same thing, here. I wouldn't put much stock into a single result on a single test, but I think there's some broader value to be gained by examining the trend, the fluctuations, and what you wind up as more often than not.
- ebbv 10y ago
  C'mon man. It purports to test personality, not mindset. It doesn't say "Run this after meals and first thing in the morning between meals to get an idea of your mindset throughout the day." Sheesh.
  - 10y ago

zzleeper 10y ago

I read your first paragraph and there is absolutely no information in those 851 characters (!). I actually had to go through your comment history to see that your account is not some sort of Markov generator. On a more productive point, your post gave no evidence at all about why M-B is useful

reitanqild 10y ago
I suggest reading it again.

ck425 10y ago

I used MBTI in a similar way when I was younger. I identified strongly with the INTP type and wanted to become more outgoing and confident so I studied the descriptions of the ENTP type and deliberately cultivated some of those behaviours. It actually worked fairly well (though admittedly this was also around my 18th birthday so maybe it was just alcohol), nowadays I don't find it particularly useful nor the descriptions at all accurate but as a starting base for self analysis and improvement it's great.

taplogger 10y ago

Myers-Briggs is incredibly useful for people who fall into INFJ because the categorization is relatively rare and can help them place a few of their more socially maladaptive tendencies in context. Admittedly, the test is arbitrary in many ways, but you can't deny the questions -- about introversion, how logical, emotive, and judgmental you are, etc -- represent the subjective experience we have of others' personalities, even if the categories are incomplete, nonlinear, redundant, or transient.

robobro 10y ago
yes, I always score very very strongly in INTJ. It may not be as useful as a full psychological evaluation for describing my personality, but unlike Tarot/astrology, if you know what INTJ means, you can understand how I function and how I see myself. (not very social/emotional, very logical, stubborn, aptitude for systems-building)

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

Your comment works surprisingly well like this: As an individual (Taurus) thoroughly interested in astrology, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who tout astrology as a comprehensive personality test fail to understand what astrology attempts to identify. While the "value-add" is more subjective, I'm going to go ahead and say it's not as useless as this article claims. While I don't think anyone (especially employers) should rely heavily on astrology, I think it can provide a decent framework (or starting point) outlining basic facets of an individual's personality based on their own perspective. Though I often distrust individual claims about belonging a sign, given my interest in understanding myself and facets of my own personality, I enjoy discussing why a person may claim to be a part of a certain sign. For me, astrology tends to be little more than a starting point for discussing the finer parts of my own personality, values, and perspectives. I find that those who are equally interested in astrology share similar values in self-understanding, thus a starting point for some interesting discussion. Your comment can be distilled to "it's fun to talk about".

whitehouse3 10y ago
No, that doesn't work at all. OP is saying that he draws conclusions about someone's personality based on the Meyers-Briggs type with which they identify. That logic doesn't apply to the zodiac because your star-sign is based on your birthday. People don't lie about their birthday to become a Virgo. But they might fudge the answers to the Meyers-Briggs survey so they appear more "introverted" and "thinking". If you compare someone's self-view ("I'm an introvert!") with their behavior (definitely an extrovert), you can draw conclusions. This is more than "fun to talk about". It's standard practice in psychology.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  That logic doesn't apply to the zodiac Sure it does. I've met people who will say things like "My sun sign is Virgo, but my personality is dominated by my Sagittarius moon", and then later say something like "I'm going through Saturn return, no wonder Pisces is such an influence". If you compare someone's self-view ("I'm an Aries!") with their behavior (definitely a Gemini), you can draw conclusions. It's standard practice in astrology.

novaleaf 10y ago

I am an INTP, and while a lot do consider Myers-Briggs as glorified Barnum statements, I do consider it somewhat valuable for self-introspection. The main reason I don't think Myers-Briggs can be a true-ism is that each dimension is actually a spectrum. For example I am about 60% "I" (and thus 40% "E") so the various "I" true-isms only slightly factor on my personality.

brianmartinek 10y ago
Self-introspection is also where I find the most value in M-B. It gave me perspective on my ISTJ personality preferences (preferences is the key word) that I didn't understand about myself prior to having these results.

bunderbunder 10y ago

As a conversation piece, sure, it is an interesting framework. As a tool, though, its utility remains doubtful. Its test-retest reliability is very low, meaning that, if you give the same person the test at two different times, you're likely to get two different results. This strongly suggests that, while the test might capture aspects of a person's personality, it's also functioning like a glorified mood ring. Without some way to separate those two aspects, its utility as an indicator of anything useful about any one individual is highly suspect.

oldmanjay 10y ago
Seems like a great tool for a science that draws conclusions first and looks for evidence later, as I've been led to believe has been happening in psychology.
- bunderbunder 10y ago
  I wouldn't drop this one on psychology's doorstep - the MBTI has been pretty consistently critcized by the mainstream psychology community for decades.

c3534l 10y ago

If you feel that way, why not just go for a scientifically-developed personality test like the Big 5? It seems to me that there's an alternative that is real, but there's an almost astrological appeal to Myers-Briggs because (not in spite of) it is opaque.