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I've never really understood the harsh criticisms of MBTI. It's not super predictive, but not to be honest, nothing else in psychology is either; the whole fie

I've never really understood the harsh criticisms of MBTI. It's not super predictive, but not to be honest, nothing else in psychology is either; the whole field is just not anywhere near the level of physics or chemistry (not to blame the researchers; predicting humans is very hard). The big 5 and I think more recently an 18 dimensional breakdown (using PCA or ICA?) just aren't that much better than MBTI, despite many online claims to the contrary. Myers-Briggs at least has some small level of predictive power, so no, it's not like horoscopes. There was once a poll of engineers at the tech company I work at, and I think the results were like 70% INTJ, 25% INTP, and 5% other. If MBTI lacked all predictive power, you would expect a distribution roughly equivalent to that of the general population. Could people self-select what they "want" to be? Sure, but it's still predictive of something in that case.

Quekid5 6y ago
> I've never really understood the harsh criticisms of MBTI. It's not super predictive [...] I think the problem might be that people are using it to 'predict' things. > Myers-Briggs Wikipedia will give you a lot of references to research as to why this is not considered science (or even science-adjacent). Anecdotally, I have been subjected to these (or something very similar at least) as a condition of employment. It was so incredibly transparent that I chose a personality at the outset and 'achieved' that outcome.
- souprock 6y ago
  Check the math in the article. (the correlation tables especially, both against the "Big 5" and for repeatability) If Myers-Briggs is not science, then the "Big 5" personality traits are also not science. They are tied together, each strongly predictive of the other. Results are repeatable, especially if not rounded to boolean values.
  - Quekid5 6y ago
    I'm going to suggest a hypothetical. Let's ignore any personality test specifics just to generalize. Ok, so I have a candidate for a position, who shows +5% to "conscientiousness". What does that mean, practically, for me as an employer? It means exactly nothing, because that trait is so vague as to be ... meaningless. (That's just the start of the problems with these tests.) Even if it M-B (or whatever) is a repeatable effect it has no value as a predictor of performance of a single individual. In aggregate, maybe... (but also no, see the wiki). It's just people playing Management Consultant extracting money from Management.
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      For somebody who admits having no idea what it's for, you seem awfully confident of your opinion.
      - Quekid5 6y ago
        > For somebody who admits having no idea what it's for I'm sorry, what? I did ask that as a rhetorical flourish in a different thread (as a response to you, in fact), but c'mon. You specifically said > It's not science, or science-adjacent, or anything to do with science. It doesn't pretend to be. That's not what it's for. I note that you didn't answer my other question: how do you justify its use if it's not 'science'. EDIT: Btw, my allusion was to a comment by Stephen Fry in a debate. (Specifics are no doubt going to lead to more contention, so I'll omit them.)
        ncmncm 6y ago
        Some people insist science=good, therefore not-science=not-good. But the world is bigger than that. Your responsibility as a human is to discover value in things you encounter. Failing to find it is just failing, and says more about you than about things.
        dang 6y ago
        Please don't cross into personal attack in HN threads. It's not what this site is for, and wrecks what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        ncmncm 6y ago
        I am not attacking anyone, personally or otherwise. What I wrote applies to anybody, myself included.
        Quekid5 6y ago
        Ah, yes. Not answering any of my questions and just putting out vague platitudes.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  It's not science, or science-adjacent, or anything to do with science. It doesn't pretend to be. That's not what it's for. You can always lie, about anything you like. You can put salt in the sugar bowl. You can substitute decaf in for the coffee at the office, and give everybody caffeine-withdrawl headaches. You can have your dog crap in the sandbox at the park. What do you imagine you would prove, by that? (I give you exactly one guess.) All you did lying on the test was to land in a different box than if you had not lied. But one box is not better than another box, so what good did that do? It means somebody who looks and believes it will find it harder to communicate with you. What you achieved was to throw sand in the gears. Congratulations.
  - Quekid5 6y ago
    > It's not science, or science-adjacent, or anything to do with science. It doesn't pretend to be. That's not what it's for. Ok, so what is it for? And how do you justify its use? I've seen what it's being sold for/as.
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      If you do not see it how it would be useful, my recommendation is do not buy it. I have not bought it, but I have used it. I justify using it because it is useful to me: It helps me understand how people very different from myself interact with their world. These other people are not wrong, just different. Remarkably often, the differences are quite comprehensible. It helps to organize those differences. The precise details of how to organize them are not especially important, because it is just a way to break up what would be a lot of confusing detail into chunks that minds can grasp more easily. If it matches how other people organize, then we can talk about it. Certain ways of organizing differences satisfy more criteria than others, and so have attracted more people to use them. MB is one that does, and so has. That doesn't make other systems wrong; and that other systems exist doesn't make MB wrong, even if different systems are more useful in one place than another.
      - Smaug123 6y ago
        If the purpose is merely to understand how people different from you view the world, then why take the test at all, rather than just reading about the ~sixteen personality types MBTI distinguishes between? The MBTI consultant who administered the test to me couldn't answer that question.
analog31 6y ago
Something I wonder is if people within different occupations tend to interpret the questions differently. That would explain a trend in the results, unrelated to personality.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Wouldn't the manner in which a person interprets questions be part of their personality, especially if that interpretation is consistent between e.g. high school and their time in industry (as mine was)?
  - analog31 6y ago
    Indeed that might be possible. In fact there may be sub categories within the popular categories with different behaviors, e.g., a poet whose symbol is INTJ might be a different personality than an engineer with the same symbol. This would be hard to sort out because there are vastly fewer poets than engineers. Intelligence may play a role too. Two people with the same symbols but widely different intelligence may behave differently to the point where they are identified as having different personalities. I'm speaking broadly about intelligence without necessarily believing in IQ testing.
- visarga 6y ago
  > people within different occupations tend to interpret the questions differently There are also other types of ambiguity. For example when asking: "Do you keep your room in order?" - you might answer "yes" because that's what you do, but you only do it because it has been enforced into you over time, while if you were alone and free you'd keep it messy. Do people respond with their instinctive reaction or with their trained reaction? Which one is the right answer? Depending on that you could get a different type.
  - croes 6y ago
    There is even more ambiguity in questions like "Do you keep your room in order". First what order for some, is chaos for others. Second some people just lie to them self or ignore the truth. For example, how would a hoarder answer that question. So the self perception could differ much from the real behaviour.
MattGaiser 6y ago
> There was once a poll of engineers at the tech company I work at, and I think the results were like 70% INTJ, 25% INTP, and 5% other. If MBTI lacked all predictive power, you would expect a distribution roughly equivalent to that of the general population. Could people self-select what they "want" to be? Sure, but it's still predictive of something in that case. I was once part of an accelerator that used the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument, which basically seemed like MBTI except with more fees. And it got very similar results for the engineers in the room. Introverted analysts. And anecdotally, I know very few non INTJ engineers and the few that aren't are INTP (among those of us that have taken the test for career planning or personality testing for the workplace). I get how it may not be a rigorous way to sort people, but I want some research on whether it at least clusters them.
- deleted 6y ago
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- iso1210 6y ago
  Does that make the information actionable? Does being an INTJ allow a prediction on anything else other than being an INTJ? What is the point in clustering them? If your team is 75% ravenclaw, 20% Hufflepuff and 5% other, how does that help? Are you going to go out and try to recruit a Slytherin? What if your team is 45% Rachel, 15% Chandler, 20% Joey? What benefit do you get from clustering people in this way?
  - RogerL 6y ago
    You are spot on. I would suspect that everyone that I work with falling this cluster. You could sum us up as a bunch of nerdy engineers, and I don't think anyone would really take exception with that. But it captures almost nothing except a very small range of behavior. We are very different people. 'Sally' lights up whenever she talks of her children, but mostly pines to be a librarian one day. we have cluster b people, we have Jokers and humorous people, perhaps a bit of Asperger's, adventurers and the meek, storytellers, partiers, tea totalers. One seems to live for firing people, another I'm pretty sure I cannot model another human mind. some of us paint, play music, others disdain that stuff. Jocks and couch potatoes. Those that say they use the mtbi for self-understanding puzzle me, because it tells you nothing of any of these very human traits. knowing somebody has one of the cluster b traits for example tells you a lot about how you might need to modify your behavior to interact with them successfully in a work environment, and MB days nothing. I could go on and on on what it is not measuring. Yeah we're engineers. I knew that. I didn't need the test.
molticrystal 6y ago
Agree completely, everything has to start from somewhere. Often it is a false start with nothing to gain. While MBTI was a small step, at least it was a forward step to better understanding vs the example you mentioned, "horoscopes", which past the fleeting interest into astronomy is just walking off a cliff into the void.
rcakebread 6y ago
I read the book "What's Your Type?: The Story of the Myers-Briggs, and How Personality Testing Took Over the World" and learned it was a bit like Scientology a few decades ago. Very secretive, offered a free personality test to lure you into lots of paid courses. They were selling courses to an astonishing percentage of large corporations.
- ConnorLeet 6y ago
  I’ve always been amazed by how much of the self-development & improvement industry seems to be based off of Scientology!
- ncmncm 6y ago
  There is no Church of Myers--Briggs, and no secrets. Everything is open. There are charlatans in any field, and they will use anything. They all use money, but using money does not make you a charlatan. That corporate HR departments hire charlatans only demonstrates that HR departments will hire anybody willing to give the HR director a kickback.
dehrmann 6y ago
My main criticism is it gives the impression the traits are bimodal when they're actually more modal, giving people the impression we're more dislike than similar.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  I seem to recall seeing an MBTI result that showed a location on a quadrant for pairs of attributes? So you could see if you were really closer to or further from the origin. That might help with the false binary impression.
  - visarga 6y ago
    I thought all MBTI tests give you scores for each axis.
    - watwut 6y ago
      It does. And then people refer to themselves by four letter, read abour description of types by 4 letter and completely ignore the scale in it.
      - pseudalopex 6y ago
        I've seen people call themselves xNTJ or INFx.
rewgs 6y ago
I’ve gotten downvoted every time I’ve come to the defense of Meyers Briggs on HN, so I’m happy to see a comment with more or less my view of it voted to the top for once. I find it to be an extremely useful abstraction. Being honest with myself and really digging into how the cognitive functions “work” has been incredibly instructive and valuable in terms of further understanding myself. It’s a REALLY high level programming language, so if you want memory management, so to speak, you’ll be disappointed. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable.
- bigfudge 6y ago
  This analogy breaks down though. High level languages can be slow or inefficient because they don’t map directly into reality, but they are still correct. MBTI and FFI just don’t really work at all ... they don’t predict much and if you took them too seriously as permanent traits you would make bad decisions.
- anotherfish 6y ago
  You probably hit the wrong "bubble". This happens. Then there's the various groupthink fashions that come and go like weather patterns on various comment sites. I doubt HN is much different. Probably better on HN but I've seen some oddball voting patterns around BLM and similar.
esperent 6y ago
The problem with these results is not that they're inaccurate, it's that people think they measure a permanent aspect of themselves. In truth, people's personalities are malleable - if you spend all your time working on a computer, you become more introverted - or at least, you start to express your introverted tendencies more strongly. If you switch jobs and have to spend all your days talking to people, you'll become more extroverted. From this perspective, of course a of a group of engineers personalities show high introversion. But are they introverted because they are engineers or engineers because they are introverted? Or is it a little from column A and a little from column B with a different ratio for each person measured? In the end, Myers Briggs is harmful because it gives a simplistic view of something complicated, and makes people believe they are stuck with a particular personality. In reality all it does is give an estimate of your outlook on the day you took the test. Personality is emergent as a response to your needs to interact with the world given your current career, relationship, peer group, social standing, and so on. It's not fixed. Or at least, it's far less fixed and far more fluid than Myers Briggs would have you believe.
- 0df8dkdf 6y ago
  * In truth, people's personalities are malleable * Thank you for saying that. There was an interview before Carl Jung passed away, where even he talked about how in certain situation where arch type changes. We all ought to view tests like Myer Briggs as a way to shade light on people and their ways of being.
- visarga 6y ago
  > In truth, people's personalities are malleable That's what I observed myself - I can have different MBTI depending on situation and context. When "people change" it's mostly the context that changes, and a different personality is assumed like a role by the mind, as if the mind just wants to adapt to each situation as best possible. Reminds me of the unlimited ability of GPT-3 to assume personalities and points of view, with the right trigger you can get it to be anyone. I'm not saying people's personalities are equally flexible but they do have a degree of context flexibility.
  - 6y ago
clairity 6y ago
my big criticism is that they’re taken as constants, when they can be highly dynamic quantities in different contexts. that’s what makes personality types misleading and not that useful in real life (i.e., not very predictive).
sunstone 6y ago
The best that can be said of MBTI is that it has a slight correlation with one of the Big 5 dimensions. So it's not useless but it's close to useless. On the other hand it's expensive whereas the Big Five has been validated and it's free. Really MBTI is just a waste of time and money.
- souprock 6y ago
  Not that correlation with Big 5 should be a determining factor, but... The chart in the article shows that E/I is strongly correlated with extraversion, S/N is strongly correlated with openness, T/F is moderately correlated with agreeableness (and weakly with conscientiousness), and J/P is moderately correlated with conscientiousness (and weakly with openness). It's not a slight correlation, so if MBTI is useless then so is Big 5. Again though, choosing Big 5 as the standard is arbitrary and unfair. That automatically judges all other systems as inferior, without examining their merit.
  - pzone 6y ago
    Only one of the two systems stands up to modern standards of psychological science. If you are an HR rep and you want to predict an applicant’s job performance, you are using inferior data if you choose an MBTI test. It may have other uses, like fostering a useful discussion during an interview, but there is a very real case in which it is inferior and 5-factor personality is the standard to be judged against.
    - bigfudge 6y ago
      If you place any weight on Ffi in recruitment you are also doing it wrong though. The studies reporting ffi correlations with real world outcomes give confidence intervals not prediction intervals. For individual cases it’s mostly just noise.
DiscountChocula 6y ago
> There was once a poll of engineers at the tech company I work at, and I think the results were like 70% INTJ, 25% INTP, and 5% other. If MBTI lacked all predictive power, you would expect a distribution roughly equivalent to that of the general population. You're assuming the types are proportionally represented in the general population, which we have no reason the believe even if the test works as advertised. For all we know urban environments are 70% INTJ.
- jbay808 6y ago
  > For all we know urban environments are 70% INTJ. There are 16 categories, which means you'd expect about 6% in each if the test sorts evenly. It doesn't; in fact only between 2% and 3% of the population is INTJ. Unless one of the questions is literally "are you a tech worker", that's very conspicuous selectivity.
  - sdenton4 6y ago
    On the other hand, a test with questions like 'are you a tech worker' might be a lot shorter and just as meaningful!
  - calt 6y ago
    The test doesn't sort evenly. One of the most popular online test sites says in one of their descriptions - I forget which one - that "this is the rarest type with only x% of the population." I had a female friend who was an INTJ, and told me that it was very rare among women. Being very, INTJ, she was referencing some rigorous statistics.
    - jbay808 6y ago
      Yes, I mentioned in the next line that it doesn't sort evenly, and INTJ is particularly a minority.
- Simon321 6y ago
  INTJ is 2.1% of the population https://personalitymax.com/personality-types/population-gender/ https://personalitymax.com/personality-types/population-gend...
jbay808 6y ago
In grad school I joined an extracurricular social society where you meet around a table with other grad students and discuss various topics selected in advance while eating pie and other goodies. Sort of like debate but without the structure or positions. Anyway one time the topic was Myers Briggs and so we all filled out our profiles in advance so we'd have something to discuss. It was a group of 20 people, and we discovered that 19 of us were INTJ. The other was INTP. That was when I decided the test has strong predictive power, for the same reason you did. Even if it's just able to predict a preference for discussing personality tests with a plate of cherry pie. INTJ has a background rate of about 2%.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- phreeza 6y ago
  Or INTJ is what you get when you answer questions in a way that you expect to be conforming to what your fellow grad students will respect, before going to a meeting and revealing your result to them.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    No. That's a very clever and cynical viewpoint but realistically, none of us cared about that. It's not like these were peers in the same lab whose opinion mattered. Nor did anyone really have a strong opinion about meyers briggs categories. If anything it almost got a little embarassing after the first five replies to keep answering the same thing as the other people - like going to a restaurant and everyone ordering, one after the next, that they want the blueberry pancakes. You almost feel like an automaton instead of being a unique and creative individual.
    - phreeza 6y ago
      Right, I didn't mean to imply that everyone was lying, I just think that wanting to fit in with a group is a strong subconscious drive in such situations. Edit: I was curious and did a quick search what the scientific literature says about this, and it seems like it is an accepted problem, though there are techniques used to reduce the effects. To quote one study: "Regarding the use of self-report personality inventories, meta-analytic results have indicated that applicants are able to, and actually do, deviate from honest responses in order to make a good impression (Alliger & Dwight, 2000; Viswesvaran & Ones, 1999). "
watwut 6y ago
> I've never really understood the harsh criticisms of MBTI. It's not super predictive, but not to be honest, nothing else in psychology is either The way psychologists see it, "this is much worst then usual uncertainity for many reasons". Also, psychology and pop psychology are two different things.
bambax 6y ago
If the aim is to help conversation during a first date, as the post implies, then why not. If such an imprecise tool is used to determine your employability, or pay grade, or career path, or access to some vital services or housing, etc. then it's unacceptable. The fact that HR professionals seem to love it is a strong indicator that it is bad and harmful.
anotherfish 6y ago
Yeah, horoscopes are fun. I used to mess with my school by shuffling the horoscopes in the weekly newsletter. No one noticed or complained.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  The purpose of horoscopes is to keep people from doing the same thing every day. It doesn't matter which sign you check, or even if you check the same one each time. So, scrambling them did not interfere with what people used them for. There was no reason for anyone to complain. The astro-BS just randomizes assignments, so everybody doesn't all get the same advice at the same time. You have spent years feeling smug, but the joke was on you all along.
  - anotherfish 6y ago
    I felt quite good actually both then and now. But you seem angrier than you should be. Certainly angrier than someone who would have wrote "It doesn't matter which sign you check" and actually meant it.
    - mcphage 6y ago
      You interpreted them as being angry, but I think they were just laughing at you.
      - ncmncm 6y ago
        I am laughing at the mystery of existence. None of us have anything to be smug about, but we can laugh about it. Have to, really.
      - anotherfish 6y ago
        Accusations of being smug are usually made by people who chose a team and you've encroached or offended that team somehow. There's often an aspect of admonishment in using that word as well. As for my part it wasn't based on arrogance as you'd likely expect. It was simply the result of a bet. I won that bet since no one noticed.
fsloth 6y ago
Being predictive of something is the beef here. There is no sound theory of what that something is and what specifically it would predict. Binning people into excel rows by an arbitrary process is one of the hallmarks of either a pseudoscientific hoax, or an entertaining but scientifically unremarkable party game. You might as well divide people into Hogswarts houses by a similar test and it would serve similar purpose. In other words, it's a pastime driven by fictional representation of human psyche. Some groups may find this exercise fun. But this is no reason to stop hating Meyers-Brigs given it's driven by psedoscientific marketing. While it might not be harmful, it totally is a similar type of activity like homeopathy.
wisty 6y ago
There's two main personality tests. Big 5 is preferred by scientists. MBTI is preferred by people who are taking it to see which famous person (or fictional character) allegedly has the same personality. The problem isn't just the test, it's the whole culture around MBTI. Yes, the test measures something, but you're not just getting a test, you're also getting a bunch of information on how to interpret the test. You can always spot someone who takes MBTI seriously because they talk about introversion meaning they "lose energy by spending time with others and need to recharge by spending time alone".
- Smaug123 6y ago
  Really? I certainly don't take MBTI seriously, but I use that as a rough definition of introversion.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    Here is some potential to construct a personality meta-test: If you prefer Big 5 to MBTI, you are introverted; if you prefer MBTI to Big 5, you are extraverted. If you prefer either of them to horoscope, you are... blah blah blah... if you think all tests are problematic, you are judging; and if you are afraid you would fail at all of them, you are neurotic.
dahart 6y ago
> Could people self-select what they "want" to be? Sure, but it's still predictive of something in that case. Why would measuring self-selection be a good thing, why would that be a reason to use MBTI in your book, rather than a reason to avoid it? If it does measure self-selection, then what is the function or purpose of the test?
runarberg 6y ago
> It's not super predictive, but not to be honest, nothing else in psychology is either. This is an often cited myth. Examples of psychological effects with high predictive powers include: * The law of stimulus and response * Priming * Classical conditioning * Reinforcement learning, which further includes positive reinforcement, punishment, etc. * Plenty of neural models that predict behavioral anomalies after brain trauma. * Plenty of social psychology models that predict how people behave inside groups. * Heck even the linguist Noam Chomsky made an accurate psychological prediction based on cognitive psychology in how people acquire grammar. I think you might be confusing psychology with psychometrics which is a sub-field of psychology which holds that any psychological effect is measurable and that operational definition is a good way to establish these effects. The whole field of psychometrics has a serious problem with predictive powers of their theories. Other modern fields of psychology on the other hand has a good track record of making theories that hold good predictive powers.
rawgabbit 6y ago
Scientific studies support the Big 5 or Hexaco model of personality. Sticking with MBTI is the same as saying the earth is flat despite evidence to the contrary. MBTI was not created Jung. But my two fans of Jung. There is a huge difference.

Quekid5 6y ago

> I've never really understood the harsh criticisms of MBTI. It's not super predictive [...] I think the problem might be that people are using it to 'predict' things. > Myers-Briggs Wikipedia will give you a lot of references to research as to why this is not considered science (or even science-adjacent). Anecdotally, I have been subjected to these (or something very similar at least) as a condition of employment. It was so incredibly transparent that I chose a personality at the outset and 'achieved' that outcome.

souprock 6y ago
Check the math in the article. (the correlation tables especially, both against the "Big 5" and for repeatability) If Myers-Briggs is not science, then the "Big 5" personality traits are also not science. They are tied together, each strongly predictive of the other. Results are repeatable, especially if not rounded to boolean values.
- Quekid5 6y ago
  I'm going to suggest a hypothetical. Let's ignore any personality test specifics just to generalize. Ok, so I have a candidate for a position, who shows +5% to "conscientiousness". What does that mean, practically, for me as an employer? It means exactly nothing, because that trait is so vague as to be ... meaningless. (That's just the start of the problems with these tests.) Even if it M-B (or whatever) is a repeatable effect it has no value as a predictor of performance of a single individual. In aggregate, maybe... (but also no, see the wiki). It's just people playing Management Consultant extracting money from Management.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    For somebody who admits having no idea what it's for, you seem awfully confident of your opinion.
    - Quekid5 6y ago
      > For somebody who admits having no idea what it's for I'm sorry, what? I did ask that as a rhetorical flourish in a different thread (as a response to you, in fact), but c'mon. You specifically said > It's not science, or science-adjacent, or anything to do with science. It doesn't pretend to be. That's not what it's for. I note that you didn't answer my other question: how do you justify its use if it's not 'science'. EDIT: Btw, my allusion was to a comment by Stephen Fry in a debate. (Specifics are no doubt going to lead to more contention, so I'll omit them.)
      - ncmncm 6y ago
        Some people insist science=good, therefore not-science=not-good. But the world is bigger than that. Your responsibility as a human is to discover value in things you encounter. Failing to find it is just failing, and says more about you than about things.
        dang 6y ago
        Please don't cross into personal attack in HN threads. It's not what this site is for, and wrecks what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        ncmncm 6y ago
        I am not attacking anyone, personally or otherwise. What I wrote applies to anybody, myself included.
        Quekid5 6y ago
        Ah, yes. Not answering any of my questions and just putting out vague platitudes.
ncmncm 6y ago
It's not science, or science-adjacent, or anything to do with science. It doesn't pretend to be. That's not what it's for. You can always lie, about anything you like. You can put salt in the sugar bowl. You can substitute decaf in for the coffee at the office, and give everybody caffeine-withdrawl headaches. You can have your dog crap in the sandbox at the park. What do you imagine you would prove, by that? (I give you exactly one guess.) All you did lying on the test was to land in a different box than if you had not lied. But one box is not better than another box, so what good did that do? It means somebody who looks and believes it will find it harder to communicate with you. What you achieved was to throw sand in the gears. Congratulations.
- Quekid5 6y ago
  > It's not science, or science-adjacent, or anything to do with science. It doesn't pretend to be. That's not what it's for. Ok, so what is it for? And how do you justify its use? I've seen what it's being sold for/as.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    If you do not see it how it would be useful, my recommendation is do not buy it. I have not bought it, but I have used it. I justify using it because it is useful to me: It helps me understand how people very different from myself interact with their world. These other people are not wrong, just different. Remarkably often, the differences are quite comprehensible. It helps to organize those differences. The precise details of how to organize them are not especially important, because it is just a way to break up what would be a lot of confusing detail into chunks that minds can grasp more easily. If it matches how other people organize, then we can talk about it. Certain ways of organizing differences satisfy more criteria than others, and so have attracted more people to use them. MB is one that does, and so has. That doesn't make other systems wrong; and that other systems exist doesn't make MB wrong, even if different systems are more useful in one place than another.
    - Smaug123 6y ago
      If the purpose is merely to understand how people different from you view the world, then why take the test at all, rather than just reading about the ~sixteen personality types MBTI distinguishes between? The MBTI consultant who administered the test to me couldn't answer that question.

analog31 6y ago

Something I wonder is if people within different occupations tend to interpret the questions differently. That would explain a trend in the results, unrelated to personality.

nitrogen 6y ago
Wouldn't the manner in which a person interprets questions be part of their personality, especially if that interpretation is consistent between e.g. high school and their time in industry (as mine was)?
- analog31 6y ago
  Indeed that might be possible. In fact there may be sub categories within the popular categories with different behaviors, e.g., a poet whose symbol is INTJ might be a different personality than an engineer with the same symbol. This would be hard to sort out because there are vastly fewer poets than engineers. Intelligence may play a role too. Two people with the same symbols but widely different intelligence may behave differently to the point where they are identified as having different personalities. I'm speaking broadly about intelligence without necessarily believing in IQ testing.
visarga 6y ago
> people within different occupations tend to interpret the questions differently There are also other types of ambiguity. For example when asking: "Do you keep your room in order?" - you might answer "yes" because that's what you do, but you only do it because it has been enforced into you over time, while if you were alone and free you'd keep it messy. Do people respond with their instinctive reaction or with their trained reaction? Which one is the right answer? Depending on that you could get a different type.
- croes 6y ago
  There is even more ambiguity in questions like "Do you keep your room in order". First what order for some, is chaos for others. Second some people just lie to them self or ignore the truth. For example, how would a hoarder answer that question. So the self perception could differ much from the real behaviour.

MattGaiser 6y ago

> There was once a poll of engineers at the tech company I work at, and I think the results were like 70% INTJ, 25% INTP, and 5% other. If MBTI lacked all predictive power, you would expect a distribution roughly equivalent to that of the general population. Could people self-select what they "want" to be? Sure, but it's still predictive of something in that case. I was once part of an accelerator that used the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument, which basically seemed like MBTI except with more fees. And it got very similar results for the engineers in the room. Introverted analysts. And anecdotally, I know very few non INTJ engineers and the few that aren't are INTP (among those of us that have taken the test for career planning or personality testing for the workplace). I get how it may not be a rigorous way to sort people, but I want some research on whether it at least clusters them.

deleted 6y ago
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iso1210 6y ago
Does that make the information actionable? Does being an INTJ allow a prediction on anything else other than being an INTJ? What is the point in clustering them? If your team is 75% ravenclaw, 20% Hufflepuff and 5% other, how does that help? Are you going to go out and try to recruit a Slytherin? What if your team is 45% Rachel, 15% Chandler, 20% Joey? What benefit do you get from clustering people in this way?
- RogerL 6y ago
  You are spot on. I would suspect that everyone that I work with falling this cluster. You could sum us up as a bunch of nerdy engineers, and I don't think anyone would really take exception with that. But it captures almost nothing except a very small range of behavior. We are very different people. 'Sally' lights up whenever she talks of her children, but mostly pines to be a librarian one day. we have cluster b people, we have Jokers and humorous people, perhaps a bit of Asperger's, adventurers and the meek, storytellers, partiers, tea totalers. One seems to live for firing people, another I'm pretty sure I cannot model another human mind. some of us paint, play music, others disdain that stuff. Jocks and couch potatoes. Those that say they use the mtbi for self-understanding puzzle me, because it tells you nothing of any of these very human traits. knowing somebody has one of the cluster b traits for example tells you a lot about how you might need to modify your behavior to interact with them successfully in a work environment, and MB days nothing. I could go on and on on what it is not measuring. Yeah we're engineers. I knew that. I didn't need the test.

molticrystal 6y ago

Agree completely, everything has to start from somewhere. Often it is a false start with nothing to gain. While MBTI was a small step, at least it was a forward step to better understanding vs the example you mentioned, "horoscopes", which past the fleeting interest into astronomy is just walking off a cliff into the void.

rcakebread 6y ago

I read the book "What's Your Type?: The Story of the Myers-Briggs, and How Personality Testing Took Over the World" and learned it was a bit like Scientology a few decades ago. Very secretive, offered a free personality test to lure you into lots of paid courses. They were selling courses to an astonishing percentage of large corporations.

ConnorLeet 6y ago
I’ve always been amazed by how much of the self-development & improvement industry seems to be based off of Scientology!
ncmncm 6y ago
There is no Church of Myers--Briggs, and no secrets. Everything is open. There are charlatans in any field, and they will use anything. They all use money, but using money does not make you a charlatan. That corporate HR departments hire charlatans only demonstrates that HR departments will hire anybody willing to give the HR director a kickback.

dehrmann 6y ago

My main criticism is it gives the impression the traits are bimodal when they're actually more modal, giving people the impression we're more dislike than similar.

nitrogen 6y ago
I seem to recall seeing an MBTI result that showed a location on a quadrant for pairs of attributes? So you could see if you were really closer to or further from the origin. That might help with the false binary impression.
- visarga 6y ago
  I thought all MBTI tests give you scores for each axis.
  - watwut 6y ago
    It does. And then people refer to themselves by four letter, read abour description of types by 4 letter and completely ignore the scale in it.
    - pseudalopex 6y ago
      I've seen people call themselves xNTJ or INFx.

rewgs 6y ago

I’ve gotten downvoted every time I’ve come to the defense of Meyers Briggs on HN, so I’m happy to see a comment with more or less my view of it voted to the top for once. I find it to be an extremely useful abstraction. Being honest with myself and really digging into how the cognitive functions “work” has been incredibly instructive and valuable in terms of further understanding myself. It’s a REALLY high level programming language, so if you want memory management, so to speak, you’ll be disappointed. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable.

bigfudge 6y ago
This analogy breaks down though. High level languages can be slow or inefficient because they don’t map directly into reality, but they are still correct. MBTI and FFI just don’t really work at all ... they don’t predict much and if you took them too seriously as permanent traits you would make bad decisions.
anotherfish 6y ago
You probably hit the wrong "bubble". This happens. Then there's the various groupthink fashions that come and go like weather patterns on various comment sites. I doubt HN is much different. Probably better on HN but I've seen some oddball voting patterns around BLM and similar.

esperent 6y ago

The problem with these results is not that they're inaccurate, it's that people think they measure a permanent aspect of themselves. In truth, people's personalities are malleable - if you spend all your time working on a computer, you become more introverted - or at least, you start to express your introverted tendencies more strongly. If you switch jobs and have to spend all your days talking to people, you'll become more extroverted. From this perspective, of course a of a group of engineers personalities show high introversion. But are they introverted because they are engineers or engineers because they are introverted? Or is it a little from column A and a little from column B with a different ratio for each person measured? In the end, Myers Briggs is harmful because it gives a simplistic view of something complicated, and makes people believe they are stuck with a particular personality. In reality all it does is give an estimate of your outlook on the day you took the test. Personality is emergent as a response to your needs to interact with the world given your current career, relationship, peer group, social standing, and so on. It's not fixed. Or at least, it's far less fixed and far more fluid than Myers Briggs would have you believe.

0df8dkdf 6y ago
* In truth, people's personalities are malleable * Thank you for saying that. There was an interview before Carl Jung passed away, where even he talked about how in certain situation where arch type changes. We all ought to view tests like Myer Briggs as a way to shade light on people and their ways of being.
visarga 6y ago
> In truth, people's personalities are malleable That's what I observed myself - I can have different MBTI depending on situation and context. When "people change" it's mostly the context that changes, and a different personality is assumed like a role by the mind, as if the mind just wants to adapt to each situation as best possible. Reminds me of the unlimited ability of GPT-3 to assume personalities and points of view, with the right trigger you can get it to be anyone. I'm not saying people's personalities are equally flexible but they do have a degree of context flexibility.
- 6y ago

clairity 6y ago

my big criticism is that they’re taken as constants, when they can be highly dynamic quantities in different contexts. that’s what makes personality types misleading and not that useful in real life (i.e., not very predictive).

sunstone 6y ago

The best that can be said of MBTI is that it has a slight correlation with one of the Big 5 dimensions. So it's not useless but it's close to useless. On the other hand it's expensive whereas the Big Five has been validated and it's free. Really MBTI is just a waste of time and money.

souprock 6y ago
Not that correlation with Big 5 should be a determining factor, but... The chart in the article shows that E/I is strongly correlated with extraversion, S/N is strongly correlated with openness, T/F is moderately correlated with agreeableness (and weakly with conscientiousness), and J/P is moderately correlated with conscientiousness (and weakly with openness). It's not a slight correlation, so if MBTI is useless then so is Big 5. Again though, choosing Big 5 as the standard is arbitrary and unfair. That automatically judges all other systems as inferior, without examining their merit.
- pzone 6y ago
  Only one of the two systems stands up to modern standards of psychological science. If you are an HR rep and you want to predict an applicant’s job performance, you are using inferior data if you choose an MBTI test. It may have other uses, like fostering a useful discussion during an interview, but there is a very real case in which it is inferior and 5-factor personality is the standard to be judged against.
  - bigfudge 6y ago
    If you place any weight on Ffi in recruitment you are also doing it wrong though. The studies reporting ffi correlations with real world outcomes give confidence intervals not prediction intervals. For individual cases it’s mostly just noise.

DiscountChocula 6y ago

jbay808 6y ago
> For all we know urban environments are 70% INTJ. There are 16 categories, which means you'd expect about 6% in each if the test sorts evenly. It doesn't; in fact only between 2% and 3% of the population is INTJ. Unless one of the questions is literally "are you a tech worker", that's very conspicuous selectivity.
- sdenton4 6y ago
  On the other hand, a test with questions like 'are you a tech worker' might be a lot shorter and just as meaningful!
- calt 6y ago
  The test doesn't sort evenly. One of the most popular online test sites says in one of their descriptions - I forget which one - that "this is the rarest type with only x% of the population." I had a female friend who was an INTJ, and told me that it was very rare among women. Being very, INTJ, she was referencing some rigorous statistics.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    Yes, I mentioned in the next line that it doesn't sort evenly, and INTJ is particularly a minority.
Simon321 6y ago
INTJ is 2.1% of the population https://personalitymax.com/personality-types/population-gender/ https://personalitymax.com/personality-types/population-gend...

jbay808 6y ago

In grad school I joined an extracurricular social society where you meet around a table with other grad students and discuss various topics selected in advance while eating pie and other goodies. Sort of like debate but without the structure or positions. Anyway one time the topic was Myers Briggs and so we all filled out our profiles in advance so we'd have something to discuss. It was a group of 20 people, and we discovered that 19 of us were INTJ. The other was INTP. That was when I decided the test has strong predictive power, for the same reason you did. Even if it's just able to predict a preference for discussing personality tests with a plate of cherry pie. INTJ has a background rate of about 2%.

deleted 6y ago
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phreeza 6y ago
Or INTJ is what you get when you answer questions in a way that you expect to be conforming to what your fellow grad students will respect, before going to a meeting and revealing your result to them.
- jbay808 6y ago
  No. That's a very clever and cynical viewpoint but realistically, none of us cared about that. It's not like these were peers in the same lab whose opinion mattered. Nor did anyone really have a strong opinion about meyers briggs categories. If anything it almost got a little embarassing after the first five replies to keep answering the same thing as the other people - like going to a restaurant and everyone ordering, one after the next, that they want the blueberry pancakes. You almost feel like an automaton instead of being a unique and creative individual.
  - phreeza 6y ago
    Right, I didn't mean to imply that everyone was lying, I just think that wanting to fit in with a group is a strong subconscious drive in such situations. Edit: I was curious and did a quick search what the scientific literature says about this, and it seems like it is an accepted problem, though there are techniques used to reduce the effects. To quote one study: "Regarding the use of self-report personality inventories, meta-analytic results have indicated that applicants are able to, and actually do, deviate from honest responses in order to make a good impression (Alliger & Dwight, 2000; Viswesvaran & Ones, 1999). "

watwut 6y ago

> I've never really understood the harsh criticisms of MBTI. It's not super predictive, but not to be honest, nothing else in psychology is either The way psychologists see it, "this is much worst then usual uncertainity for many reasons". Also, psychology and pop psychology are two different things.

bambax 6y ago

If the aim is to help conversation during a first date, as the post implies, then why not. If such an imprecise tool is used to determine your employability, or pay grade, or career path, or access to some vital services or housing, etc. then it's unacceptable. The fact that HR professionals seem to love it is a strong indicator that it is bad and harmful.

anotherfish 6y ago

Yeah, horoscopes are fun. I used to mess with my school by shuffling the horoscopes in the weekly newsletter. No one noticed or complained.

ncmncm 6y ago
The purpose of horoscopes is to keep people from doing the same thing every day. It doesn't matter which sign you check, or even if you check the same one each time. So, scrambling them did not interfere with what people used them for. There was no reason for anyone to complain. The astro-BS just randomizes assignments, so everybody doesn't all get the same advice at the same time. You have spent years feeling smug, but the joke was on you all along.
- anotherfish 6y ago
  I felt quite good actually both then and now. But you seem angrier than you should be. Certainly angrier than someone who would have wrote "It doesn't matter which sign you check" and actually meant it.
  - mcphage 6y ago
    You interpreted them as being angry, but I think they were just laughing at you.
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      I am laughing at the mystery of existence. None of us have anything to be smug about, but we can laugh about it. Have to, really.
    - anotherfish 6y ago
      Accusations of being smug are usually made by people who chose a team and you've encroached or offended that team somehow. There's often an aspect of admonishment in using that word as well. As for my part it wasn't based on arrogance as you'd likely expect. It was simply the result of a bet. I won that bet since no one noticed.

fsloth 6y ago

Being predictive of something is the beef here. There is no sound theory of what that something is and what specifically it would predict. Binning people into excel rows by an arbitrary process is one of the hallmarks of either a pseudoscientific hoax, or an entertaining but scientifically unremarkable party game. You might as well divide people into Hogswarts houses by a similar test and it would serve similar purpose. In other words, it's a pastime driven by fictional representation of human psyche. Some groups may find this exercise fun. But this is no reason to stop hating Meyers-Brigs given it's driven by psedoscientific marketing. While it might not be harmful, it totally is a similar type of activity like homeopathy.

wisty 6y ago

There's two main personality tests. Big 5 is preferred by scientists. MBTI is preferred by people who are taking it to see which famous person (or fictional character) allegedly has the same personality. The problem isn't just the test, it's the whole culture around MBTI. Yes, the test measures something, but you're not just getting a test, you're also getting a bunch of information on how to interpret the test. You can always spot someone who takes MBTI seriously because they talk about introversion meaning they "lose energy by spending time with others and need to recharge by spending time alone".

Smaug123 6y ago
Really? I certainly don't take MBTI seriously, but I use that as a rough definition of introversion.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  Here is some potential to construct a personality meta-test: If you prefer Big 5 to MBTI, you are introverted; if you prefer MBTI to Big 5, you are extraverted. If you prefer either of them to horoscope, you are... blah blah blah... if you think all tests are problematic, you are judging; and if you are afraid you would fail at all of them, you are neurotic.

dahart 6y ago

> Could people self-select what they "want" to be? Sure, but it's still predictive of something in that case. Why would measuring self-selection be a good thing, why would that be a reason to use MBTI in your book, rather than a reason to avoid it? If it does measure self-selection, then what is the function or purpose of the test?

runarberg 6y ago

> It's not super predictive, but not to be honest, nothing else in psychology is either. This is an often cited myth. Examples of psychological effects with high predictive powers include: * The law of stimulus and response * Priming * Classical conditioning * Reinforcement learning, which further includes positive reinforcement, punishment, etc. * Plenty of neural models that predict behavioral anomalies after brain trauma. * Plenty of social psychology models that predict how people behave inside groups. * Heck even the linguist Noam Chomsky made an accurate psychological prediction based on cognitive psychology in how people acquire grammar. I think you might be confusing psychology with psychometrics which is a sub-field of psychology which holds that any psychological effect is measurable and that operational definition is a good way to establish these effects. The whole field of psychometrics has a serious problem with predictive powers of their theories. Other modern fields of psychology on the other hand has a good track record of making theories that hold good predictive powers.

rawgabbit 6y ago

Scientific studies support the Big 5 or Hexaco model of personality. Sticking with MBTI is the same as saying the earth is flat despite evidence to the contrary. MBTI was not created Jung. But my two fans of Jung. There is a huge difference.