4 ms·

Isn't MBTI largely pseudo-science?

by pitaj 2y ago

salomonk_mur 2y ago
Doesn't mean there isn't some meaningful signal in its results. Signal/noise ratio might be lower than with actual science, but there is so much data using the framework that the signal part is still useful.
- jcranmer 2y ago
  ... That is kinda what it means though: the apparent success of the framework would come not from being grounded in any truth but from humans mistaking noise for signal. Are you going to argue that astrology has meaningful signal? (Although, that said, the one thing of MBTI that does comport with modern understanding of personality is that introversion-extroversion is one of the main axes, although unlike MBTI's theory, it's more of a gaussian normal distribution than a bimodal distribution).
  - madcaptenor 2y ago
    Does MBTI ever really say that the distributions are supposed to be bimodal? My impression was that it's not quantitatively rigorous enough to say that it makes that claim, but I could be wrong.
    - jcranmer 2y ago
      The basic theory of MBTI is that it doesn't really matter what degree of introvert you are, it's the difference between introvert and extrovert that matters, and that there's not really a group of people who are neither introverts nor extroverts (which is how it differs from other personality theories, including the one it's based on). Granted, this part of the theory doesn't really get explored much in its usage in popular psychology.
      - ulbu 2y ago
        and if someone is veering very strongly onto one side to the detriment of another, we get pathologies. like people who can never stay with themselves without great despair or make a decision of their own, or incels and racists who are thoroughly incapable of fitting into their world the autonomy of the object, building their life around the idea of subjecting it to their will.
yyuugg 2y ago
It's absolutely pseudo science. People love it, and it's useful as a tool to recognize "different humans problem solve differently", but like, taking it more seriously than that is a problem.
- slimsag 2y ago
  While there is criticism of MBTI, it can actually be quite useful in sparking interesting conversations about work styles and preferences. It also helps people reflect on their own tendencies/behaviors in general. I won't pretend its perfect, but it can be a fun team-building exercise and provide common language for discussing differences. We are working on a stealth startup which will use AI to analyze e.g. Slack messages and build out results of personality tests using methods like MBTI, so that e.g. when reaching out to someone in your workplace, you can get view a personalized overview of how to interact with that person, their behavior, how they might prefer you communicate with them, etc. Email in my bio for anyone interested, we're looking for early adopters.
  - musiciangames 2y ago
    I wish you success, however... In my current team we all sit down about every six months and agree how we should communicate, giving our own preferences. After a few weeks, it's back to normal, i.e. 90% of the team making real-time interrupts in Teams, irrespective of stated preference, urgency, whether info is supplied as agreed, etc. I don't see it being much different because an AI tells them so.
  - lee-rhapsody 2y ago
    That's a really interesting idea, but how do you make a business case for something like that? It'd be far too easy to just resort to whatever the organization's cultural norm is, especially for high-priority comms. I couldn't see myself paying for something like that, anyway, but would be interested to hear your business case.
betenoire 2y ago
Grouping humans into 16 categories is pseudo science. The idea that we have traits and tendencies is not, and these things help us understand our own biases if we choose.
lee-rhapsody 2y ago
It is. I find Big 5/OCEAN to be both more scientifically validated and more intuitive to use, as all Big 5 traits exist on a spectrum. It's much easier to understand what it means when someone says they're in the 25th percentile for extraversion (that is, 75% of people are more extraverted than you), and tease out what implications that trait has, than for them to say, "I'm an INTJ" and you need to know not only those 4 traits, but the "cognitive functions" beneath them and how they interact with each other.
mckirk 2y ago
I looked into this a bit a while ago, and what I've learned basically boils down to: The MBTI does measure aspects that roughly correlate with other, scientifically accepted measures (such as the Big Five, where the classic MBTI basically is only missing the 'neuroticism' aspect, which is added as another dimension in some variants of the MBTI). As such, I believe it does have some validity on its own. But the big problem is that the MBTI simply dissects every one of its dimension into two halves and your 'type' is based on which respective halves you fall into. But if your personality dimensions are well-calibrated, you would expect most people to fall exactly into the middle of the scale, and so it's pretty silly to then fully assign them to the camp they just barely end up in. This still kind of works for people that very clearly are at one end of the spectrum in all the dimensions, but it doesn't really work well for the majority of people. All that is to say, I think if there was something like the MBTI that also had a neuroticism axis, and would use three intervals (of roughly equal 'expected size' among the general population) per dimension, it would be a lot more accurate. But at that point, you'd basically just have a clustering of the Big Five into 243 'types' -- which makes it a lot less handy than the neat '16 personalities' the MBTI offers.
hindsightbias 2y ago
Given 99% of people have never pondered their work behavior or personality impact on work, it's a 0 to 1 thing.
karaterobot 2y ago
What does MBTI have to do with this article? This is a genuine question, since I can only read the abstract. If it's just the word introversion, my understanding is that introversion is still considered a meaningful concept, and its validity is not related to Meyers-Briggs at all.
- throw4847285 2y ago
  Because the other main term being used in the piece is Intuitive. When I see the words Intuitive and Introverted, I think, "Huh, that's halfway to an MBTI." Also, yes, introversion is a concept in more rigorous forms of personality science, but it's normally distributed. The idea of a sharp binary between E and I is very MBTI and complete BS. It's great for identity formation, bad for actually understanding human behavior.
  - karaterobot 2y ago
    I see! I mean, as long as they define what they mean by introversion and intuition, and how each relates to their experiment, it's not necessarily an issue. If they're saying that their research depends on MBTI, I agree that's weird. I guess I am revealing how low my requirements for social science, and especially business management research are, along with my correspondingly low confidence in them. All of this, with the huge caveat that I can't actually read the whole article, so I'm just speaking in hypotheticals.
    - throw4847285 2y ago
      From what I understand, the psychology behind trait theory is still being developed, but the Big Five represents the best model that we currently have. Even for psychologists uncomfortable with rigid personality characterization (for good reasons), the Big Five can still be seen as some of the basic building blocks of human temperament. Introversion/extroversion is in both, but while in the MBTI it's a binary identity (as this article seems to posit), in the Big Five it's a spectrum that is close to normally distributed.
theonemind 2y ago
It's useful. It's not science. Those two statements don't have any contradiction. "Pseudo-science" sounds like a dismissal without further evaluation beyond "is it science?" In practice, it's more useful than the scientific big 5 model of personality.
- throw4847285 2y ago
  How is it more useful than the Big 5? I find the Big 5 to have far more explanatory power. Openness to Experience especially is an under-discussed factor in human relationships.
  - lee-rhapsody 2y ago
    Strong agree. Once I understood Big 5, my understanding of myself opened up far more than MBTI ever helped with.
    - throw4847285 2y ago
      The fact that the MBTI frantically added a fifth type for neuroticism is all the evidence you that at best it's playing catch up real personality science. The MBTI is all about profiting off of a human desire for belonging, which is why all the examples that the major sites give for each type are historical heroes (are you more of an Abraham Lincoln or Joan of Arc). Neuroticism is a harder sell, but guess what? Thinking of myself as a sensitive/neurotic person has been extremely enlightening, more than all the MBTI results in the world. I'm preaching to the choir, but I get fired up about this stuff.
ebiester 2y ago
This isn't MBTI. I got confused as well.. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10596011221121461 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/105960112211214... talks about an "intuitive cognitive style" which looks to tie to https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256450858_Not_All_Great_Minds_Think_Alike_Systematic_and_Intuitive_Cognitive_Styles https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256450858_Not_All_G... as the easiest place to start, but I'm seeing research back to Cognitive Continuum Theory. I'm still digging in (this looks like a productive rabbit hole) but this looks like a more rigorous paper based on a different foundation.
perrygeo 2y ago
MBTI has decent-ish correlations with career choice. IIRC something like >90% of architects are INT_s (introverted thinkers) and > 80% of counselors/therapist are INF_s (introverted feelers). But the correlations are not strong enough, nor do they imply causality. And there are other personality metrics which have more predictive power. That's not to say MBTI has no predictive power - it has some but they are weak. If all you know about someone is their MBTI type, you have more information on their personality than, say, knowing their hair color.
insonable 2y ago
It's based on analytical psychology from the 1920s as Jung laid out in "Psychological Types." The funny thing is MBTI was developed for carbon copy paper and as an instrument to quickly type people. So they created the 4th column because in their scoring and layout, they couldn't indicate whether the person was more perceptive (N or S) or reasoning (T or F) focused by putting one in front of the other as Jung did, and also, in their test I guess they found it easier to figure out which function type you extraverted rather than what the attitude (introversion or extroversion) of your primary function was directly. This leads to a lot of confusion. Jung for example might call a type "Introverted Intuitive with Feeling", and in MBTI that is INFJ, where the J means they extrovert the Feeling, but are primarily actually perceivers! Then there's Introverted Feeling with Intuition, which in MBTI is INFP, the P here meaning they extrovert intuition, but since they're primarily introverted they are "introverted feelers" foremost. I think this MBTI formulation has really made Jung's ideas unnecessarily confusing. Also, Jung himself was not fond of people typing others, and thought people ought to learn the ideas and type themselves and of course allowed and discussed that some are not differentiated strongly in some dimensions, although he did view that as being a sort of lack of development. So is it science? I guess I'd call it an interesting analytical model and leave it at that.

Isn't MBTI largely pseudo-science?

by pitaj 2y ago

Isn't MBTI largely pseudo-science?

Doesn't mean there isn't some meaningful signal in its results. Signal/noise ratio might be lower than with actual science, but there is so much data using the framework that the signal part is still useful.

jcranmer 2y ago
... That is kinda what it means though: the apparent success of the framework would come not from being grounded in any truth but from humans mistaking noise for signal. Are you going to argue that astrology has meaningful signal? (Although, that said, the one thing of MBTI that does comport with modern understanding of personality is that introversion-extroversion is one of the main axes, although unlike MBTI's theory, it's more of a gaussian normal distribution than a bimodal distribution).
- madcaptenor 2y ago
  Does MBTI ever really say that the distributions are supposed to be bimodal? My impression was that it's not quantitatively rigorous enough to say that it makes that claim, but I could be wrong.
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    The basic theory of MBTI is that it doesn't really matter what degree of introvert you are, it's the difference between introvert and extrovert that matters, and that there's not really a group of people who are neither introverts nor extroverts (which is how it differs from other personality theories, including the one it's based on). Granted, this part of the theory doesn't really get explored much in its usage in popular psychology.
    - ulbu 2y ago
      and if someone is veering very strongly onto one side to the detriment of another, we get pathologies. like people who can never stay with themselves without great despair or make a decision of their own, or incels and racists who are thoroughly incapable of fitting into their world the autonomy of the object, building their life around the idea of subjecting it to their will.

yyuugg 2y ago

It's absolutely pseudo science. People love it, and it's useful as a tool to recognize "different humans problem solve differently", but like, taking it more seriously than that is a problem.

slimsag 2y ago
While there is criticism of MBTI, it can actually be quite useful in sparking interesting conversations about work styles and preferences. It also helps people reflect on their own tendencies/behaviors in general. I won't pretend its perfect, but it can be a fun team-building exercise and provide common language for discussing differences. We are working on a stealth startup which will use AI to analyze e.g. Slack messages and build out results of personality tests using methods like MBTI, so that e.g. when reaching out to someone in your workplace, you can get view a personalized overview of how to interact with that person, their behavior, how they might prefer you communicate with them, etc. Email in my bio for anyone interested, we're looking for early adopters.
- musiciangames 2y ago
  I wish you success, however... In my current team we all sit down about every six months and agree how we should communicate, giving our own preferences. After a few weeks, it's back to normal, i.e. 90% of the team making real-time interrupts in Teams, irrespective of stated preference, urgency, whether info is supplied as agreed, etc. I don't see it being much different because an AI tells them so.
- lee-rhapsody 2y ago
  That's a really interesting idea, but how do you make a business case for something like that? It'd be far too easy to just resort to whatever the organization's cultural norm is, especially for high-priority comms. I couldn't see myself paying for something like that, anyway, but would be interested to hear your business case.

betenoire 2y ago

Grouping humans into 16 categories is pseudo science. The idea that we have traits and tendencies is not, and these things help us understand our own biases if we choose.

lee-rhapsody 2y ago

It is. I find Big 5/OCEAN to be both more scientifically validated and more intuitive to use, as all Big 5 traits exist on a spectrum. It's much easier to understand what it means when someone says they're in the 25th percentile for extraversion (that is, 75% of people are more extraverted than you), and tease out what implications that trait has, than for them to say, "I'm an INTJ" and you need to know not only those 4 traits, but the "cognitive functions" beneath them and how they interact with each other.

mckirk 2y ago

I looked into this a bit a while ago, and what I've learned basically boils down to: The MBTI does measure aspects that roughly correlate with other, scientifically accepted measures (such as the Big Five, where the classic MBTI basically is only missing the 'neuroticism' aspect, which is added as another dimension in some variants of the MBTI). As such, I believe it does have some validity on its own. But the big problem is that the MBTI simply dissects every one of its dimension into two halves and your 'type' is based on which respective halves you fall into. But if your personality dimensions are well-calibrated, you would expect most people to fall exactly into the middle of the scale, and so it's pretty silly to then fully assign them to the camp they just barely end up in. This still kind of works for people that very clearly are at one end of the spectrum in all the dimensions, but it doesn't really work well for the majority of people. All that is to say, I think if there was something like the MBTI that also had a neuroticism axis, and would use three intervals (of roughly equal 'expected size' among the general population) per dimension, it would be a lot more accurate. But at that point, you'd basically just have a clustering of the Big Five into 243 'types' -- which makes it a lot less handy than the neat '16 personalities' the MBTI offers.

hindsightbias 2y ago

Given 99% of people have never pondered their work behavior or personality impact on work, it's a 0 to 1 thing.

karaterobot 2y ago

What does MBTI have to do with this article? This is a genuine question, since I can only read the abstract. If it's just the word introversion, my understanding is that introversion is still considered a meaningful concept, and its validity is not related to Meyers-Briggs at all.

throw4847285 2y ago
Because the other main term being used in the piece is Intuitive. When I see the words Intuitive and Introverted, I think, "Huh, that's halfway to an MBTI." Also, yes, introversion is a concept in more rigorous forms of personality science, but it's normally distributed. The idea of a sharp binary between E and I is very MBTI and complete BS. It's great for identity formation, bad for actually understanding human behavior.
- karaterobot 2y ago
  I see! I mean, as long as they define what they mean by introversion and intuition, and how each relates to their experiment, it's not necessarily an issue. If they're saying that their research depends on MBTI, I agree that's weird. I guess I am revealing how low my requirements for social science, and especially business management research are, along with my correspondingly low confidence in them. All of this, with the huge caveat that I can't actually read the whole article, so I'm just speaking in hypotheticals.
  - throw4847285 2y ago
    From what I understand, the psychology behind trait theory is still being developed, but the Big Five represents the best model that we currently have. Even for psychologists uncomfortable with rigid personality characterization (for good reasons), the Big Five can still be seen as some of the basic building blocks of human temperament. Introversion/extroversion is in both, but while in the MBTI it's a binary identity (as this article seems to posit), in the Big Five it's a spectrum that is close to normally distributed.

theonemind 2y ago

It's useful. It's not science. Those two statements don't have any contradiction. "Pseudo-science" sounds like a dismissal without further evaluation beyond "is it science?" In practice, it's more useful than the scientific big 5 model of personality.

throw4847285 2y ago
How is it more useful than the Big 5? I find the Big 5 to have far more explanatory power. Openness to Experience especially is an under-discussed factor in human relationships.
- lee-rhapsody 2y ago
  Strong agree. Once I understood Big 5, my understanding of myself opened up far more than MBTI ever helped with.
  - throw4847285 2y ago
    The fact that the MBTI frantically added a fifth type for neuroticism is all the evidence you that at best it's playing catch up real personality science. The MBTI is all about profiting off of a human desire for belonging, which is why all the examples that the major sites give for each type are historical heroes (are you more of an Abraham Lincoln or Joan of Arc). Neuroticism is a harder sell, but guess what? Thinking of myself as a sensitive/neurotic person has been extremely enlightening, more than all the MBTI results in the world. I'm preaching to the choir, but I get fired up about this stuff.

ebiester 2y ago

This isn't MBTI. I got confused as well.. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10596011221121461 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/105960112211214... talks about an "intuitive cognitive style" which looks to tie to https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256450858_Not_All_Great_Minds_Think_Alike_Systematic_and_Intuitive_Cognitive_Styles https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256450858_Not_All_G... as the easiest place to start, but I'm seeing research back to Cognitive Continuum Theory. I'm still digging in (this looks like a productive rabbit hole) but this looks like a more rigorous paper based on a different foundation.

perrygeo 2y ago

MBTI has decent-ish correlations with career choice. IIRC something like >90% of architects are INT_s (introverted thinkers) and > 80% of counselors/therapist are INF_s (introverted feelers). But the correlations are not strong enough, nor do they imply causality. And there are other personality metrics which have more predictive power. That's not to say MBTI has no predictive power - it has some but they are weak. If all you know about someone is their MBTI type, you have more information on their personality than, say, knowing their hair color.

insonable 2y ago

It's based on analytical psychology from the 1920s as Jung laid out in "Psychological Types." The funny thing is MBTI was developed for carbon copy paper and as an instrument to quickly type people. So they created the 4th column because in their scoring and layout, they couldn't indicate whether the person was more perceptive (N or S) or reasoning (T or F) focused by putting one in front of the other as Jung did, and also, in their test I guess they found it easier to figure out which function type you extraverted rather than what the attitude (introversion or extroversion) of your primary function was directly. This leads to a lot of confusion. Jung for example might call a type "Introverted Intuitive with Feeling", and in MBTI that is INFJ, where the J means they extrovert the Feeling, but are primarily actually perceivers! Then there's Introverted Feeling with Intuition, which in MBTI is INFP, the P here meaning they extrovert intuition, but since they're primarily introverted they are "introverted feelers" foremost. I think this MBTI formulation has really made Jung's ideas unnecessarily confusing. Also, Jung himself was not fond of people typing others, and thought people ought to learn the ideas and type themselves and of course allowed and discussed that some are not differentiated strongly in some dimensions, although he did view that as being a sort of lack of development. So is it science? I guess I'd call it an interesting analytical model and leave it at that.