heywood on 22/6/2020 at 15:31
I've been subjected to Myers-Briggs twice. First when I was a university student, when I worked with two friends on a year-long project to study the influence of learning style and personality type on standardized testing results. We administered a variety of different measures to about a thousand high school students across 8(?) urban and suburban schools and looked for correlations with SAT and ACT performance. MBTI was one of the measures, and we took the extended form ourselves before we got started. My result was ENTJ. This was in 1992, before the measure was widely known.
When I got married, my wife & her family insisted on a Catholic wedding, so we did the Pre-Cana thing and I took it again. This time it was the standard questionnaire, and I was ENTP. The change from mild J to mild P probably reflected my maturation after getting out into the world. It was not a surprise to me. It also might have foreshadowed my decision to abandon a career as a military officer after just six years of active duty.
Now that the MBTI is widely known because of the internet, it suffers badly from gaming the outcome. A lot of people read about it online and take the measure knowing in advance what type they want to be. Even if you try to answer the questions as honestly as you can, if you know what it's trying to measure it will indicate what personality you want to project more than what you are. So I think it has outlived it's usefulness.
Since this is relatively self-contained, I'll stop here and then take a break to compose a longer post about who I really am.
Sulphur on 22/6/2020 at 15:49
Sidebar: there are bigger problems with MBTI. The first is it's generally criticised as putting you in a box when human personalities don't operate in arbitrary type boundaries like that - which is also why you might sometimes feel that the indicator is somewhat off-base compared to your own observations of your behaviour. The second is that it's based on Jungian principles which aren't widely accepted as a psychological standard in this day and age, because our definitions and means of measuring psychological characteristics have evolved since the 20s. (There's a third, which is the inherent unreliableness/repeatability of results is a problem with MBTI - there's been some research showing the repeatability of the test is quite poor, which means in a relatively short time period you can get different results [types] by taking the same test twice.)
While MBTI's big in corporate circles these days, I think the academic community's largely moved on. Big Five tends to address both criticisms by working on a sliding scale, and being more current in terms of how we define and measure traits.
Jeshibu on 22/6/2020 at 16:09
Quote Posted by heywood
I noticed that you just defined yourself by who you hate. And before that, a personality test result.
I don't know you, so I don't know whether either of those things accurately reflects your personality. But it seems like you're projecting, which is not what Gray had in mind for this thread.
I'm guessing you're reacting to Gryzemuis' post, which was also not in the spirit of the thread. Can you guys please not interject current events, culture, and politics? We get enough of that in other threads.
Are we not shaped by our dislikes as much as our likes?
Anyway, I believe the question is largely meaningless, unless you're looking for test results, which still don't tell you a whole lot about a person. The "ENTP" post was a joke, a refutation of the question. I'm not a fan of MBTI's way of putting people in boxes and assigning characteristics to those boxes. ENTP probably isn't what I'd end up in anyway.
If we're doing layer descriptions, I guess I could describe myself as a layer of cynicism over a core of mild optimism too. But what does that tell you, really? There are a lot of people that applies to, and they can vary wildly in behavior and probably thought - and what is a personality but behavior and thought?
faetal on 22/6/2020 at 16:14
Quote Posted by Sulphur
While MBTI's big in corporate circles these days, I think the academic community's largely moved on. Big Five tends to address both criticisms by working on a sliding scale, and being more current in terms of how we define and measure traits.
I was under the impression that psychometric testing has been more or less debubunked as anything other than business tarot a few decades ago.
Sulphur on 22/6/2020 at 16:17
You'd think so, but lots of corporates use it as qualifying criteria still - and that's MBTI, forget something newer. I'm of the opinion that psychometric instruments are generally useless as anything approaching entrance or performance criteria, because why wouldn't you game that? But hiring practices generally come about from people sticking their fingers up their butts, sniffing them, and using the result as criteria, so you know... c'est les ressources humaines.
rachel on 22/6/2020 at 17:41
Re: repeatability, I got the same result more than a decade apart, so I don't know... I don't really take it too seriously, but there were major life changes and quite a few therapy sessions in between so it's interesting.
Anecdotally, of course.
faetal on 22/6/2020 at 19:18
Sure, and every time I fire up Skyrim, I sooner or later wind up being a stealth archer, but that doesn't mean the stealth archer describes me.
heywood on 22/6/2020 at 19:44
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Sidebar: there are bigger problems with MBTI. The first is it's generally criticised as putting you in a box when human personalities don't operate in arbitrary type boundaries like that - which is also why you might sometimes feel that the indicator is somewhat off-base compared to your own observations of your behaviour. The second is that it's based on Jungian principles which aren't widely accepted as a psychological standard in this day and age, because our definitions and means of measuring psychological characteristics have evolved since the 20s. (There's a third, which is the inherent unreliableness/repeatability of results is a problem with MBTI - there's been some research showing the repeatability of the test is quite poor, which means in a relatively short time period you can get different results [types] by taking the same test twice.)
I think the MBTI suffers from a few big problems.
The first problem is that it's easy to influence the outcome if you know what it's trying to measure. When I took it at the start of our project, my Professor and our sponsor were careful not to say a word about it to us before hand. It was just a long set of multiple choice questions. Then we had to get trained to administer it, and sign up with the foundation in order to get the materials. One key lesson I was taught is that it had to be administered "blind" to avoid biasing the results, and obviously not to the same person twice. When we would administer it, we always asked if somebody had heard of Myers-Briggs or Jung before, or tested before, and if so they were excluded. We didn't discuss the dichotomies with students until after they had completed the measure.
The second big problem is that the labels given to poles of each scale are not perceived as neutral by most people. That influences whether they perceive their measured type positively or negatively, and whether they perceive it to be accurate or inaccurate. My project partners and I discussed results one-on-one with a couple hundred high school students. During those discussions, no matter how hard I tried to make it clear that there were no better or worse types, I could tell by the discussion (and sometimes the look on their faces) that they liked or didn't like certain labels. The most difficult to explain is extroversion/introversion. People hear that and think I'm an extrovert or an introvert, and that's not what the measure means. Students would get hung up on the terms and miss the nuance of where you choose to employ your dominant function. The same is true to a lesser extent with some of the other poles. Not to be sexist, but the boys didn't like feeling, and some of the girls didn't like judging. Since that time, I've noticed that the textbook descriptions for each type have been revised to sound more equal and more positive, so I presume people are less likely to be disappointed by their result compared to when I used it. But the types now get cool names like "Defender", "Architect", and "Adventurer" which makes the problem worse by associating the type more closely to people's self-perceptions and aspirations. It also over-simplifies the types to the point of being pigeon holes.
A third big problem with the MBTI is that it became a big business in the late 90s. It turned into a fad that large companies and organizations jumped onto because it was marketed as a team-building tool. Suddenly everybody was taking it, often knowing the types beforehand and thus not "blind". Worse yet, there were a lot of people trying to assign types without administering the questionnaire (because they weren't certified and couldn't buy them). That doesn't work because self-image gets in the way.
Those three problems combine to make it unreliable today. Too many people have heard of it before and have already formed some opinion about the types. Even if you're trying to answer honestly, if you're aware of the types you can't help but be influenced.
A final, more minor problem is that some of the scales are imbalanced relative to the population distribution. Sensing vs. intuition is strongly skewed towards sensing, and the J-P distribution is moderately skewed towards J. There's also some degree of correlation between the scales. So the 16 types aren't close to being equally distributed across the population. Some say that's just the way it is, but I think you could get more value out of the measure if you changed the questions so that they divide the population more equally.
Pyrian on 22/6/2020 at 21:47
Not really interested in going deep into the BS at the heart of the very premise of MBTI, so I'll just post this:
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator#No_evidence_for_dichotomies)
It's 50%-75% bunk. Just bunk. We can tell from the data that there's no underlying personality trait for at least 2 of the 4 dichotomies (and that there
is for just one of them, introversion/extroversion). You could associate any random set of uncorrelated questions and/or answer completely randomly and get a very similar distribution of answers that MBTI gets.
Gryzemuis on 22/6/2020 at 22:31
Quote Posted by heywood
I'm guessing you're reacting to Gryzemuis' post, which was also not in the spirit of the thread.
I'm sorry. I wanted to tell that I view myself as someone who can sometimes be direct and blunt in words, but who tries to be nice in his acts. As example I brought up a current event where people do exactly the opposite (make a fuss about a bad joke, but then have no problem going to Qatar). If that is derailing this thread, then I don't know what we're supposed to talk about.