Keep in mind that in practice this classification is not perfect, as in you cannot just bucketize people into three categories and declare perfect understanding. You should treat the roles described in the article as archetypes of human behavior.
You would be surprised, but companies actually pay hard money to consultants to do these astrology readings and present them to shareholders as a "measure of workforce compatibility".
I think it was more popular before that book ("The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing") came out. Not that I ever believed it before that, but I assumed it was created by actual social scientists rather than two untrained amateurs as is the case.
Meyers briggs is not “astrology” - it doesn’t claim to predict anything. It categorizes how people already consciously see themselves with Carl Jungs archetypes. The main point of the archetype concept is to then explore the part of you that is different from how you see yourself- your “shadow” for the purpose of personal development.
It’s not mysterious, mystical, or claiming to be science- it’s just a very simple set of arbitrary categories to give you a different perspective on yourself, and point you in a direction of dealing with things you would otherwise avoid because it’s uncomfortable to think about. For example if you see yourself as “rational” and reject “emotional” thinking, it can be helpful to actually explore your emotional side rather than push it away.
The concept itself is a useful and simple thing, but is mostly misunderstood and misused… I don’t see how an employer testing employees would be useful.
As someone who has read Carl Jungs books, but has not encountered it in the workplace, it annoys me to see people talking derisively about it from a place of misunderstanding.
It’s astrology because it takes unimodal distributions and splits them into two groups above and below the mean. This is a cardinal sin in statistics because it implies the existence of distinct populations that don’t really exist and so any predictions you try to make are no better than a coinflip.
It actually does not do that- each dimension which represents two opposite archetypes (e.g. introvert vs extrovert) is a continuum, and the output of the test isn’t actually a single category but a point on that line for each dimension. The full output is actually a 4 dimensional vector. Importantly- everyone has both traits, it is only telling you which you more consciously identify with. Many people will be near the middle and not strongly on one end of a dimension.
Again, astrology claims to predict the future based on nonsense. MTBI makes no such claims, it predicts nothing, and it’s chosen dimensions are very transparently arbitrary value judgements, among limitless possible archetypes that one could choose.
I think you may have missed my point so I’ll give an example:
Suppose you take a random sample of adult humans and sort them by height. What you’ll see is a bimodal distribution which reflects the fact that there are actually two distinct populations represented in the sample: men and women. The sexes can be considered types and you will get reasonably accurate results for predicting height from sex and vice versa.
However, if you instead take a sample of only men and sort them by height you will see a unimodal distribution. If you then try to split this sample into two types above and below the mean, you will find that it doesn’t tell you anything!
This is what I mean when I say MBTI astrology. The archetypes are meaningless! Someone who is at 51% on the extroversion scale will get labeled an Extrovert and someone at 49% will get labeled an Introvert, but in practice these two are virtually indistinguishable and fall squarely within the margin of error. Since the distribution is unimodal the majority of the population clusters around the means, exactly what you would expect to find with the hypothesis that personality archetypes do not exist.
To follow on: why does the MBTI focus on 8 specific archetypes when there are limitless others?
It is indeed a totally arbitrary choice, and a value judgement. These are ones that Carl Jung thought particularly important based on his philosophy of personal development, and experience as a clinical psychologist. Of the ones Jung talked about MBTI further selected an even more limited set.
Personally, I think it is more useful to skip the MTBI and just use Jungs original text.
I don’t think I missed your point but you missed mine. If someone is 51% or 49% it is misleading to classify- which is why the test actually outputs a vector.
Archetypes are fairly arbitrary concepts that isolate individual aspects among thousands that could potentially explain personality traits- they don’t claim to exist in real people.
It is critical to realize that in the dimensions on MBTI everyone is actually both, but some people strongly identify with one and reject or despise the part of themselves that represents the other.
I attempted to explain what it is useful for above, but will elaborate.
The valuable result is the extreme opposite of your result- it is a therapy or personal development tool that directs you to explore and understand parts of yourself you reject or disapprove of (your “shadow”).
It simply quantifies something obvious that you already know: how you consciously see yourself- in a way that guides you to explore aspects of yourself that you otherwise would choose to avoid because it’s difficult and possibly even painful to do so.
What it measures is actually pretty banal and obvious if you are familiar with Jungian archetypes- one can easily guess the result for yourself and other people without using the test.
> The valuable result is the extreme opposite of your result- it is a therapy or personal development tool that directs you to explore and understand parts of yourself you reject or disapprove of (your “shadow”).
Look, I too have read Jung and agree with what you're saying here, but this is emphatically NOT how MBTI tends to be used in corporate settings, which is what everyone else in this thread is talking about.
I agree, it is being misunderstood and misused. Instead of using it as a tool for deep introspection, it seems to be used for the condescending purpose of “fabricating a mystical 3rd party authority get our idiot employees to notice that people have different personalities and everyone else isn’t just a carbon copy of them.” Which sounds like an irredeemably awful workplace situation, and I don’t envy people in it.
This part also seems like it was intended to be predictive:
>Briggs and Myers began creating their indicator during World War II (1939–1945)[7] in the belief that a knowledge of personality preferences would help women entering the industrial workforce for the first time to identify the sorts of war-time jobs that would be the "most comfortable and effective" for them
You are correct- what used to be considered scientific psychology is not up to the standards of rigor that we would still call it science nowadays.
It was at one point used as a psychology research tool, but it does not work well for e.g. predicting mental health outcome differences in different groups of people, and has been superseded by things like the Big Five personality traits, which are slightly better but also probably not that useful. MBTI is probably inappropriate and useless in the workplace as other people on here are complaining about.
Nowadays, I don't think it is appropriate to use it for anything except "for fun" or as a simplified tool for making sense of and using some of Carl Jungs ideas and techniques.
Carl Jung himself has had a lot of pushback in modern times for not using scientific methodology, and having ideas and methods that aren't even testable with modern scientific methods. I've heard people even say he "set psychology back 50 years with pseudoscience."
I disagree with that, because his methods and ideas work very well for myself and a lot of people. I think he was way ahead of his time in finding "hacks" that work to improve mental health, and overcome psychological challenges... however his ideas and methods were so far ahead of his time it will be a very long time still before they could potentially be connected to any sort of mechanistic or biological psychology, or neuroscience. They should probably be regarded more as spiritual or psychotherapy tools, in the same vein as things like meditation- but still not totally worthless nonsense like astrology.
I went through mbti at a workplace and it was used to give us an understanding of our co-workers.
Your point that it's a self assessment and thus only "how you see yourself" and not.. y'know, how you actually behave, is in retrospect "no shit" but I missed this crucial point.
It kind of changes every conversation with anyone I've ever had about our result.
It sounds like it is being misused and misunderstood in a way that is actually BS.
The way it relates to others is more subtle than that:
Say someone is strongly extroverted and sees introversion as a negative thing… and dislikes and disapproves of their more introverted co-workers. If they come to explore, understand, and accept their own introverted aspects it will also take the steam out of their dislike for others who show those traits.
This is true for any kind of generalization. Having said that, I can really see this at my company.
At the beginning I was a high-perfoming loser. Then I realized how things work, and since then I do bare minimum. I wish I could be a sociopath, but I don't have the brains nor the lack of morals to do so. I passionately hate the clueless ones because they stand against everything I believe in. My dream is to save enough money not to have to take part in this circus anymore.
You don’t really need to be a clinical sociopath for that - you need to know enough to employ the characteristics in order to reach your own goal, which might not be a selfish one at all.
