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What can a popular personality test teach you?

This is off the beaten path, but this tweet reminded me of something:

The Myers-Briggs personality test gets a lot of abuse, and mostly for good reason. It's a mish-mash of stuff based loosely on Jungian archetypes that are no longer taken seriously, and it has little connection to modern views of personality traits. It's never been tested for validity or reliability, and its 16 different personality types (or "Type Indicators," thus MBTI as the formal name of the test) are probably kind of meaningless.

But that doesn't make it useless. It's fun and easy to take, and if you administer it to a large group it teaches a valuable lesson: people are different. That may seem pretty obvious, but it's surprisingly less obvious than you'd think. If you watch group interactions—especially contentious ones—it's clear that lots of people operate with no real understanding that other people aren't just being stubborn about recognizing "obvious" truths; they genuinely have different ways of viewing the world.

One of the things the MBTI does is devote some time to explaining (a) how different personality types are good at different things, and (b) how you should interact with different personality types. Even if the specific advice is questionable, the simple idea that you should acknowledge differences in people and act accordingly is fairly valuable.

POSTSCRIPT: Of course you want to know what personality type I am. I'm an INTJ. Is that meaningless? Well, the MBTI is basically a set of questions that asks things about your personality. Do you like being around other people? Do you like to work through problems logically? Are you empathetic toward other people?

In a nutshell (to take just one personality trait), it asks in various ways if you're introverted or extroverted. If you mostly answer extroverted, then it says you're extroverted. Amazing! This is not rocket science, and it's likely to be at least reasonably accurate. So even on this measure, I doubt the MBTI is all that bad. I mean, that INTJ description sounds a lot like me, doesn't it?

31 thoughts on “What can a popular personality test teach you?

  1. ejfagan

    I'm not a psychologist but come across political science research using the Big 4 personality traits from time to time. My understanding of the criticism of the Myers-Briggs types is that they suggest that people form distinct personality types, rather than most people being average on most traits. Some people are very intro or extroverted, but the population forms a normal distribution around the average. Thus, Myers-Briggs types aren't strongly associated with other behavior that we might expect people's personality to be associated with, such as partisanship. One of the tests for construct validity when designing a measurement system is whether the resulting variable is related to things you would expect it to be related to. Myers-Briggs looks much closer to a random variable (read: not measuring something real) than, say, the Big 4 personality traits, which can be used to predict things like partisanship and other political behavior.

    1. Steve_OH

      This is, I believe, the biggest criticism of Myers-Briggs: the way that the results are presented suggest dichotomies rather than spectra. Ironically, the data that could be used to present the results as spectra are actually there in the test report; it's just ignored in favor of discretizing the information into 16 bins.

  2. cld

    Do I like being around other people? Sure. But I know plenty of people who like it a lot more than I do, yet we would all answer yes to that question.

    Meyers-Briggs asks for an entirely subjective evaluation of your self, so the end result lacks context or scale.

    I've taken versions of this a couple times but I can never remember what it ends up telling me, and this drops from my mind within about a minute of having taken it. They never ask that question.

  3. Jim Grey

    All models are wrong; some are useful. I forget who said that originally.

    I'm an INFP and an Enneagram 4. These lenses through which to look at myself have let me make some self-improvements. So these models have been useful to me!

  4. Anandakos

    "I mean, that INTJ description sounds a lot like me, doesn't it?"

    That sounds like a judgmental thing to say about someone. And of course an Introvert would primarily be interested in themself, right?

  5. DButch

    In a management seminar back at DEC we got run through several of those tests. I also came up INTJ on Myers-Briggs. I kind of liked my Transactional Analysis results - very high Adult, very high Child, absolutely no Parent. I did a quick search and I noticed on one site that one variant of TA now subdivides the Parent and Child categories into two "states". Parent can be Nurturing or Critical, Child can be Adaptive or Free.

  6. Old Fogey

    These silly things would probably be better if people who know the subject were the ones describing the person instead of the subject doing so. Our human ability for self deception and non existent self insight are always there.

  7. dausuul

    In the course of my life, I have taken a number of versions of the MBTI, and collected (so far) four different personality types, depending on which version I took and when in my life I took it. The only axis that has never flipped for me is the I/E axis, which just so happens to be the one component that directly maps to a Big Five trait.

    I do agree that the lesson of "different people think differently" is valuable, but it would be nice if it could come without all the pseudoscience gabble.

  8. cephalopod

    With Myers-Briggs there does seem to be some connection between the categories and the personality traits of the people in them. At least it seems fairly right for the people I know who've taken it.

    Unfortunately, I had a boss who wanted to assign work tasks and work groups based on our Myers-Briggs results, which was asinine and she couldn't even do it well. Just because I am an extrovert, it does not mean I like planning all the office parties.

    We also did the Strengthsfinder, which mostly gave a name to the traits we'd already noticed in each other. I, for example, scored high as an "initiator." I was already known as the person in the office with the reputation for putting out "work fires" (I work in a field dominated by personalities who are much more likely to ruminate than take immediate action, so my tendency stood out).

  9. NealB

    Hard to know never having met Kevin Drum, about the I at the beginning. But he's a good writer, so the N makes sense. All the data and charts prove T. And I don't know if he took the test today that he'd still get the J, but he'd know how to answer the questions to get whatever he wants. MBTI is a puzzle and it's worth figuring out.

  10. Dana Decker

    INTJ (least common, if memory serves) is the apex of human behavior. I know that because I'm an INTJ. And INTJs are never wrong. Ever.

    1. iamr4man

      You will have to go a long way to convince me that Lance Armstrong and Arnold Schwarzenegger are at the “apex” of human behavior unless that word doesn’t mean what I think it means.

  11. Perry

    Substitute the word astrology for MBTI or Meyers Briggs and see if you still agree with your own comments. Reading a profile such as INTJ and finding bits that match your sense of yourself is no different than reading a astrological horoscope and confirming that parts that are like you, because someone told you that was your sign. All of them are so general that anyone can find a lot to confirm about any profile.

    Where is Amazing Randi when we need him?

  12. pjcamp1905

    I thought INTI had to do with your navel?

    I figured out the Meyers-Briggs was complete bullshit decades ago when I noticed it has no negative personality traits. I don't know about you but I've met a gracious plenty of toxic personalities in my life, and dated more than one. If the test can't characterize them then it is bullshit.

    1. name99

      One could say that there are no negative personality traits, only negative pairs when incompatible personalities interact.

      Is that (at least mostly) true? I have no opinion, but I could believe it.
      It does feel in some interactions that things go south for no one person's fault, just because each side does things differently. for example:
      - I try to explain things in great detail so that there's no misunderstanding, and you immediately assume this means I am treating you as an idiot who doesn't understand the subject. (Ah, that beautiful, oh so helpful word, "mansplaining").

  13. Vog46

    A LONG time ago I took a "test" called Personalysis which is kinda like this. My boss made me do it as we had JUST gotten a new company President and she wanted to make sure I started off on the right foot with him. I was EXTREMELY independent, willing to go it alone, technically oriented. I also shyed away from groups.
    HE was the direct opposite. My boss coached me on how to approach him. I was stunned when she said after the first month I was a manager he held in high regard. It really worked !!
    The business itself suffered and I did get laid off as a cost cutting move a year later. But now I pay attention to how other people act in most situations. It's an interesting subject............

  14. Winslow2

    One of the best office exercises we did (led by an outside facilitator) involved choosing from a wide variety of photo cards. We were to pick the card that we liked/related to the most. I chose a photo of a person standing in a boat on a pond, fishing in the early morning mist. My colleague chose a photo of a person about to bungee-jump. He looked at my card and said, "That would make me lose my mind." It was a fast way to gain interesting insight into another person's personality, and it taught us a lot about each other. I can never remember my MBTI.

  15. Scott_F

    LOL.
    MBTI Practitioner here.
    Kevin is correct that the most important take away is that other people don't see things the way you do.
    That said, the critics all love the Big 5 because it uses spectra instead of "categories". But the funny thing is that the MBTI and Big 5 have medium-strong correlations so they are measuring the same aspects of personality. As to validation, when you look at the four dichotomies separately along with the 16 "pigeon holes", the test stands up. It's not perfect but it ain't nothin'
    Psychology is such a messy business that I find it ironic that the establishment bashes MBTI and then gives us a therapy based on ancient Stoic philosophy.

  16. Uncle Jess

    At a large (100 people) work meeting we all took the Meyer Briggs test. When we got our scores back, we were asked to sit with similar types. It was astounding. When I saw the groups I though No Way, but after thinking a bit it became clear. I used the test to improve the way I dealt with some people and it helped. Just an anecdote, not claiming scientific truth.
    BTW, I'm a fellow INTJ.

  17. name99

    Like everything in the world (kinda the point of Kevin's post) it depends.
    In PARTICULAR it depends on whether the interactions one is having are "emotional" or "intellectual".

    For "intellectual" type interactions, the background personalities may matter a lot less than the background assumptions as to how the world works. This is being tracked by
    https://myprimals.com/discover-your-primals/

    Let's see if this particular way of slicing up the world gives us more value that Meyer-Briggs or Jonathan Haidt...
    (Ultimately, I think, this stuff is only valuable insofar as it has some sort of predictive power. As long as it remains a form of higher onanism ["oh personality test, you get me, you really do you. You understand how I am the most interesting thing in the world, unlike all those other phonies out there who just don't get it"] basically who cares?)

  18. Heysus

    Myers Briggs is good for teachers to find students best learn. As we age, with experience, our personalities change. Wait and see. Like Kevin, I have moved to an INTJ and I'm old.

  19. Kalimac

    Easy to take? On the contrary, I found Meyers-Briggs -impossible- to take, and its presentation of spectra as dichotomies was the primary reason. To almost every question I had one of three replies, 1) "It depends on what you mean by that" 2) "Sometimes one, sometimes the other" 3) "Compared to whom?" I handed back the sheet almost entirely blank.
    Horoscopes are not BS, the sun signs are a very useful method of classifying people. What's BS is that it has anything to do with your birth date.

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