The value of Myers-Briggs has nothing to do with its accuracy: Good tests start by telling you that humans are too complex for a 4 axes characterization.
The value of MB is teaching interaction. Many people, esp those in tech fields, have a high degree of "I'm like me, therefore everybody is like me." Thinking about how "the other half" lives and works causes a new language to develop between different folks which can be very powerful.
Here's an example: Development people are quite different than straight operations people. In MB-land, you might say the devs tend more towards N and ops tends towards S. I can't tell you how many hardware products I've seen die because of the failure to bridge that gap, with each side driving the other up a wall.
A more interesting question for me is - Are there distinct personality types at all? My anecdote: I lived in a very white, very blue collar suburb of Vancouver for the first 20 years of my life and did not know anyone who wasn't in the same boat as me. Then I started working in an area that was dominated by Indian immigrants. I was surprised to find out that people where the same they just had different faces and names.
By that I mean that Raj was very similar to Steve, they laughed at the same sort of humor, they acted similar, they could have traded bodies (ala "Freaky Friday") and nobody would have noticed. At 26 I moved to Tucson AZ and the whole cycle repeated. Now I was living in an area that was 50% Hispanic. The same cycle repeated itself, where I met people that seemed to me to be personality clones of others I had known before. Now it was Juan who was just like Raj or Steve from my past. It felt like to me there was 12-16 basic personalities out there and I thought I could understand where the seed of Astrology or Meyers-Briggs sprouted from.
Now I am an employer of about 10 people in a manufacturing company. I have seen many people come and go, and after a while you see patterns. Of course humans are known to find patterns where none exist, so maybe I am just fooling myself. This foolishness keeps popping up though, whenever I meet someone new and I think "He is just like Steve, or Raj or Juan" and possibly this helps or hurts our relationships on some hidden level.
edit: I am Scorpio but have never taken the Meyers-Briggs test. I do apparently have nine of my planets in the house of money for any investors out there that are basing their portfolios on astrological principles :)
I dunno. I try to consciously avoiding reframing people in the context of a certain personality template or whatever. I prefer taking people at face value and gradually forming an opinion as to who they are while consciously dissociating the superficial characteristics. This is not an easy task and something I work very hard to do (and often fail).
( This is mainly because I was born and have lived in quite a few countries which were very different from the region that my race originates from: I have found that people take a shortcut to judging others which always annoys me. Some do it based on race, e.g. You are Ashkenazi jewish, you must be so smart. Others based on superficial personality traits observed in biased environments: You look so vibrant and love to talk, you clearly are an extrovert. )
I suspect the evolutionary advantage of having these short cuts is that it helps you size up a situation really quickly. However, in this rapidly changing world of ours, I find this to be a hindrance. People rarely are unidimensional and have significant personality shifts depending on who they interact with or who they talk to. E.g. I was working with a potential advisor back in School who is known to be a paranoid insecure tyrant who is incredibly sarcastic and mean to his grad. students. On the other hand, this person has been in a committed, long term relationship with his significant other, brought up kids in what could be described as the most gentle patient person.
( I realize that we are both trading anecdotes here but I tried looking for hard science to back this up a few years back and all I found were speculations.)
If you look for similarities, you will be able to find them. If you look for differences, you will be able to find those, too. Is a platypus a mammal even though it lays eggs? (Yes. But why does the categorization matter?) Is Pluto a planet?
The thing about the MBTI, and other personality tests, is that they're tools. You have to treat them as tools; they're not authorities. They're methodologies. I enjoy taking personality tests and classifying myself and the like. I like having a label; that's a facet of my particular psyche. But I don't give them a huge weight; I let them influence my self-reflection and then I move on.
(Incidentally, astrology is far more complicated than personality typing. The popular kind today is just a simplified natal horoscope; here's a more complex natal horoscope that's a lot more interesting: http://chaosastrology.com/ Also take a look at http://www.friesian.com/elements.htm for more fun.)
One trait that I've seen about Scorpios is that very few of them can get along together: whether that be friends, lovers, business partners, or other closely affiliated people. I've seen this time and time again, sometimes with me not even noticing. I am a Scorpio as well as my girlfriend.
I started practising witchcraft (if you were to give it a name) about 5 years ago after I received "proof". This proof is a personal type of something that I observed. So no, I do not expect you to _believe_ me.
Don't get me wrong I don't buy in to any of this, but while people, like say the last POTUS, say publicly that they believe in god, talk to god and are guided on policy by god, and that's seen as a plus point to a lot of voters, then I fail to see why astrology gets put down as some thing less credible. If anything, astrology is a bit less dangerous, since its little more than empty cold reading, etc.
In the end, a lot of decisions end up being take on the flip of a coin. Its this just an over complicated coin toss?
Rationality in the world is not going to happen all at once: chipping away at the irrational beliefs of people, and educating them in rational thinking is most likely the best way to get there.
I recently applied for a job and they sent me this test and another personality test. I wasn't sure what to make of it, but is there any way to politely decline wasting 30 minutes of my life to taking a test that I refuse to take on the ethical grounds that this is pure bunk? I guess it is a great way to filter out people I wouldn't want to work for, but I wonder if refusing to take the test is somehow a litmus.
When legitimate knowledge exams are found "discriminatory" by judges across America, shouldn't it be time to look at these so-called, non-scientific tests and ask if they aren't discriminatory against what, exactly? Wouldn't it be egregious if it were more likely that women or Latinos often fall into one of the "no hire, no promote" letters? That last is stupid hypothetical, but something has to get the madness to stop.
Working for someone else often involves jumping through arbitrary stupid pointless hoops.
Refusing to take the test, even if you have excellent reasons to do so, is probably a reason to not employ you. That early part of recruitment has little t do with getting the best person. It's mostly about trimming away hundreds of people applying for 2 positions.
You need your own assessment about where the benefits of cash, job security, job fun, etc outweigh the disbenefits of PHBs with idiot job demands.
> but something has to get the madness to stop.
Recruiting is hard job and is not a solved problem. I suggest a consulting company that i) works carefully to avoid discrimination and ii) just randomly places people with suitable experience and qualifications into a company. Market it as using advanced algorithms to place workers and it might take off.
I ended up taking the test and probably took that test, or variants of it, about 100 times over the past 10 years. I never once got a call back from an employer who required the test. I'm usually recognized as a very nice person and I'm pretty sure I am good at customer service.
I've been on the hiring end also, and it most certainly isn't easy. I will say though that it is very inefficient the way it is done now and these tests are making things far more difficult and confusing than it has to be. Case in point: just about every place you can apply to that has an opening for stocking shelves require an extensive personality test. Why are the people who work at these places so damn rude (at least where I live)?
FWIW, I have zero faith that employers would let a computer randomly drop people into their work environment, even if I was able to write a super AI that was 90% perfect. People simply don't trust statistics that much.
There are a hundred different ways to look at this
1) you could look at it as a nuisance that isn't worth wasting any career capital fighting (that's a perfectly valid way to look at it, you can only fight stupidity on so many fronts, this probably isn't worth the effort)
(seems relevent http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4448755)
2) you could say you don't want to take the test and see how much they care. You should have some wariness of how seriously a place takes their arbitrary hoops. If an organization can't deal with a nail sticking up over an arbitrary personality test, how are they going to deal with a nail sticking up over something that really matters?
Point 2) I tend to be the nail sticking up, but that is more a function of my job descriptions in the past where it was my responsibility to say "no" or question things. It takes a a certain amount of deftness to pull it off consistently combined with a fearlessness of not getting your head chopped off.
The results of the test I recently took said something on the order that I am a very blunt person that appreciates honesty. While this is true in many cases, the test dismissed the idea that I have situational awareness. There is a time for letting someone know that they could have done better and there is a time for congratulating people for doing their best, even if my expectations were disappointed. Empathy didn't seem to be an important measurement for this particular version of the test. People are complex and slippery, with their own motives, and sometimes you can't expect people to be what they aren't.
To say the least, it was upsetting to read a small part of my personality painted with such a thin brush. Ultimately, if I was a hiring manager and read such a description, I would probably think twice about speaking to this person again. This seems to suggest that whoever created the test, or whoever wrote the descriptions, had axes to grind vs certain personality "traits."
> but is there any way to politely decline wasting 30 minutes of my life to taking a test that I refuse to take on the ethical grounds that this is pure bunk?
Maybe a non-politically correct answer to what to do with the test is the way to ace the test, who knows.
Myers-Briggs is the corporate equivalent of those "Is He Right For You? - Take Our 10 Question Soulmate Quiz" things that have done a brisk trade in magazines since time immemorial.
I love personality tests, I find them addictive, I've taken the Myers-Briggs test at least half a dozen times at various times in my life, with results from INTJ to ENFP and everything in between.
One flaw in the test is that it doesn't distinguish between how you instinctively act and what you value most. Naturally I am a total introvert, but at times in my life I have made an unusual effort to have an active social life and make a lot of friends. And I scored an E on the introvert/extrovert dimension. For whatever reason I was proud of this.
It would be trivially easy to game this test, but even if you take it honestly, the test is telling you something ambiguous: a mixture of who you are now and what you aspire to.
You can take an MBTI test twice, once 'honestly how you behave' and another time 'how you aspire to behave'. Which, if any, axes flip may be interesting.
There's a long history of the use of pseudoscience by companies to pick job candidates. In the 1980s there was a craze for handwriting analysis, where a person's handwriting style was supposed to reveal various aspects of their personality.
If a company wants you to complete personality tests it's a sign that the management is easily influenced by the claims of fashionable "gurus" and isn't very rational.
This is very widespread across all industries, especially at higher levels of management. Pharmaceutical companies are extremely prone to 'managing by nonsense' and pour immense amounts of money into these tests (especially the red/blue/yellow/green energy ones that are currently popular). Novartis is one of the worse in this area. They generally try to have a management team that is 'balanced across the color energies' and that.
I wonder what companies actually use these for. I've worked for a couple of companies that gave them to all the employees and then completely ignored the results. Probably just a ritual thing, I guess.
I know of at least one company which actively filters potential applicants based on their 'personality', which they determine by administering a 15-minute online quiz.
I agree these practice gives the feeling to do something without the burden of actually doing something. A more optimistic view would be, it creates some dynamic to introduce the idea of doing something. In any cases, the hard work remains to be done.
I just learned today that the first few google hits for NLP are about Neuro-Linguistic Programming and not Natural Language Processing. Imagine my disappointment!
if you try these things online you'll soon see it's pretty easy to play them. if you're given one in an interview, answer the "obvious" ones obviously and then with the ones that seem ambiguous or pointless, simply answer according to what you think appropriate for the job. for example, if they are looking for leadership, answer positive to whatever implies you enjoy telling others what to do (it's really that trivial).
given that, i assume they select for people smart enough to play them. which might have some value, i guess.
What a great post! I've been a different Myers-Briggs type in the few times that I've taken them, and outside of its usage in business, I've heard things like if you and your partner only differ by one type, that could mean that you will have relationship problems. In addition, if both of you are (some astrological type) then depending on the type you may also have problems. This is such B.S. and there is no scientific study that proves it.
But, lets examine this a bit further. These tests do ask questions that identify behavioral traits, and it is true that some behaviors could more likely be less compatible, and that there are studies to support this. So, to some extent these tests are onto something.
And what about psychological tests? If each test was perfect, you would not need to take several tests that each vary a lot in the results. Both a family member and I have taken a number of psychological tests, over time and result were really inconsistent.
It isn't just in business that they use these types of tests, whether they are Myers-Briggs or widely accepted and used psych tests. These tests are used for college students in dorms to assess whether they are compatible. They are used to access psychological problems. This is very important stuff, and it is guesswork! The human mind and accessment of our behavior is beyond our current ability to measure and diagnose properly.
Hardly, they occupy different spaces. Big 5 is the current faith in academia, while MB is the current cult within business.
In any case, the Big 5 has little more of a scientific basis than the MBTI, but as most psychologists don't understand the importance of statistics (and what factor analysis can and can't tell you) it still survives, zombie like. I hate the big 5, but I hate myers briggs more.
Big 5 isn't particularly good, and hopefully no-one says it is (except when they follow up with a "compared to MB"). And unlike MB, it doesn't claim to be anything deep or fundamental. It is just a lens which might be useful, and that's what it says on the tin.
The most important part of Big5 (IMO) is that it gets away from archetypes. Changing "introvert / extrovert" to "level of introversion / extroversion" is very important.
Well the constant refusal of Costa and McCrae to accept the results of confirmatory factor analyses is what gets me. To argue that personality must necessarily have a different method because the current method does not agree with your (essentially qualitative) conclusions is not science in my view.
Certainly in my areas (social especially) there's a lot of flag waving for the Big 5 which really upsets me. Then, when I told my lecturers during the course of my PhD that all psychologists should have to learn a little matrix algebra i was essentially laughed at. Unfortuntately, until they do, stupid over interpretations of flawed statistical models are likely to remain commonplace.
I do Agile coaching. That is, I help teams work in a productive and fun way. Basically it's best practices of iterative and incremental development.
Because Agile is a best practices thing and not a standard, we're always interested in how some teams do better than others. A professional colleague has put together an online test where you can measure your personality and then find the perfect team-mates. It's a very similar concept to what the article is talking about.
I'm not a believer in personality tests at all, but I wonder if in the aggregate they might be marginally useful for team formation. I've heard some rumors that sports psychologists have been using systems like this for years. So, while personality test X might suck for detailing anything about me as a person, if all 100 people at my company take it, would it help optimize team formation? Even if helps out only 10% or so, it could be worth the investment.
Beats me. It's an interesting question. I'm all in favor of calling out the over-sold quackery for what it is, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There still might be something useful in there, even if it only works by accident.
It's vary hard to get good data from team sports, so they often end up using 'plausible' quackery. Sadly, the same is often true in bushiness which is why training fad's are so common. That and milking training budgets is profitable.
PS: Might be something there is only worth something if you can develop a test and compare results. If you can't then it's best to ignore 'gut' feelings on such things as you have no idea if your wasting time and money or even making things worse.
Another anecdote: investor decided not to invest in a startup because his astrologist advised against it. The date company founded was not a "good" day. Yes, investor actually called founders to ask for this piece of info, as far as i remember the story. :-)
My current employers have invested in the Birkman method[0][1], which many people at the company see as quite helpful. I remain skeptical, but then again I found the Enneagram[2] to be helpful in giving me some guidance during a particularly trying time in my life.
I've taken Myers Briggs a number of times, and seen it given by three different employers. I've never seen it used for anything more than giving people a little more insight into themselves and others. In particular, I've never seen it used to make decisions about hiring, promotion, or anything that affects people's jobs, pay, or the business.
So while I agree that M-B can be overinterpreted, I am skeptical of the claim that businesses are actually trying to use it to decide who to hire, fire, promote, etc.
As the famous saying goes: All models are wrong, but some are useful.
I agree that MBTI is largely unscientific, but I would point out that a model doesn't necessarily have to be scientific to be useful. To me, the value of a model is in the conceptual framework it provides you to work with, and the common language it gives you for discussing ideas with others.
One doesn't have to believe that anyone is absolutely an "introvert" or an "extrovert" for the idea of an introvert or an extrovert to be useful, for instance.
"Tested" is vague. Tested for what? That a model fails to be predictive for certain tasks only really demonstrates that it's a bad model for that task, not that it's categorically useless.
I am no expert on this topic, so can only speak from my own experience having taken MB twice, 7 years apart, scoring INTP on both occasions. Each time following the test I read a few pages in the book about INTP as well as a few pages on each of the archetypes on which I was judged not to be. Generally I regard personality tests with enormous skepticism but in the case of MB I must confess I was impressed with how accurate the INTP profile described my world view. More importantly, I found no such positive correlation between how my mind works and the other profile descriptions.
If the test is worthless, as the author of this article suggests, how would he explain people like me who upon reading the profile for their archetype in the book attest "yes that is a shockingly accurate description of me" and upon reading others' profiles react "no absolutely nothing about that resonates with me"? My own view is that MB, while hardly perfect, is surprisingly revealing for many individuals and can help one understand and be more tolerant of people whose profiles are in sharp contrast to one's own.
That said, I have taken other personality tests which highly intelligent people have recommended to me and found absolutely no value in those results. But I would not make the claim that those other tests are therefore universally useless, because after all I am but one data point.
This reminds me of the day one of my work 'colleagues' asked me what my star sign was and various other similar questions, indicating he was evaluating me as a potential mate.
Disregarding the sheer immaturity of the approach and inappropriateness in a work-related context, I had a good amount of laughs over it with one of the company's bosses.
"Now, 50 years after the first time anyone paid money for the test, the Myers-Briggs legacy is reaching the end of the family line. The youngest heirs don’t want it. And it’s not clear whether organizations should, either.
. . . .
"Yet despite its widespread use and vast financial success, and although it was derived from the work of Carl Jung, one of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, the test is highly questioned by the scientific community."
"Overall, the review committee concluded that the MBTI has not demonstrated adequate validity although its popularity and use has been steadily increasing. The National Academy of Sciences review committee concluded that: 'at this time, there is not sufficient, well-designed research to justify the use of the MBTI in career counseling programs,' the very thing that it is most often used for."
There are many discussions here on HN about company hiring procedures. From participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274
sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test.
The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone, is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.
The long version of my company hiring procedures FAQ was last posted at
My understanding of Myers-Briggs is that it is only useful when undertaken voluntarily, and the subject accepts and recognizes the validity of the outcome. Jung was a therapist, so his main purpose was to help people seeking to attain mental health. The idea of the test is for individuals to understand themselves, not for other people to understand them.
The problem with these personality tests is their belief in an atomic, immutable "personality" or identity. It doesn't exist. People change radically. The person I was at 5 is gone. He's effectively gone, forever. That's not a bad thing. It's to be celebrated.
One thing I like about Buddhism is that it dovetails well with my skeptical, nonreligious inclination. You're expected to find things out for yourself, not take your beliefs from on high. If you don't believe in reincarnation (I do, but it's not required) you can still meditate. You're still invited to participate. It doesn't matter if you believe in God or an afterlife.
One teaching of Buddhism, that I find to be very useful, is that most of what we call "me" is an illusion. It's inherently empty. To the extent that it exists, it's dependent on so many other conditions and relationships. People get into traps. "I'm just not a happy person." "I'm a neurotic mess." "I'm a programmer, so I could never be a good writer." Bullshit. People also inflict it on each other (crab mentality) by focusing on reputation and "track record"-- this illusion that observable state reflects inherent traits rather than an interaction between a person and external conditions-- rather than real capability.
People get deeply invested in, and limited by, these identities they build for themselves and each other that actually make no sense.
More obvious, glaring problems with the Meyers-Briggs:
1. Score distributions along each axis are normal, not bimodal.
2. Scores are discretized to one-bit values along each axis.
3. Error bars are big enough that the combination of facts (1) and (2) results in very similar people getting very different scores, and poor test-retest reliability.
Though my personality has changed over the years, it has stayed similar in a lot of ways. The person I was at 5 has a great deal of overlap with the person I am now. And all versions of me who know about probability distributions would be unanimous in their mathematical disapproval of how the raw test scores from the Meyers-Briggs get reported and interpreted.
One solution to the problem you pose in your first paragraph is to identify the vector and not the position through testing. Perhaps a person's profile would be visualized with positions and error bars mapped across time. It would be impossible to perform such a test usefully on a five-year-old boy, but adults are more stable.
To me there seems to be just as many issues with any belief system relying heavily on suggestion and then asking you to "see for yourself". Isn't this just another form of magical thinking? Most especially if you're accepting a lot of unprovable esoteric beliefs along with your simple meditation practice.
It may actually be easier to do the (meditation) practice and see for yourself rather than looking for scholarly books. A number of the scholarly books are written by people who do not practice, and so there exist distortions to their words. Reading something like Tibetan Book of the Dead may not be terribly helpful if you are not also practicing too.
A good intro to this frame of mind (and also relevant, since the dude works at Google ;) ) is to watch this video of a talk by Chade-Meng Tan - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8fcqrNO7so
I like Daniel Ingram's approach. He has a strong focus on the essence, and bypasses a lot of Buddhist dogma that seems to get in the way for westerners.
There's also a good book coming at the same subject from a more Western, scientific angle: The User Illusion by Tor Nørretranders. It comes to similar conclusions about the "self" as Buddhism.
I think the best first book to read on Buddhism would just be The Heart of Understanding by Thich Nhat Hanh. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is really good, but I would read that next. It's much longer, and although parts of it are really insightful, there are also large sections that are repetitive or esoteric. It's also about ideas and practices that are important to Tibetan buddhism, but that aren't central to most other forms of buddhism.
The value of MB is teaching interaction. Many people, esp those in tech fields, have a high degree of "I'm like me, therefore everybody is like me." Thinking about how "the other half" lives and works causes a new language to develop between different folks which can be very powerful.
Here's an example: Development people are quite different than straight operations people. In MB-land, you might say the devs tend more towards N and ops tends towards S. I can't tell you how many hardware products I've seen die because of the failure to bridge that gap, with each side driving the other up a wall.