➢Some observations on MBTI, the "16 personalities."
I don't think the MBTI is broken. I don't think it's useless in the least. I think Jung was onto something when he discussed aspects of the human mind that were later formulated into what is now the MBTI. I do, however, think that much of our understanding of the human mind has advanced significantly, so I think it's worth the time to look at the system and ask what might be done to improve it. I will skip the general introduction and move straight to the main parts of contention that I have with MBTI. Intermixed with this (or perhaps at the end) I will discuss why I think MBTI is attractive, and how it might be improved upon.
First, the (major) flaw: The claim of MBTI is that one can consistently and accurately predict a person's behavior based on knowledge of their 'neural pathways' (that is, the 'toolkit' of their mind. Keep in mind, I am using general terms here.). However, MBTI test are usually incredibly flawed, as they often do one or both of the following:
1) Ask for self-report on behavioral tendencies. This is not a direct measurement of the 'toolkit' of the mind, and questions like these give no real way to accurately test the theory behind MBTI. Moreover, since the 'toolkit of the mind' is a black box in this sense (bound by 4 arbitrary but meaningful pairs of words), MBTI is NOT actually a theory of human behavior based on ways in which the mind interprets data. When tests are based off this kind of question, MBTI is a simple word/action association with post-hoc rationalization into a theory that cannot be proven in any scientifically meaningful way.
2) Ask for self-report on emotional responses and lifestyle preferences. Not only are these only vaguely related to information interpretation and behavioral pathways (emotions, like actions, are a result of the personality), but they are highly corroded by the fact that there is no strong correlation between a person's self-report of their preferences and emotions vs their actual preferences and emotions. This could be due to self-delusion, forgetfulness, lack of personal insight, or a substitution for fantasy over reality (the first point also suffers from these same issues). If you want to understand a man, don't listen to his words. Watch his actions. If unsure of his motives, look at the results of his actions.
Note that in both cases, "self-report" is a problem in and of itself, because many people already have a fixed idea of what their personality is, and will be prone to trying to shape the answers to their questions so that they fit the preconceived notion. I've seen instances of individuals purporting to being able to accurately measure other individual's personality through observation, but such observation suffers the same exact flaws as mentioned in point #1 - from the outside, you can only observe behavior.
As an aside, when MBTI is calculated via behavioral observation, it functions in very similar form to the "Big 5" in that both simply group behaviors together under titles and use those titles to predict other behaviors (aka, "personality). Under this understanding, when it comes to observing behavior, the "Big 5" is undoubtedly a superior model for its form simply by way of its creation: via a distillation of a broad swath of words used to describe personality into 5 linguistic categories. That is to say, the Big 5 (Five Factor Model) is superior simply because its categories are much more individualized, and it's inclusion of a 5th column allows for greater detail to the personality profile Each of these columns are further broken down into greater depth, allowing for an incredibly complex look at any given human being.
NOTE: I am not *for a second* suggesting that MBTI is not useful. I am merely saying that, for all things considered, MBTI is less functional than its potential, and could be far more beneficial. Whether or not I have anything useful to add here, only my ego can confidently claim. Reality has yet to see.
A third problem that occurs to me at the moment: The fact that certain MBTI personalities are much more common than others gives two possible suggestions: First, that certain personality types are far more common than others (No reason has been given for this so far as I can tell, and there is no reason to assume that a standard bell curve distribution applies here, or which specific Jungian types of the MBTI would be within the first derivation.). The second: It is my assertion that MBTI types are so foggy in concept that certain types draw from the same pool as other types, inextricably linking them together (I will explain this shortly). This is a flaw, in that it prevents greater differentiation between personality types, and lowers the total resolution of the system's ability to make precise guesses. I strongly believe this to be the case here.
There is something I believe MBTI has gotten right: if it were possible to accurately map the neural decision pathways of the brain, I absolutely agree that MBTI would have highly increased predictive power. However, I believe that in relying on self-reported behavior to determine the "types" of a personality, the functionality of MBTI is hamstrung for this simple reason: The form does not fit the function. Of secondary note, it's important to realize that a person's experiences forge neural pathways with behaviors imprinted onto them, and new experiences, if numerous or extreme enough, can alter a person's behavior in specific areas without affecting a person's overall personality, thus further lowering the resolution of MBTI's predictive power. However, such a flaw also applies to the Big 5, so that particular aspect won't be covered here. With my winded introduction in mind, here is some commentary on the various types which make up MBTI:
Extroversion vs Introversion:
I don't have a huge critique of this specific category as a personality type. The only observation I would give is that this seems to be less a form of "mental toolkit" so much as it is a very distinct set of behavioral patterns describing how an individual relates to society, both in part and in whole. To that extent, the critique that I'd have for MBTI is that I cannot find a particular part of the MBTI theory which describes a set of mental processes that eventually lead to the behaviors of either extroversion or introversion. Personally, I don't think there necessarily should be; my supposition is that extraversion is probably highly influenced by an individual's level of socialization, but given the idea that MBTI is based on a theory of mental functions, I would expect an explanation here. The best I can find is vague references to 'paying attention to the outside vs the inside,' which is neither sufficiently reasoned nor properly evidenced. Plenty of inverted people are highly aware of their surroundings, and just as many extroverted people have internal issues they obsess over, and all I've found is an assertion that one type of being roughly matches up with the word "extraverted" and the other type of being with the word "introverted," without any data (statistical or otherwise) to prove it.
Thinking vs Feeling:
So far as I can tell, the measurement of this particular sliding scale is given by answering the following question: "What is the balance of emotions to rational thought which drive your decisions?" By my measure, this is a very shallow question to ask, for the following reason:
Emotions have a rational explanation, often rooted in deeper truths and past experiences of the person, whether known or unknown to that individual. Emotions are tools of the hypothalamus and limbic system to alert us to a deeper truth or issue, whether social or sexual or physical or mental or dominance-related, etc. Emotions do not appear out of nowhere. Emotions have their own set of logic to them. To that extent, "thinking vs feeling" would be better phrased as "logic you're aware of vs logic you're unaware of," which puts the conversation in a completely different ball park.
Perhaps a better direction to go with this involves a question like: "What level of truth does the person most strongly respond to and prioritize when they make a decision about their behavior?" Also relevant, "How much self-awareness and self-control does the person have in choosing which levels of truth they want to prioritize in any given situation?" A story example might be a hero who puts aside revenge to work with a villain (temporarily) for a greater good. Despite the strong emotion of desiring revenge (anger, intent) he instead prioritizes a deeper moral good. Our hero prioritizes the fundamental truth of "the greater good" over that of "physically re-establishing a violated dominance hierarchy (or 'revenge' for short).
Sensing vs Intuition:
The broad-brush differentiation between these two sides of the scale seems to be a matter of mindedness. "Is the person present-minded, or future-minded? Does he focus on strict information, or does he abstract information into larger ideas?"
A primary problem I see with this category: In order to a person to intuit, they must first sense. One cannot abstract principles from information he does not have. Moreover, because the ability to have abstract thoughts, be imaginative, etc is linked to an ability to see multiple ways of being in the world, this category is permanently linked to the Thinking/Feeling category. To phrase it another way: The same depth to which a person is cognizant of the multiple layers of truth in their own psyche in T/F is the same potential depth they can delve into abstraction for S/N. In this sense, these two categories have low resolution because they are not describing separate things, they are describing interrelated things. Because one category partially describes another, this limits the ability of MBTI to properly categorize people. This also seems a decent explanation for why so many people tend to fall into a few specific types. Of the 16 types, the top 4 account for nearly 50% of the population. The bottom 4 account for less than 10%. As far as I can tell, this implies that MBTI has failed to properly differentiate the more common mbti types, while over-differentiating the less common.
A secondary problem (aside from the two I listed so far) is this: the ability to abstract is in part a question of intelligence: the higher an IQ, the greater the capacity of an individual to see multiple layers of meaning in an idea, etc. To that extent, the category of S/N is further muddled in that it partially measures IQ - which would be brilliant, except that IQ is wholly separate from personality. IQ merely affects a person's ability to implement their personality in the world, it should not be a factor of the personality itself.
To take this to a deeper level, I think the question this category tries to answer may be the wrong question to ask. The question is one of how people process data. Of course, the problem here is this: how people process data depends highly on what problem they're trying to solve! Perhaps a different approach to this question might be along the lines of:
"When fixing a flaw, does the person simply seek to minimize damage, or restore the situation to it's prior condition, or seek to completely improve the system?"
A plausible second way of giving the category greater clarity is to replace it with a different question: what is the person's consistent level of situational awareness? That is to say, what is their ability to 'filter out' unnecessary information, and what is their ability to take in large quantities of information on multiple levels and handle multiple levels of informational analysis?
Judging vs Perceiving:
This scale seems to describe the tendency of a person's mind towards informational order or chaos. Specifically, the habit of mentally categorizing information and preferring those categories to remain unchanged. In truth, I don't really have a real problem with this category (or "type" if you will). It seems to me to be sufficiently distinct from the other categories so as to not need any measured change, though perhaps the names could do with some revising, perhaps "Ordered" vs "Chaotic."
Concluding thoughts:
If MBTI truly wants to form a metric for accurately predicting behavior in humans, perhaps the questionnaires for MBTI should stop asking users about their behaviors (which they can hardly accurately predict anyways) and instead ask a different, more fundamental set of questions. I don't think the person being graded should be asked to describe himself. First, it largely robs the system of it's predictive power (see: my comparison of MBTI to the Big 5). Second, the current system attempts to extrapolate mental processes from self-reports, which is highly flawed for all the reasons I mentioned at the start of this writing, and even more. I think that if we are to measure the specific ways the mind processes information, we must first categorize that information, then find ways to get the person to relate that information with as little corruption as possible. Perhaps one way of doing this is to gather reactions to different scenarios. Perhaps the best way to accurately get a mental profile of a person is to tell them stories with deep symbolic meaning, and get feedback from the reader regarding their immediate reactions to those stories.
If we are to make a map of the mind based on how the mind intakes, interprets, and then processes data, I think it might be interesting to ask a different set of questions about the person.
1) What categories of data does the person routinely look for?
2) What truth heirarchies does that data fit into?
3) What is the person's values in those relevant truth heirarchies?
