In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

The Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator (MBTI) gets a lot of scorn:

About 2 million people take it annually, at the behest of corporate HR departments, colleges, and even government agencies. The company that produces and markets the test makes around $20 million off it each year.

The only problem? The test is completely meaningless.

Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless (Vox)

Finally, it would seem appropriate to address the troublesome discrepancy between research results (a lack of proven worth) and popularity. What accounts for the popularity of an instrument that is not yet supported by research?

In the Mind’s Eye: Enhancing Human Performance (1991)

I began to read through the evidence, and I found that the MBTI is about as useful as a polygraph for detecting lies. One researcher even called it an “act of irresponsible armchair philosophy.” When it comes to accuracy, if you put a horoscope on one end and a heart monitor on the other, the MBTI falls about halfway in between.

Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad That Won’t Die (Psychology Today)

Some psychologists believe that independent, peer-reviewed research in the decades since the MBTI was devised has provided something better than Myers-Briggs. They champion the notion of the “Big Five” personality traits — openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

Is Myers-Briggs up to the job? (Financial Times)

Apparently the MBTI is nonsense, but the Big Five is a real, scientifically valid test. I’ve got no truck with the Big Five. But to think it’s dramatically better than the MBTI is bonkers.

Here are the most common complaints.

MYERS AND BRIGGS JUST, LIKE, MADE IT UP

It’s true. Myers and Briggs were enthusiasts of Carl Jung’s theories who created the test during WWII. They hoped to aid the entry of women into the workforce. They weren’t professional scientists and didn’t base it on some large corpus of data. And Jung’s theories are… controversial today.

THERE AREN’T 16 DISCRETE TYPES OF PEOPLE

Also true!  There is no switch in your brain set to T or F. We will probably never find the “judging” gene. These traits are probably heritable — everything is — but polygenic. So we should expect varying strengths even if we disregard “nurture” influences.

This complaint is understandable. Some early MBTI proponents really did defend binary outcomes, claiming each attribute was “theoretically dichotomous”. There was even some now-debunked research that claimed to prove that empirically. It’s now clear that the population has a standard bell-shaped distribution for each trait. For example, this is a histogram of the E-I axis (other axes look similar):

This is from Bimodal Score Distributions and the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator: Fact or Artifact? (Answer: Artifact)

THE MBTI HAS POOR REPEATABILITY

Technically true. Suppose someone takes the test, then repeats it 4-5 weeks later. Something like 35-50% of people will fall into a different one of the 16 groups. We’ll come back to this.

THE MBTI DOESN’T VARY BETWEEN PEOPLE

Not true. This is claimed strangely often with no evidence. I think the logic is that the mean of the population for each trait is near zero? But there’s plenty of variability.

THE MBTI MAKES EVERYONE SEEM LIKE A BEAUTIFUL SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE

I think this is true. It’s hard to read the Big Five and conclude that neuroticism is a positive thing. But every MBTI type seems wonderful in its own way.

THE MBTI MEASURES THINGS THAT AREN’T FUNDAMENTAL or THE MBTI ISN’T USED BY REAL SCIENTISTS or THE IN-GROUP SAYS I MUST TREAT IT WITH CONTEMPT.

Well, maybe.

The Myers-Briggs foundation grasps at an image of scientific seriousness. It grates on me, and I’m not a psychologist. Everyone should probably stop spending money on the official version (administered by someone who spent $2,500 dollars to get certified).

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Let’s consider a few points in favor of the MBTI.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BINARIZE THE AXES

90% of the complaints about MBTI come down to: “you can’t split people into two groups along these axes!” Yeah, OK, then how about we don’t do that?

Of course someone can be borderline. Most people are borderline along at least one axis.  Early versions of the MBTI actually gave an “x” for someone near the middle. Let’s bring this back! In fact, let’s go further.

Behold, DynoMight© MBTI notation:

• Strong preference: Capital letter
• Weak preference: Lower-case letter
• Borderline: x

For example: eNxJ is:

• weakly extroverted (e)
• strongly intuitive (N)
• borderline thinking / feeling (x)
• strongly judging (J)

This gives five bins for each axis. You can still sort of say it out loud by making the strong preferences louder. This gives 5⁴=625 possible results. Of course, there aren’t 625 discrete types of people. Our goal isn’t to split people into groups, it’s to give a convenient summary of how they answered a bunch of questions.

To claim it’s never useful to discretize denies human nature. You might as well claim we shouldn’t say “hot” or “cold” but must always give a number of degrees.

SERIOUSLY, YOU DON’T HAVE TO BINARIZE THE AXES

If you’d like a test that gives the scores as continuous attributes, may I recommend… any test? For example, here’s the results of me randomly clicking answers on two popular websites:

Not convinced? Want to see the official results that gullible people pay money for? They look like this:

THE MBTI MIGHT AS WELL BE CALLED THE “BIG FOUR”

And what happens if you don’t discretize the axes? If you take continuous measurements (like every single Myers-Briggs test ever gives you) they correlate strongly with four of the five big five measurements. (This is from a 1989 paper.)

The rows show the four MBTI axes, while the columns show the Big Five axes. This shows that:

• The MBTI E/I axis is strongly correlated with the Big Five extraversion axis.
• The MBTI S/N axis is strongly correlated with the Big Five openness axis.
• The MBTI T/F axis is moderately correlated with the Big Five agreeableness axis and weakly correlated with the conscientiousness axis.
• The MBTI J/P axis is moderately correlated with the conscientiousness axis and weakly correlated with the openness axis.

Other research supports the same basic conclusion. What does this mean? If you believe the MBTI is meaningless, you must also believe the Big Five is meaningless!

THE MBTI’S REPEATABILITY IS FINE

If someone is near the middle, a small change can land them on the other side. This is why 35-50% of people fall into a different bucket when they re-test. This is not something to worry about.

Instead, we should check if the continuous measurements are repeatable. For reference, here’s Cronbach’s alpha for the Big Five (measured for an Arabic version): 

	Men	Women
Neuroticism	.83	.74
Extroversion	.82	.83
Openness	.79	.85
Agreeableness	.82	.81
Conscientiousness	.90	.92

And here’s the results for Myers Briggs (from a review):

	Men	Women
EI	.82	.83
SN	.83	.85
TF	.82	.80
JP	.87	.86

YOU CAN ADD AN AXIS IF YOU WANT

The Big Five measures neuroticism, while the MBTI. does not. This is, no doubt, a very important trait. Some MBTI variants add extra axes. For example, one can introduce an axis that measures “turbulence” vs. “assertiveness”. This is a measure of neuroticism in all but name.

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Everything above just says the MBTI isn’t too much worse than the Big Five. So why not just use the Big Five? Well, you just try it.

THE MBTI IS COMFORTABLE TO TALK ABOUT

Say you’re on a first date. You discuss your favorite Italian films, the pets you had growing up. Then, you ask “How agreeable are you?” How does that go?

If that seems cherry-picked, let’s go through all the attributes:

• “How extroverted are you?” This is fine.
• “How neurotic are you?” Uncomfortable.
• “How agreeable are you?” Uncomfortable.
• “How conscientious are you?” Uncomfortable.
• “How open are you to experience?” This seems fine, but isn’t. Everyone claims to be open.

Only one of the five is OK. And — as you surely noticed– that same attribute exists in the MBTI.

The great advantage of the the MBTI is exactly that it makes everyone feel like a beautiful special snowflake. The axes are chosen and named ingeniously so as to make them easy to reveal.

For this reason, the MBTI’s omission of neuroticism is sometimes good. The alternative to four axes is often zero, not five.

THE MBTI IS POSSIBLE TO TALK ABOUT

Binarization is the key criticism of the MBTI. Yet, it’s also the MBTI’s biggest advantage.

Say you’re a weirdo who is happy to tell your date your Big Five. How do you actually say it out loud? I am such a weirdo, and I end up saying something like “My neuroticism is low, my conscientiousness is high, my extroversion is low, and… ummm, what are the other axes?”

With the MBTI, you have the option of a coarse summary by saying something like “ESFP”. You can then give the more precise measurements if you want.

Option value is a positive, not a negative.

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So, to summarize: You don’t have to discretize the MBTI axes. The MBTI measures similar stuff as the Big Five with similar repeatability.  But it is more appealing and dramatically easier to talk about. Don’t feel guilty about using it.

In theory the Big Five might adopt the advantages of the MBTI. (Not that I’m advising this!) This would appear to just require different names for the axes. These should sound more “neutral”, so people are happy to discuss them. And there should be different names for ends of the axes, to enable “easy optional discretization”. But, really, why bother? The MBTI is good enough.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2MRlheb