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.
> 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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] jpdoctor|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gregpilling|13 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] eshvk|13 years ago|reply
( 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.)
[+] [-] woodchuck64|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saraid216|13 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] TheAmazingIdiot|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alan_cx|13 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] aroberge|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dizzystar|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DanBC|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jacquesm|13 years ago|reply
Maybe a non-politically correct answer to what to do with the test is the way to ace the test, who knows.
[+] [-] pbateman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] impendia|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] edent|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcheong|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gojomo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saraid216|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motters|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RyanZAG|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edent|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yen223|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kosmogo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naftaliharris|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewcooke|13 years ago|reply
given that, i assume they select for people smart enough to play them. which might have some value, i guess.
[+] [-] genuine|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nshepperd|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disgruntledphd2|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Retric|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grakic|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atamyrat|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cyranix|13 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.birkman.com [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Birkman [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram_of_Personality
[+] [-] pdonis|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] overgard|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tieTYT|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] systemtrigger|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] samspot|13 years ago|reply