I actually think Myers-Briggs is an interesting test. Of course it isn’t useful for concrete decision making like hiring or group formation. I don’t think there is a test, or will be a test, that is helpful that way. The nature of answering questions about one’s own personality alone is highly arbitrary. The test does try to control for that by re-asking questions in different ways to try and hone your answers but its obviously only somewhat effective. All that said, when my friends and I have used it, it seemed eerily accurate in describing each of us. I don’t think the test was designed to answer questions about relationships based on its results so using it that way is just silly. Though that of course doesn’t stop corporations, etc,. from doing so.
Jung was a genius, and I actually stopped reading the article when it stated “[b]ut the test was developed in the 1940s based off the untested theories of an outdated analytical psychologist named Carl Jung, and is now thoroughly disregarded by the psychology community.”
Jung was so much more than a psychologist and many of his theories were not exactly testable, which may be why some psychologists disregard them. But to say Jung’s ideas are “thoroughly disregarded by the psychology community” is like saying that about Freud (though I think Jung had a much better grasp of human personality than Freud ever did). These are the two greats upon whose foundations ALL of western psychology rest, so there’s that.
Okay, I managed to read further despite myself. I really had no idea there was a marketing machine behind the test and that it costs money to use it because when we’ve used it in the past it was free on the internet. That’s creepy and I don’t like it, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to the test. It all depends on what you’re using it for. As a general outline of personality types it has some use, but trying to apply those results to real world situations is highly suspect as I mentioned above. But I’d say that for any such psychological test, including the Five Factor test mentioned as superior:
“Apart from the introversion/extroversion aspect of the Myers-Briggs, the newer, empirically driven tests focus on entirely different categories. The Five Factor model measures people’s openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism — factors that do differ widely among people…”
These categories are no better than the Myers-Briggs categories, and to suggest that things like introversion/extroversion don’t vary widely among people is just silly. Ditto sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling and judging/perceiving. The idea isn’t to “pigeonhole” people as the OP suggests, but to gauge where on a spectrum one is, exactly the claims made for the Five Factor and other, undisclosed, supposedly superior tests. As I mentioned at first, I don’t think there exists, or will exist, a psychological test that is seriously useful for concrete applications. But that won’t stop psychologists from trying and of course favoring their results over earlier work.
I don’t trust anything that is marketed so heavily and costs a fortune to administer. That said, are we really supposed to forego the Myers-Briggs for a newer and just as useless alternative? Lets face it, HR and corporate types love to reduce people to factors pluggable into equations. The categories in the tests they use are largely irrelevant because its a garbage in/garbage out exercise when applied to real life decision making. Human psychology, hell, dog psychology, is too complex for these silly tests to show us more than the barest glimpse of insight into our inner workings. When used for that purpose Myers-Briggs can be insightful and interestingly fun. But lets not engage in the logical fallacy of thinking that because its flawed there is necessarily a better test that we can invent.
