I don’t know that the MB test is necessarily needed, but when an introverted leader at my company went on an informal “introvert awareness” campaign, it really helped some of my more extroverted colleagues figure out how to deal with us introverts a little more effectively. I tend to get written off as aloof or (worse) “shy,” so it definitely benefited me as an introvert to have people more aware of our personality differences.
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Why the positive reference to the MMPI? As I understand it, it’s just as voodoo-laden in that your responses are evaluated against the responses of a pool of middle-aged white Minnesotans (MINNESOTA Multiphasic Personality Inventory). When I worked at an outpatient psychiatric clinic, we administered the MMPI to anyone whose insurance would pay for it. If you were poor and there through the public program, no MMPI for you, but if you were an average middle-classed neurotic white person with good insurance, you got to use your #2 pencil.
It’s ALL voodoo.
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You sound ad hominem reasoning.
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I’m trained / certified in its administration and interpretation.
The BIGGEST complaints about it come from the Jungian idea that personality is fixed. It ain’t. It drifts. However, it doesn’t drift that far. You might get some movement from one or two traits but its not going that far. Beyond that, there are complaints about the introversion / extroversion scale as it doesn’t incorporate ambiverts. I’d be considered one of these…very near center, but always SLIGHTLY on the side of introversion. However, I’m comfortable with public speaking and amiable (to a point)…but I’d rather be by myself most of the time. That said, I/E doesn’t really mean what most people think, it means where do you get your energy from.
The test really isn’t there to sort anyone into or out of a group – I know some companies use this for hiring purposes, which technically is illegal but no one seems to do anything about. Aptitude testing is legal (i.e., do you understand this line of work enough to do it…not do you LIKE this work)…personality / IQ testing illegal. And the test gets bad results because of this.
More or less, the test is there to help someone get more insight into themselves. Its to allow someone that is receptive to it to help figure out whats going on with their life. And honestly, quite a bit of the time, I never even looked at the results. I’d give the test, I’d talk to the person about the subtypes and what they meant, and when we were done, I’d ask them what they thought they were. And then we’d talk about it some more. Quite often, I’d give them the type that they thought they were…and more often than not, it did match with the type they thought they had.
What is the test good for? Its good as a conversation starter for people wanting help in their life. Is it voodoo? Probably. Quite a bit of psychology is voodoo. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. The practitioners just need to know how to give it and how to use it. If a patient had no self definition and was aimless, this would be the very first thing I’d give after the intake interview. Others might get a full battery test (MMPI was brought up above). Other might get nothing. Of course, supervisors would push for something far more rigorous because it reimbursed more, but then again they can’t interfere with treatment.
So the people that think its bullshit are probably right…for all the wrong reasons. And the people that think it works? Well…if it works for you, thats what its there for.
As a note: I don’t work in the field any more (which was always the goal…I wanted the degrees and to move into academia / research in a related field).
From what I’ve seen everyone just seems to discuss it the way they’d discuss their horoscope.
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My clan in college was INTO this test, like we all knew our letters, we assigned letters to everyone we knew, we talked about it incessantly.
Much like horoscopes, tarot, mind-reading, etc, people LOVE to hear about themselves. They LOVE the language of pronouncement, “You seek the truth above all things,” “You will find true love,” “You value order over emotion.” If you want to be popular, just throw sentences like this around in your speech.
It’s amazing how gullible we are.
To me the Myers-Briggs is like those Malcolm Gladwell books. You know it’s bullshit, but it’s good to know what it’s about because it’s a fun conversation to have at a party.
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Or some people just aren’t fond of just-so stories? You don’t have to be a Scientologist to see the self-ascribed bullshit potential for these “personality tests”.
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But sometimes it is somebody who wishes to explain why we should stop using an outdated tool. Not all criticisms of obsolete psychology come from people with an anti-psychology agenda; sometimes they come from people trained in contemporary psychology, who understand that there’s been a lot of progress since MBTI was concocted. Myers-Briggs is not accepted as valid by the majority of the psych community; pretty much nothing connected to Jung is considered legitimate by the majority of psychologists. I’m happy your comment advises people to be skeptical of this “exposé”, as they should be, but in this case they should certainly be more skeptical of Myers-Briggs itself.
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“How wasteful children are, even with their own precious, irreplaceable lives!” Jung once wrote to Freud, a letter that might have doubled as his irritated response to Katharine and her request to collaborate."
I stopped after “a letter that might have”. Pretty annoying insertion of agenda.
I asked my sister and her husband about MBTI, as they wrote a textbook for Communications courses. They said that they applied MBTI scores to various work occupations and found only a 2% variance. Now that 2% may be significant, but they weren’t sure. Now compare that very nuanced interpretation to the above’s fact-free polemics. I really hate logic based on a chain of opinions.
Welcome to Boing Boing! Please feel free to look around the forums for other interesting articles you might enjoy!
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At least they’re not demanding a blood sample and then judging you based on your ABO-Rh type. That’d be silly…
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Keeps insisting that I am a lesbian.
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According to one guy, it may determine how receptive you are to the message that “we risk systemic failure if we don’t acknowledge limits to resources and growth”.
(scaled to 100% interest for INTJ)
That’s what I thought. I always always always test as an INTJ, and so did practically everyone else in my home-ec class. (My home-ec teacher was a floaty pothead who thought it would be a clever way to legitimize her curriculum-free class by trying to do a “learning style test” to try and make it look like it was more than just a place for her to zone out between bong hits. Smoking weed is fine. Smoking weed between teaching high school classes is really fucking stupid.)
Basically, you can get pretty much any personality type on the MBTI, depending on your mood.
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I’ve always been INTJ too. The first time I took the test, I was told that this meant that I probably wouldn’t be a good leader. While that may well be true in my case, the director at the time (who seemed both popular and effective) was also INTJ.
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Yeah, it seems every time I’m tested with the MBTI the administrator is impressed and says that I must be great at planning and stuff. That I could be some kind of mastermind.
Of course that’s hilarious, seeing as off-meds I’m severely ADHD and can’t even decide what lunch I want other than “all the lunches” (excluding seafood). I couldn’t plan my own escape from a paper bag. I see way too many variables in freaking everything and nothing is even remotely stable enough under my scrutiny for me to plan on anything. Ironically, I’ve become floaty too. I just drift through most of life following an established routine, and I become very uncomfortable to nearly panic-attack levels when faced with a change, like a few weeks ago when the fucking president of china had 10 miles of freeway shut down so he could move over his 100+ vehicle motorcade 2 miles. Fucking bastard. Anyway I went to great lengths to avoid taking the freeway but somehow fucked up and ended up on an unfamiliar onramp right when they shut the whole thing down, so I was stuck in the same spot for an hour and a half. Fuck the president of china, and all the horses he rode in on.
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In fact, it probably helps - Scientologists and other fundies will diss anything like this because they hate anything that infringes upon their gullible bullshit turf.
I find generally that these sort of exercises are a great way for big companies to reduce their effectiveness by gradually filtering out all the people who aren’t box-tickers, people-pleasers and nodding dogs. Anyone with any gumption or basic critical thinking skills can understand that it’s drivel.
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BTW, here’s a little footage of the damage Shi Jinping did to us:
Even walkers and bus takers were fucked. China can go to hell. Next time he comes, he can do it covertly and not fuck up our already shitty transportation systems. Seattle is well known for it’s really bad freeways, inadequate buses, and less-than-useful train system. Then that guy thinks it’s appropriate to have a 130 vehicle entourage. Fucking dictator.
He can fly to Denver next time he goes publicly. They have better roads than we do in Seattle.
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