this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
516 points (87.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43148 readers
1604 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No, the test itself is definitely the problem. Regardless of whether you believe a personality type test can be effective, the MBTI is particularly and provably ineffective in just about every measurable way:
It's not reliable. It has terrible test-retest reliability. If I'm X personality type, I shouldn't test as X type one time, and Y type the next, and Z 6 months laters.
It's not predictive. If a personality test accurately judges someone, it should mean you now know something about someone's behaviours, and can extrapolate that forwards and predict behavioural trends. MBTI does not.
It fundamentally doesn't match the data. MBTI relies upon the idea that people fall neatly into binary buckets (introverted vs extroverted, thinking vs feeling, etc). But the majority of people don't, and test with MBTI scores close to the line the test draws, following a normal distribution. So the line separating two sides of a bell curve ends up being arbitrary.
And finally, it's pushed very hard by the Myers-Briggs foundation, and not at all by independent scientific bodies. copying straight from wikipedia:
I risk sounding very "AKSHUALLYY" here, but online tests do a huge harm to the credibility of MBTI, no wonder it gets such a bad rep when the tests are so unreliable and people nevertheless base their entire personalities on it... Originally it's not supposed to be based on the binary choices of the 4 letters but the "cognitive functions" as defined by Carl Jung, which a lot of people will find to be just as much non-sense but with the right attitude I think they're a useful tool to learn about ourselves and others.
Yeah, anyone who thinks that there's exactly 16 types of person is using it like a horoscope, but that really isn't the point.
Exactly, and that's what it helped me with. It's not a personality test about how you act outwardly (or which Pokémon you are or whatever), it's supposed to be about the inner workings.
But if you want an example of misuse: There's an MBT community on Reddit that is full of that sort of bullshit.