"Now, 50 years after the first time anyone paid money for the test, the Myers-Briggs legacy is reaching the end of the family line. The youngest heirs don’t want it. And it’s not clear whether organizations should, either.
. . . .
"Yet despite its widespread use and vast financial success, and although it was derived from the work of Carl Jung, one of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, the test is highly questioned by the scientific community."
"Overall, the review committee concluded that the MBTI has not demonstrated adequate validity although its popularity and use has been steadily increasing. The National Academy of Sciences review committee concluded that: 'at this time, there is not sufficient, well-designed research to justify the use of the MBTI in career counseling programs,' the very thing that it is most often used for."
Please, ladies and gentlemen who participate on Hacker News, do yourselves the favor to read some psychological research literature that was written after you were born, so that you find out that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® was never widely accepted by psychologists and that it now languishes on the ash heap of history. For a long time now, factor-analytic models of human personality have been the fruitful research paradigm, and currently the Big Five model
enjoys a fair amount of research support across multiple countries with some good confirmation by multiple researchers. The Big Five theory still needs work, but it is much more productive of understanding human personality than the Myers-Briggs model ever was.
Don't forget to up vote the poll to get more data.
Note that the HN poll here suffers BIG-TIME from all the usual problems of voluntary response polls, just like the Literary Digest poll that failed in predicting the result of the 1936 United States presidential election despite a high response rate.
What is happening is that you can think of a personality profile as a vector in very high-dimensional space. MBTI presents a basis in a 4-dimensional subspace of that. How well it works for a particular person depends on how her personality aligns with that basis.
A lot people will test near the middle on the MBTI characteristics, and say that the test does not work for them. If most of the population is near the middle, statistical studies won't show much validation for MBTI either.
Now, none of that means that the test has little value -- it actually has a lot of value, but only for people who test at relatively high scores. For example, I generally test as either ENTP or INTP -- and since I'm near the middle of E/I scale, it does not tell much either way. my N, T, and P, however, are quite extreme (I've done quite a few of these, and not once have I had a case when my N or T score was not at the end of the range, P nearly there too) -- so the descriptions and advice for these types that I've seen have been quite relevant and helpful.
Exactly... there are hundreds of systems to evaluate people. All of them are abstractions which are unable to capture the full depth of reality, and so will work well under some conditions and bad under others. It's a matter of design choices and tradeoffs. Choose the system that better fits your needs and be aware of its limitations.
That said, I like MBTI's (or Keirsey's) simplicity. It gives you a lot of data for such a simple system, and is easy to apply. You have to be aware of its limitations, of course. But I've been playing with it for almost 10 years (in my personal life, not so much for work) and it rarely fails me.
I think it's the same principle as the Fibonacci scale for planning poker... you will always have some error in your system, don't fool yourself. So the ROI of a simple system might pay off...
PS: I agree, MBTI seems VERY accurate for people that are not in the middle of the scales, and not-so-accurate otherwise.
The classification would be more meaningful, I think, if there was a good way to characterize certainty/degree.
In my case, I and T are both generally very strong, while N has been weaker.
The most interesting part is the J/P has gradually shifted. I used to test as a very strong J, but that has been changing and today I finally flipped and tested P.
Which isn't popular with the average Joe, because in contrast to MB, where all the types have somewhat positive names (Architect, Healer, Protector, Mastermind, Champion, Inventor, ...), the big 5 measures personality traits that can be regarded as negative (and which probably are in the context of social interaction). No one likes to hear from a test that they're a disagreeable, neurotic, close-minded person.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/myers-b...
"Now, 50 years after the first time anyone paid money for the test, the Myers-Briggs legacy is reaching the end of the family line. The youngest heirs don’t want it. And it’s not clear whether organizations should, either.
. . . .
"Yet despite its widespread use and vast financial success, and although it was derived from the work of Carl Jung, one of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, the test is highly questioned by the scientific community."
http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html
http://www.psychometric-success.com/personality-tests/person...
"Overall, the review committee concluded that the MBTI has not demonstrated adequate validity although its popularity and use has been steadily increasing. The National Academy of Sciences review committee concluded that: 'at this time, there is not sufficient, well-designed research to justify the use of the MBTI in career counseling programs,' the very thing that it is most often used for."
http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/deve...
http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Personality-Testing-Annie-Murphy/...
Please, ladies and gentlemen who participate on Hacker News, do yourselves the favor to read some psychological research literature that was written after you were born, so that you find out that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® was never widely accepted by psychologists and that it now languishes on the ash heap of history. For a long time now, factor-analytic models of human personality have been the fruitful research paradigm, and currently the Big Five model
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~cdeyoung/Pubs/DeYoung_Intelligence-Pe...
enjoys a fair amount of research support across multiple countries with some good confirmation by multiple researchers. The Big Five theory still needs work, but it is much more productive of understanding human personality than the Myers-Briggs model ever was.
Don't forget to up vote the poll to get more data.
Note that the HN poll here suffers BIG-TIME from all the usual problems of voluntary response polls, just like the Literary Digest poll that failed in predicting the result of the 1936 United States presidential election despite a high response rate.