Admiral Katrina Cornwell

Bonus for the grief you’ve endured:

Jayne Brook being an absolute cutie pie with a tiny Cornwell pin.

I do not use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

I’m so sorry, because I know this is not the answer you were looking for, but I object really strongly to MBTI.  And as I psychologist I feel obligated to tell people why.  In a nutshell: it’s not valid, but most people don’t know that.  Personalities cannot be meaningfully sorted into types.  Anyone who says differently is selling something.  “Love Languages” is from a for-profit company.  “Learning Styles” is from a for-profit company.  “Left Brain/Right Brain” is perpetuated by for-profit companies.

The Myers-Briggs Foundation is a for-profit company.  Specifically, it is a for-profit company that uses junk science to sell tests to educational institutions and human resource managers.  People’s futures get directed by a test that doesn’t tell us a damn thing.  And part of the reason that happens is that MBTI successfully markets itself as a “validated” “tool” based in “science.”  Kind of like Goop or Scientology.

To be clear: Hogwarts Houses and Buzzfeed quizzes are also meaningless, but I still love playing around with because they are correctly treated as meaningless.  If “Design a Café to Find Out Which Power Ranger You Are” doesn’t give you the answer you want, you laugh and close the window and carry on with your life.  If you don’t like where the Sorting Hat puts you, you swap houses.  The Hogwarts Houses are even better because people tailor JKR’s own descriptions at will: Don’t think Hufflepuff has enough traits?  Great, add a few!  (And I am a particularly good finder, if anyone was wondering.  #badgerpride) Don’t like the description of Slytherins on PotterMore?  Okay, change it!  The author is dead and the Slytherins killed her!

Yes, those classifying tools are still selling something.  But we all know what we’re being sold: a series of children’s books.  Or the ad revenue from that flashing “Join AARP!” gif next to the item asking you to choose between cheddar and mozzarella for interior decorating.  MBTI, however, actively presents itself as a psychometric instrument rather than a revenue generator.  Which is misinformation.

My specific objection to MBTI is a little deeper than that, though.  Because it sorts people into types, and then markets those types as real science.

Sorting personalities into “introvert or extrovert” is the equivalent of inventing a measure of hair type that only has categories “long or short.”  If we say that the cutoff point for “long hair” a foot of hair, then we’re also saying that someone with a twelve-inch Afro and someone with no hair at all have more in common than someone with a twelve-inch Afro does with someone who has a thirteen-inch Afro.  We’re also failing to capture the people with asymmetrical hair, mullets, gender variability, hair loss, wigs, and like 99% of the variance in hair.

Extraversion is a spectrum.  Most people have some high-extraversion characteristics and some low-extraversion characteristics: Cassie dislikes loud parties but eventually works in public speaking, Marco loves being the center of attention but wants to be alone when making a major decision, Ax hates even the thought of social dominance but also gets lonely when he’s alone, etcetera.  And like hair length, extraversion changes over the lifespan.  Older adults tend to be more extroverted on average than younger adults, and people become more extroverted over the lifespan.  IMHO that’s good news, because it means that over time most of us will become less scared of calling strangers on the phone.  K.A. Applegate is right: experience might not make us wise, but it can remind us that we’ve survived such tribulations before.

MBTI has, I would argue, done actual harm in perpetuating the idea that people are one thing or the other.  Arbitrarily splitting spectra into categories doesn’t just fail to measure the variable of interest, but also actively fosters social divisions.  I see it all over Tumblr: people say “extroverts will never understand me” or “society is organized against introverts.”  That view puts others down and locks oneself into fixed mindset.  Sorting people into groups creates an automatic, reflexive preference for one’s own group.  Which often creates an equally reflexive desire to make one’s own group look better through making other groups look bad.  In reality, there is no such thing as “an introvert” or “an extrovert.” No more than there is such thing as “a tall” or “a short.”  Perpetuating that myth just generates new forms of intergroup judgment.

Additionally, MBTI comes from Ye Olde School of Thought in psychology where there was a lot of belief in typologies and the elitist assumption that Science Knows Best because non-scientists are dumbasses too id-driven to know their own minds.  Jung was doing the best he could, but he was also one of the people trying to fool test subjects with inkblots and word pictures to draw out their secrets.  Ergo, his test suffers from the same problems as the Kinsey Scale: it forces people into procrustean boxes, it allows for only limited outcomes, and it tries to “trick” people into endorsing certain typologies.  Contemporary psychologists not only talk about relative degrees of extraversion, but also (for instance) find out how much people like parties by asking how much they like parties.  Yes, there are certain preferences that tend to cluster together (party-lovers are more likely to enjoy public speaking) but it’s not a uniform construct by any stretch of imagination.

Honestly, the “introvert or extrovert” distinction is the most problematic, because scientifically speaking the others are just nonsensical.  Like, what does “judging or perceiving” even mean?  It seems kinda similar to the real personality trait of Openness, but as an attitudes and persuasion researcher I can tell you that EVERYONE judges pretty much EVERYTHING if given reason to do so.  And if they judge things, does that mean they have no perception?  Even people in comas have perception, so I guess all the “judgers” who aren’t “perceivers” are already dead…  Plus, the “thinking or feeling” one isn’t really tapping a spectrum at all.  Marco, I’ve argued, is high in both thinking and feeling, while Jake is pretty low in both.

So why does the MBTI get such widespread use, when the Big Five model remains relatively unknown in spite of being real science?  I think the biggest reason is that MBTI’s descriptions of the personality types are all written to appeal to the Barnum Effect: they’re just vague enough and contain just enough hedging that they can all describe anyone.

Let’s take Rachel Berenson as an example.  She’s definitely known to “enjoy the present moment, what’s going on around [her],” whether that’s dive-racing with Jake or coming off a good fight or even just flying around with Tobias, and she’s most certainly “loyal and committed to [her] values and the people who are important to [her],” whether that’s trying to kill David after he threatens Jordan or defending her best friend even when she knows that Cassie is wrong.  So according to MBTI, that makes her ISFP.

But hang on.  Rachel is also “frank, decisive” and willing to “assume leadership readily,” as well as “forceful in presenting [her] ideas” during group discussions, so I guess that makes her an ENTJ.  But Rachel also “takes a pragmatic approach focused on immediate results” because she “wants to act energetically to solve the problem” which we can see from her impatience to hit the yeerks where it hurts and worry about moralizing later.  So then she’d be ESTP.  However, Rachel’s got the “loyal, considerate, notice and remember specifics about people… concerned with how others feel” to a T, especially when we think about her matchmaking for Jake and Cassie or her ability to notice things that Tobias isn’t telling her, and she more than any of the others “strives to create an orderly and harmonious environment at work and at home” through actually keeping her room neat and putting care into all her personal spaces, so that makes her ISFJ.  So on and so forth.

Another reason that MBTI is popular is that it appeals to a Western desire to sort things into groups.  American education (and that in similar cultures like Australia) focuses on logic, classification, and creating borders.  It involves breaking things down into disparate parts to understand them better.  MBTI does that with human beings, and in a way that gives us easy answers.  And in the process it commits the Fundamental Attribution Error, comfortably assuring us that anyone who knocks a jar off a shelf is a klutz and not just momentarily distracted, while anyone who cuts us off in traffic is an asshole and not just trying to get their kids to school on time.  The reality is that personality is at least partially situation-dependent, and that personalities change over time.  The reality is that personality traits don’t cluster nicely into “types,” meaning that it’s only informative to look at patterns of change and relativity in context.

And MBTI misinforms people about that reality.  For money.

So MBTI isn’t just “the zodiac for Livejournal,” because businesses generally (I hope) don’t say “Hmmm, we already have three Tauruses on this team, let’s get a Pisces in here” when making decisions that can seriously impact the careers of human beings.  MBTI isn’t just “the zodiac for Livejournal” because astrology doesn’t actively perpetuate misinformation in a way that sows confusion and leads to mistrust for real science.  MBTI does more active harm that the zodiac ever will.  But people don’t know this, because the test markets itself so successfully.

Second, for some context, I took two and a half psych classes before realizing that counseling was not something I could do for the rest of my life, took the easy way out, and switched to aerospace engineering.  All my other experience has been on the receiving end, dealing with my occasionally misfiring brain, so I have enormous respect for you experience, education, expertise, and accomplishments.

I’ll start by saying that I pretty much agree entirely with your points about the validity and potential harm of the MBTI.  I didn’t know how much financial motivation there was, given that my investment was three books that were probably less than $10 collectively from used book stores, but I certainly believe it.  Also, my first introduction to the test was a Facebook link from maybe 11 years ago, and I distinctly remember basically messing with my answers to see what resulted in a changed type.  Basically I hold no illusions of the descriptive capabilities of the MBTI, and reject any prescriptive or proscriptive capacity its adherents may claim.

All of that said, I want to offer my small counterpoint as to why I have a small soft spot for Keirsey, in particular.  Thanks to poorly understood messages from a religious upbringing (along with a fair amount of bullying and social isolation), I basically internalized the concept that I wasn’t allowed to have any sort of personality.  When I finally started receiving effective counseling in my early twenties, I was basically all over the place in terms of development.  In that setting, Keirsey’s work gave my an initial framework and vocabulary to start building some sense of personal identity with.  As with any theoretical framework, as the data came in, the framework was adjusted, and I developed a better understanding of myself beyond, and even contradictory to, that initial basic concept, but I feel that without the fairly simple starting point, it would have taken a lot longer to get where I am.

Again, I’m coming at this from the perspective of an engineer, where we commonly use models that we know don’t accurately represent the systems we’re working with (especially as students), but it allows us to make a start and build the necessary tools to come back and create a more accurate representation.  An inaccurate model can still be useful as long as its inaccuracies are recognized and accounted for, but no matter how much we love our models, it’s generally recognized that reality loves to not fit into our tidy little boxes.  Of course, human psychology is much more complex and intricate than nearly any system that engineers work with, and it requires much greater care than simple mechanical, electrical, or chemical processes.

At the end of the day, I’m glad I’m dealing with the relatively simple task of helping humanity reach other planets, and I’m glad people like you are working to make sure we have a humanity that is worthy of this planet, let alone others.

I also spent somewhere between days and months when I was in undergrad writing detailed descriptions as to which MBTI profile best described each of my OCs the best.  I seriously think I sat there and took a free knockoff version of the MBTI a good twelve times for the twelve main characters of my original fiction series.  It wasn’t until I was in my 400-level Psychometrics class that I has a “Whaddayamean, the MBTI’s not valid?” moment.  If I recall correctly I spent a while hunting down more information in an effort to prove my professor wrong after he first told us that it wasn’t internally consistent, couldn’t predict human behavior, didn’t distinguish between personality types, and was unable to do 95% of what it promised.  Obviously I came around after I read more of the science, but obviously I’m also a contrarian little shit at heart.

Anyway, thank you for being so understanding that I had so much rambling about a test that no one has any reason to believe isn’t a valid personality measure.  Part of the reason I go on so much is that it really isn’t clear from any information I can find on a quick Google search that MBTI actually is for-profit junk science.  So it’s almost more reasonable to conclude that it’s valid than otherwise.  Often the only good information on psychological measures is in these fucking papers on how papers psychologists write about how the L2-MLM ANOVA with MLE after MNAR of the FAE suggests S1 processes within ELM/HSM are only quasi-reflexive in light of GSR-R yadda yadda so forth…*  The Giving Psychology Away movement is, shall we say, a work in progress.