I don’t like MBTI either, they’ve had a hundred years of opportunity to do science but never used it. They’re a business selling coaching re-investing into marketing, not science. I’m merely using their abbreviations because they became a lingua franca.
MBTI being bunk doesn’t mean that Jung didn’t spot something real, though, even if he proved nothing and could only describe it fuzzily (he didn’t even describe 16 types, but eight, based on primary cognitive function. In that rough model ISTPs and INTPs are one and the same which we definitely aren’t). The whole of Psychological types is basically saying “hey guys there’s something here we should have a look at it”. Chapter 10 is the interesting one, the rest is… philology? It’s the best proof he could muster back then give the man a break that was 100 years ago.
On the scientific front the best the typology community has right now is Juan E Sandoval’s stuff, the pilot studies are quite promising but there’s more theorycrafting to be done before applying for grants for properly-sized studies to then throw at the scientific establishment saying “prove us wrong”.
In case of tl;dw: Consider embodied cognition, and following from that that cognitive operations are expressed outwardly by various gestures, suchlike, CT calls the lot of it vultology. Then make a taxonomy of markers, analyse a lot of video marking those things and throw statistics at the data, what you get out of that is bimodal distributions, showing that there’s actual differences between people (that is, unlike Big5 axis which don’t have bimodal distributions). Make a twin study, observe that twins share vultological clusters, strongly suggesting that those clusters are innate. Flank by psychological questionaries establishing correlations between the vultological clusters and self-reported cognition.
You can say that you’re sceptical but if you say that that’s not doing science then I don’t know what to tell you, either.
Ironically, the best thing done to MBTI in the later years is 16personalities test. It’s crude, it’s stupid, but it did promote the idea and had this well-designed avatars, so it brought many people on the path of self-discovery.
But making it a science? Everyone was more occupied by selling it, than researching it.
There’re also Socionics, an exUSSR bastard that rewire many things in MBTI, and is too focused on the idea of pairing types: https://mysocio.ru/ I find it a little deeper but more cringe.
16personalities is Big5 dressed up in MBTI terminology – yes Big5 has a good methodology, but it doesn’t even try to measure the stuff that Jung was getting at, if you get an “I” on 16personalities that means you rank low on Big5 sociability which just isn’t what introversion is. Big5, more or less, can tell you how other people, society in general see you as. You probably know that you’re sociable or not, Big5 can give you a very precise place on the bell curve, and you may or may not know whether you’re neurotic, which can be very helpful. But it just doesn’t have anything to do with cognition, and Big5 results very much aren’t innate, which Jungian types are supposed to be.
Overall, each time I see a type ending in -T or -A I automatically assume the thing to be a mistype. From my experience it’s quite a bit worse than chance.
The avatars are cute though and the wider typing community has adopted them wholesale.
I don’t like MBTI either, they’ve had a hundred years of opportunity to do science but never used it. They’re a business selling coaching re-investing into marketing, not science. I’m merely using their abbreviations because they became a lingua franca.
MBTI being bunk doesn’t mean that Jung didn’t spot something real, though, even if he proved nothing and could only describe it fuzzily (he didn’t even describe 16 types, but eight, based on primary cognitive function. In that rough model ISTPs and INTPs are one and the same which we definitely aren’t). The whole of Psychological types is basically saying “hey guys there’s something here we should have a look at it”. Chapter 10 is the interesting one, the rest is… philology? It’s the best proof he could muster back then give the man a break that was 100 years ago.
On the scientific front the best the typology community has right now is Juan E Sandoval’s stuff, the pilot studies are quite promising but there’s more theorycrafting to be done before applying for grants for properly-sized studies to then throw at the scientific establishment saying “prove us wrong”.
In case of tl;dw: Consider embodied cognition, and following from that that cognitive operations are expressed outwardly by various gestures, suchlike, CT calls the lot of it vultology. Then make a taxonomy of markers, analyse a lot of video marking those things and throw statistics at the data, what you get out of that is bimodal distributions, showing that there’s actual differences between people (that is, unlike Big5 axis which don’t have bimodal distributions). Make a twin study, observe that twins share vultological clusters, strongly suggesting that those clusters are innate. Flank by psychological questionaries establishing correlations between the vultological clusters and self-reported cognition.
You can say that you’re sceptical but if you say that that’s not doing science then I don’t know what to tell you, either.
Ironically, the best thing done to MBTI in the later years is 16personalities test. It’s crude, it’s stupid, but it did promote the idea and had this well-designed avatars, so it brought many people on the path of self-discovery.
But making it a science? Everyone was more occupied by selling it, than researching it.
There’re also Socionics, an exUSSR bastard that rewire many things in MBTI, and is too focused on the idea of pairing types: https://mysocio.ru/ I find it a little deeper but more cringe.
16personalities is Big5 dressed up in MBTI terminology – yes Big5 has a good methodology, but it doesn’t even try to measure the stuff that Jung was getting at, if you get an “I” on 16personalities that means you rank low on Big5 sociability which just isn’t what introversion is. Big5, more or less, can tell you how other people, society in general see you as. You probably know that you’re sociable or not, Big5 can give you a very precise place on the bell curve, and you may or may not know whether you’re neurotic, which can be very helpful. But it just doesn’t have anything to do with cognition, and Big5 results very much aren’t innate, which Jungian types are supposed to be.
Overall, each time I see a type ending in -T or -A I automatically assume the thing to be a mistype. From my experience it’s quite a bit worse than chance.
The avatars are cute though and the wider typing community has adopted them wholesale.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
the pilot studies are quite promising
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.