2:30pm July 30, 2014

youneedacat-alliecat-person-with-all-of-this

youneedacat:

alliecat-person:

With all of this Myers-Briggs stuff going around Tumblr lately, I’m wondering if I’m the only one who isn’t sure about my type. I’m very sure on the I and fairly sure on the J, but the other two are confusing. I used to think I was N, but now I’m not so…

It’s not a scientific test, at all. It’s neither reliable (meaning the same person gets the same result consistently if they take the test multliple times) or valid (meaning, it clearly predicts what it logically should in the real world).

The other problem with it is that it treats opposing traits (e.g., “introvert” and “extrovert”) as dichotomous (either-or), when they are really a continuum, like most human traits. This is a problem because, again like most human traits, these are likely distributed in a bell-curve sort of way, with very few people at the extremes and most people in the middle. That means that a few people are strong Introverts with almost no Extravert traits and a few are Extraverts with almost no Introvert traits, while most are in the middle with some of each, and could be plausibly assigned either way. The people who are 51% Extravert are lumped in with extreme Extraverts, when they differ from their fellow Extraverts much more than they do from the people who are 49% Extravert. And those who are 49% Extravert are lumped in with the extreme Introverts, when they are actually more similar to the 51% Extraverts. IMO, this is why the Myers-Briggs isn’t a reliable or valid system. By contrast, mainstream personality psychology’s dominant model at the moment uses continuous traits, e.g. Introvert/Extravert, Conscientious/Not Conscientious, Neurotic/Not Neurotic, Agreeable/Disagreeable…

That said, there are some things I really like about the Myers Briggs test. (In the same way that I really like tarot cards, even though I don’t think they actually predict the future).

First of all, I like the way the Myers-Briggs describe introversion and extraversion, which is different from most other models I’ve seen. The Myers-Briggs focuses on whether the focus of your activity is internal or external. Whether you’re an introvert or an extravert is based on not how sociable or outgoing you are but on where you direct your energy, where introverts are stimulated by internal activity and drained by external energy and extraverts are the opposite. This seems to me to have more validity than the “extravert is sociable, energetic and agreeable, introvert is the opposite” sort of thing that you see a lot most other places, even in psychology research. That’s because it gives a plausible cause of introverted and extraverted behavior (what energizes you), not the effect (outgoingness). As an ambivert, I appreciate the nuance here.

I also like the Sensing vs. Intuition dimension, which has been extremely important in my own life and which I think is a real and meaningful difference between people, but haven’t encountered in mainstream personality research. (The closest thing I’ve seen is the variable “need for cognition,” which sort of relates to some aspects of intuition). I’m about as extreme on Intuition as you can get, and am really not Sensing at all (both because how things work in the here and now is less interesting to me than ideas and emotions, and because my disabilities affect my perceiving what’s happening and how things work in real time). As a kid, this was a big part of the reason why some adults couldn’t stand me and why I shared no interests with most kids, who therefore wanted nothing to do with me. In my experience, sensing adults tend to get very irritated with Intuitive kids, especially when they are also happy to do their own thing and somewhat spacy.

I also like their take on Perceiving vs. Judging, which really does have a somewhat different nuance than Conscientiousness.

I actually really like the little capsule descriptions of the different personality types in Please Understand Me by Kiersey & Bates. They do describe certain people who happen to fit the type extremely well. They are also handy for thinking through character generation, if you’re a writer or roleplayer. They also can help you understand yourself better, in the sense that comparing yourself to various other personalities and noticing the similarities and differences can help you notice things about yourself that you hadn’t paid attention to before.

FWIW, I’m INFP—as N as you get, highly P, and right near the middle on I and F. There are aspects of ENFP and INTP that fit me extremely well, which isn’t surprising given that I’m in the middle on E/I and F/T. But I do consistently test as INFP, and the Kiersey & Bates description really does get at what motivates me the best.

I have a really hard time with N vs. S.

To me, N is just a more complex form of S. And if you had to put things on a line where N is 100-150 and S is 50-99, I would be somewhere between 0 and 49. As in, some other letter, let’s just call it U for Underneath. And U is actually different from N and S in a way that N and S aren’t different from each other. (To make things more confusing, U is what I usually call ‘sensing’. But this 'sensing’ is different from MBTI 'sensing’. It has elements of things that look like parts of both N and S, but is neither, it’s a completely different animal.)

I’ve tested as both N (iNtuitive) and S (Sensing) depending on how I answer the questions, because the way the questions are currently set up, they have elements of U that show up in N, and elements of U that show up in S. They’d have to write the test completely differently to differentiate U from either of them. (U is characterized by having trouble forming even the 'literal’ concepts that characterize S, but by living in a truly sensory-based world more than a conceptual one. S isn’t really sensory, it’s just a less-complex conceptual world than N is. I honestly think that Sensing and Intuitive are both horrible names for S and N, because both of them are completely misleading. U is both sensory and intuitive in the usual senses of the words, but it’s not S or N at all.)

I think I could almost be happy as IUFP. Almost. Even though I don’t really think the MBTI is a real thing at all. But it would make me much happier than ISFP.

Of course obviously I can do both S and N to some degree or I wouldn’t be able to have this conversation, and that’s the other thing, they don’t really account for that. Well they do, but they don’t do it well. Not in a way that satisfies me that they didn’t just do an ass-pull to satisfy people’s concerns about the validity of their ideas.

The thing about F and T is they aren’t even opposites. And the whole idea about this test is it’s supposed to be about these continuums between opposites.

And like… S and N aren’t opposites either, they’re like the middle and the left side of a continuum that goes further beyond S to the right. If you have to look at them as on a continuum at all.

But F (feeling) and T (thinking)? They’re not even on a continuum. They’re totally different things. You can have both at once. F is basically making decisions based on values and feelings. And T is basically making decisions based on logic and thinking. And those aren’t opposites. They’re not mutually exclusive. You can literally be doing both, equally, at the same time. So the F-T axis doesn’t even make sense. You can be strongly F and strongly T at the exact same time and that can’t happen in a continuum or a pair of true opposites.

The only one that makes any sense to me at all is I (Introversion) and E (extraversion). Like… that’s literally the only one of the four that makes any amount of strong sense to me as a continuum between opposites that actually makes any degree of sense. And it doesn’t make total sense, it just makes more sense than any of the rest of them.

J (judging) and P (perceiving), again, meh. It’s like one is supposed to be that you’re judging things, you’re making decisions before things happen, you’re planning things out in advance, you’re thinking about things and evaluating them all the time. And P is more like you’re leaving things open, you’re perceiving the world rather than instantly putting your mind and judgements around it, you’re not planning things in advance but being more spontaneous, etc.

I think both J and P cluster a bunch of things together that aren’t necessarily related. But like I/E, they make a little more sense to me than either N/S or F/T. (And N/S and F/T are nonsensical to me in two totally different ways.)

So I see I/E as making a fair bit of sense, J/P as making some degree of sense, and N/S and F/T being irreparably broken ideas in two totally different ways.

But that’s not even approaching whether I find the whole idea of this kind of personality test a good idea, and I don’t really.

But if I had to have a type, it’d be IUFP. But that’d break their system of having only two letters per category. Still, I’d be happier than being stuck choosing between the elements of U that are categorized as being part of N, and the elements of U that are categorized as being part of S, when there’s plenty of elements of U that are in neither. ISFP and INFP are both things I’ve gotten before, but neither of them actually describes the type of thought processes that are supposed to be described by the N/S axis.

I’ve actually put a lot of time and energy into studying the MBTI, even though I hate the MBTI with a passion. So my criticisms of it aren’t just “yuck it stinks”, they’ve actually been thought out after years of study. One thing that also bothers me about it is the way that they’ve found ways to account for what happens when you are acting like some type other than the type you supposedly have. Like they have this entire system of explanations for each letter and why you might be using E even though you’re I, or whatever. And they’re elaborate and they basically make it so that your type can’t possibly ever be wrong no matter how much evidence shows it’s wrong. (Or they’ll say things like “You only get out of the test what you put into it,” so that if your type is wrong it’s your own fault for not understanding yourself well enough to answer the questions properly.)

So… yeah I don’t really need the MBTI explained to me, I’ve read entire books about it. I just don't agree with it, it’s not that I don't understand it. (This is not in response to the person I’m replying to. It’s just anticipating the fact that whenever I say I don’t agree with it, people tend to assume I just don’t understand it well enough, and start trying to “educate” me on what it is, what it’s for, and how it supposedly works.)

I don’t like the Enneagram either. Or most typology stuff. It just strikes me as inaccurate and somewhat fanciful, at best.

But when tested, I’m generally, these days, an ISFP, and 4w5. And that has a lot less meaning to me than it does to people who believe in this stuff.