The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), first published in 1944, attempted to provide an empirical method of identifying a person's dominant ego function, in terms of Carl Jung's theory. Beginning in the 1960s, scientists performed studies to see if MBTI results were consistent with the assumed theory that Jungian functions exist and conflict in such a way that one of them must be dominant and the others suppressed. Every study has found that instead of people's MBTI scores clustering around two opposite poles, such as intuition vs. sensation, with few people scoring in the middle, people's scores actually cluster around the middle of each scale in a bell curve. This suggests that the Jungian polarities do not exist. Most contemporary psychological research questions the existence of Jungian functions and the MBTI's ability to tell which function is dominant.
Wow. Can you show us the study?
I'm arguing that if you choose to develop beliefs about human nature that ignores basic science, then you're being intellectually dishonest — i.e., refusing to look for and follow the facts where they may lead.
Human nature? When did I ever say that MBTI describes human nature? The way that I use it (which I want to make the focus of this discussion, just to be clear) never involves any such thing. I only use it to categorize people and how I should respond to them.
You can decide to continue using the ideas of the MBTI to understand the mind, but that decision will not have any epistemic basis.
In order to understand the mind itself, I turn to real, empirical psychology. To gain a heuristic understanding of the mind, I use MBTI.
It's theory, not data. Bad theory. :/
I'm a tad confused: Are you saying that self-reporting is an invalid source of data?
No one said anything about a diagnostic tool. The fact of the matter is that there's little evidence that a population of people who extravert feelings is less likely to introvert logic (or whatever; you still haven't made clear what those phrases even mean).
Well there's your problem: you don't understand MBTI and you're trying to criticize it. Whether or not MBTI is a good model or whether or not I use it in a logically valid way, you'll do a lot better job of trying to pick the system apart if you understood it. To analogize in a situation where both you and I are wrong:
You: Math is wrong, the log of 100 is x!
Me: Taking the logarithm of a constant produces a constant. The log of 100 is 3.
Despite the fact that I erroneously believe log 100 = 3 (which corresponds to believing that MBTI is a full model of the mind, which I don't) you have still missed the point because logarithms of constants produce constants (which corresponds to not knowing what the functions are). Therefore, in this example, I'm an idiot and you haven't learned about logarithms. But I could have said that log 100 is 2 (which corresponds to believing that MBTI is a useful heuristic for a narrow portion of the mind) in which case I'd be right and you'd still not have learned about logarithms.
Moreover, the experiences of my therapist and me indicate the opposite. When I was about to show the forum to my therapist, he was wondering whether I'd get tugged down into all sorts of unhealthy codependent relationships, but once he'd read some posts there, he handed my phone back to me (I was showing the forum to him on my phone) and remarked that I'd be fine since everyone here is so detached, which corresponds directly to the model of the INTP's Fe being inferior-- that is to say, that people who came to this forum on the basis of a type test behaved as the test said that they did: primarily via logic, secondarily via intuition, etc., etc.
That's tautological. You've defined Fe to mean "those processes used, for example, to be warm and fuzzy" and Ti to mean "those processes used, for example, to solve logic puzzles.
To analogize, you're asking me to define my experience of the color red, and I said "the same color that I experience when I see blood." I don't know how to describe the feeling of Ti, for example, so I either use essentially tautological definitions like "making internal decisions based on logic" or give examples so that you can experience the function for yourself. Moreover, I (and again, this is where I split off from what you're saying MBTI as a whole is) don't look at the functions as what is going on inside the brain. I see the functions as what we, as humans, perceive to be going on.
That does not clarify anything about the mind's function at all. It's a different problem from relying on the actual thing I'm criticizing (which is the MBTI and its ideological basis); whereas MBTI fails to measure variables that haven't even been shown to be meaningful, your ideas fail to say anything interesting at all.
Variables shown to be meaningful? To counter: Have you ever gone to, for example, the ESFJ forum? Try having a deep theological discussion with them and see how they react to it. My money is on them being very emotionally charged up about the issue and not seeing reason no matter how hard you try. Or, for example, do you remember our former resident INFJ, Da Blob? His posts were always filled with intuitive leaps of logic that never actually made sense. Or try going to the INFP forum: they had a thread titled "INFP Porn," which was, as one might expect of Feeling-dominants, pictures of kittens in baskets.
Also, you're moving the goalposts by referring to your ideas instead of the ones we are discussing. I'm fine with that, but it must be clear that by continuing a discussion of how you use the MBTI, we are changing the subject.
[/quote]
Well, you're right. We ought to define what we're arguing about.
Efficacy in the sense that it actually helps anyone understand mental function in the sense that they actually know more about the mind after being acquainted with it than they did before. There's is no evidence that MBTI does that, just like there's no evidence that learning Christian theology improves comprehension of the cosmos. Ergo, similarly baseless.
Not efficacious?
@EditorOne,
@Proletar,
@Nezumi and I would very much like to disagree. Here are but a few examples of people understanding themselves better:
http://www.intpforum.com/showthread.php?t=15263
http://www.intpforum.com/showthread.php?t=12855
I believe in the value of intuition when tempered by good scientific theory. The professions you mention actually have a long, and terrible history of failing to do exactly that, relying on things like the MBTI and Jung's theories to actually try to help people, shooing away academic critiques of their approach by declaring counseling/clinical work an "art" rather than a science in order to justify their reliance on intuition.
Do you know what the result was? People who were being handled by clinicians saw no better outcomes than people who never saw any clinician. Today, that is not the case (so much, anyway).
OK...? I'm saying that having a good heuristic model to condense what I've learned about someone is useful. I call outwardly emotional people "Fe-doms" and try what the MBTI says on them. Oftentimes it works, but sometimes, it doesn't because people deviate from any model, and I don't expect them not to. But it works enough that I keep using it, kind of like a sparky toaster.
Now if you're asking whether or not MBTI itself is a good overall psychometric, then I say "HECK NO!". It doesn't model disease! CBT, combined with a practitioner's best judgment and empathy is a much better tool for understanding both healthy and unhealthy minds. But oftentimes I don't have the time to completely understand someone, so I use the MBTI as a rough guide.
There are a lot of theoretical models for understanding human behavior that has experimental backing. When it comes to clinical work, check out Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. If you want to understand emotion, check out Lazarus's magnum opus Emotion and Adaptation and take your capacity for understanding other's people's feelings in realtime to a whole new level by grounding it in sound (as it gets, so far) theory. The brain only needs to be an afterthought when thinking about the mind.
I've already heard of CBT and roughly understand its precepts (thought precedes emotion, therefore fixing the thought fixes the emotion unless the brain is somehow ill) but I have neither the interest nor the empathy to be a clinician. Could you give me a summary of "Emotion and Adaptation" and how it relates to our discussion? I don't doubt its truth, I'm just curious.
The human brain, unlike other organs, can be molded by pure information. Provide the right info to the right parts of the brain, respond and control in the right ways to changes in his relation to his environment, and a lot (though not all, and never easily) of mental function can be changed.
That's the general feeling that I got from my experience with CBT: change the thought, change the feeling.
Part of clinical psychological science is learning how to do this in ways that actually work. (i.e., that produce better results than the do-nothing-at-all alternative).
Indeed!
-Duxwing
Speaking of phrenology this is the first time I hear it associated with MBTI - unless you're giving Auburn's theories a condescending shout out.
) to use it in the moment. 