To what extent do you believe in the MBTI? \ stacker news ~earth

To what extent do you believe in the MBTI?

342 sats \ 25 comments \ @cryotosensei 14 Apr earth

zaps forwarded to @elvismercury (10%) @Undisciplined (10%)

Today’s post is inspired by @Undisciplined because I wrote about being an ENFP. It made him share that he’s an INTJ.

I can’t believe that I have yet to broach the topic of personality types here. It’s one of the weird random shit (@elvismercury’s words) that I’m kinda obsessed about.

But first things first,

What is the MBTI?

It stands for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and is a personality profiling tool that divides the world into 16 distinctive personality types.

But idk my type

Oh, don’t worry. You can do a test here.

Okay, I know my personality type now. So, Sensei, what’s your type?

ENFP

Oh thank you, I thought you would never ask! I’m ENFP. If you are familiar with the hit sitcom, F.R.I.E.N.D.S, Phoebe Buffay is supposed to be in my tribe. Which is great because I simply adore her!

Okay, I sound narcissistic. Moving on, to answer my own question, while I’m cognisant of the fact that the MBTI tool cannot be empirically proven and that we are all unique individuals too complex to be tagged to four cold, static letters, I keep this on my phone:

and this:

But how has knowing your MBTI personality type helped you, Sensei?

For one, I fully agree with the weakness of ENFPs. I’m great at coming up with creative ideas but I suck at following them through and realising them. Knowing my weakness helps me pay greater consciousness to apply low time-preference. I wrote this article, transaction by transaction. Given my impatient nature, I wouldn’t have consciously gotten myself to chunk my writing like this if I wasn’t aware of my weakness as an individual.

Enough talking, Sensei. Where else can I find out about MBTI?

Frank James’ YouTube channel is on-point n freaking hilarious.I also quite like this Korean channel, even though I don’t know what it’s talking about half the time lol

WHAT IS YOUR MBTI PROFILE?

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99 sats \ 3 replies \ @TNStacker 14 Apr

I took it with a department 10+ years ago. It was a good team exercise, regardless of the issues with the test. The team I worked with felt more connected and more empowered to work together from an inner understanding perspective and framework.

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @cryotosensei OP 14 Apr

My Head of Department got us to do the MBTI test via WhatsApp messaging. Which was the impetus for me going down the rabbit hole haha. I wish he would have gotten us to do this in a face to face meeting. It would have been fun to react to our results collectively.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TNStacker 14 Apr

It was kind of cool in person. A pretty cool bonding exercise, but I was on a small team of five. I bet the dynamics are different with larger groups.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined fwd 14 Apr

I used it as a group activity when I managed student workers.

Just the fact that there are people who answer certain questions differently is an interesting thing to learn, even if the broad takeaways aren't that interesting.

99 sats \ 1 reply \ @orthwyrm 14 Apr

Obviously, one cannot distill all of human behaviour into 16 neat archetypes.

But hey, it's fun, and I think the model probably has at least some marginal predictive power. I usually do decently in guessing a person's MBTI upon meeting them. My results would be completely random if MBTI had zero basis in reality, such as star signs and horoscopes.

I usually register as INTP. Very dominant in the IN, and more borderline in the TP.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 14 Apr

Interesting about the borderline. In what circumstances are you a planner n in what other situations are you spontaneous n go with the flow?

81 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury fwd 14 Apr

I think as a very coarse description it's better than nothing, and makes for an interesting conversation starter. Mostly I think it's a selection effect -- people who feel well-described by their archetype note it and talk about it; and people who feel less perfectly matched don't remember / pay attention (I'm in the latter group.)

21 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined fwd 14 Apr

You might know the methodology better than I do, but my impression is that they start by positing how many dimensions there are.

Then they design questionnaires with a bunch of different types of questions.

After they give these to a bunch of people they use statistical techniques to form the number of clusters that matches the dimensions that were prespecified based on how strongly answers correlate from different questions.

The last step is looking at which questions and answers were grouped together and giving that an intuitive name.

158 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury fwd 14 Apr

I don't know this sub-area very well, and esp not the methodology. My understanding wrt Big-5 (which is the best studied and most thoroughly validated, though there are a number of more modern extensions of it) was close to your account, but had a few steps flipped:

Ask shit ton of questions
Do a factor analysis / PCA variant
Pick a number of factors that seems like the right number based on unexplained variance
Figure out how different questions load on those factors
Name them

But as you suggest, the magic is deciding how many types of things you want there to be. Wrt Big 5, you can make some reasonably interesting inferences based on neural primitives, so I think it's useful. Some clinicians make a lot of it.

That Jordan Peterson writing exercise that I posted about a couple months ago and can't find now for some reason (here's the website) is actually a quite good version of this -- before he became a culture war figure, JBP did a lot of very strong work in personality psychology. Highly recommended if you're into stuff like this, @cryotosensei.

104 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 14 Apr

Bookmarked your comment. See, sometimes exploring weird random shit pays off haha

64 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined fwd 14 Apr

Thanks for clarifying that a bit. It's been a while since I covered this in my stats classes and it's not something I've used in my own work.

169 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined fwd 14 Apr

I enjoy personality assessments like MBTI, but I don't know how useful (or well validated) they are. I've heard that Big 5 is considered a more reliable evaluation in psychology.

I only know a little bit about the methodology behind these, but from that I think it's a little arbitrary how many traits are considered.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 14 Apr

Never heard of the Big 5 before. Looking forward to going down the rabbithole

15 sats \ 7 replies \ @Coinsreporter 14 Apr

I know a better assesment type and it's more pratical. You're 50% of family, 30% of your closest friends, 10% of your habits, 10% of your work.

60 sats \ 6 replies \ @Bell_curve 14 Apr

For children it’s 50 percent genetic, 5 percent home environment and 45 percent peer group

50 sats \ 2 replies \ @Coinsreporter 14 Apr

Yes, thanks for the information. Yours is based on facts. Mine estimates are based on my practical assessment.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @cryotosensei OP 14 Apr

I think he also plucked those figures off the air haha

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 15 Apr

From Steven Pinker

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 14 Apr

I’m saddened to learn that parents have so little influence over their children

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @Bell_curve 15 Apr

I think this is one reason for home schooling lol

Children inherit genes from their parents

Genes are still most influential

Steven Pinker dedicated a chapter to this topic in his book, how the mind works.

As children enter school and grow up they spend less time with their parents than with their classmates in school and other peer groups etc

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined fwd 15 Apr

Bryan Caplan has a great book that goes over some of this, too.

Home environment plays almost no role in long-term outcomes, while genetics explains the most variation.

The data he's focused on doesn't allow for testing any other contributors, though.

69 sats \ 3 replies \ @premitive1 14 Apr

I look at MBTI and Astrology very similarly.

13 sats \ 2 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 14 Apr

As in they are both hogwash? Haha

4 sats \ 1 reply \ @premitive1 15 Apr

yes, but also in that they are likely the most reasonable explanations experts can give with the current understanding of human behavior.

4 sats \ 0 replies \ @premitive1 15 Apr

i meant respective instead of current. we know things now that were not known when humans developed astrology