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You are here: Home / Archives for Reliability

The Myers-Briggs rests on wholly unproven theories

April 15, 2015 by Paul Spoerry 9 Comments



Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless
It’s no more scientifically valid than a BuzzFeed quiz.

The wildly popular test is based on Carl Jung's principles and were later adapted into a test by Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of Americans who had no formal training in psychology.

Vox explains, the Myers-Briggs test is based on personality types developed in the 1940s that have little connection to any real data. More problematic, though, is that it classifies personalities by a binary preference for a particular trait. In reality, however, most people exist on a spectrum between the two and can vary between them from week to week:
"With most traits, humans fall on different points along a spectrum. If you ask people whether they prefer to think or feel, or whether they prefer to judge or perceive, the majority will tell you a little of both. Jung himself admitted as much, noting that the binaries were useful ways of thinking about people, but writing that “there is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.”"

There there's this from Wikipedia: "The interesting — and somewhat alarming — fact about the MBTI is that, despite its popularity, it has been subject to sustained criticism by professional psychologists for over three decades. One problem is that it displays what statisticians call low "test-retest reliability." So if you retake the test after only a five-week gap, there's around a 50% chance that you will fall into a different personality category compared to the first time you took the test." – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator#Reliability

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Filed Under: Google+ Posts Tagged With: Reliability, Wednesday

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