I recently read Paul Bloom's 2023 book Psych: The Story of the Human Mind, and it got me thinking about psychology in general. Bloom is a developmental psychologist at Yale and his book is essentially a Psych 101 course which reviews some of the fundamentals and greatest insights from the field of psychology. He also addresses some of the critical problems in the field including the replication crisis, which we've been seeing across the social sciences.
More than a decade ago, I graduated from a university where I double majored in psychology and sociology. Human behavior, the mind, and how we act in social settings has always fascinated me, and studying these fields have been a tremendous benefit for me, really shaping my view of the world and myself. Early in the program I was exposed to the Myers-Briggs personality test (known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), something I'm sure many of us have come across at some point in our lives, whether from job counseling or required for a job application. Although I found the MBTI interesting and felt like it really resonated with how I saw myself, I couldn't help but feel something was off about it.
Towards the end of the programs for my bachelors degree was where I had to knock out the requisites I had postponed for too long: essentially six courses covering probability and statistical analysis and the scientific method. After completing these courses, I thought it would have made more sense for students to take scientific methods and statistics prior to taking the majority of the other the psychology and sociology courses. I looked back on all of these "discoveries" with far more skepticism and the Myers-Briggs was one of them.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a questionnaire given to participants that can indicate their "personality type". I remember learning about it in my intro to psych course, but also recall taking it a job center, then again for academic advising. This and similar personality tests are flawed and equivalent to a horoscope.
The reliability of the MBTI is terrible. For example, I've taken the test several times throughout my life, each time receiving a different result. Consider how complex humans are and how the complexities emerge and differ from one moment to the next.
The validity of the MBTI as a pyschometric is also questionable. Testing validity is the extent to which evidence and theory support the interpretations of the test scores entailed by proposed uses of the test. Maybe right before I take the test I had a bad encounter with someone, which affected how I answered the questions tied to introversion. Or perhaps I had a nice chat with the person at the front desk before the test which affected my level of extroversion. Or perhaps I took the test while I was hungry and grumpy. My point is that human moods, attitudes, and behavioral traits change from one moment to the next due to external factors, or even from lines of personal thoughts.
People proudly share their MBTI personality type on their social media profile, much like they do their astrological sign. The reality is that people naturally love hearing things about themselves, most especially compliments. Why is this? This is due to what's called the Barnum-Forer effect. Humans give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that they believe that the results are specifically for them, when in reality they're vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people.
Confirmation bias is another problem. We tend to interpret information in ways that confirms our existing beliefs about ourselves. When reading our "result", we will give me weight or inflate the parts that coincide with what we wanted to hear, and give less weight or deflate the parts that the don't really fit our existing views. This impacts how we rate the accuracy of the test.
James Randi, the scientific skeptic who has challenged and debunked a wide range of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims, demonstrated this in a great YouTube video where he handed out a classroom of college students. They were told that their personalized horoscope were created by a "professional" and based on their personal details like when and where they were born. When the students received their survey, most of the class rated the results as "very accurate". He then had the students exchange their results with others in the class where they discovered they had all be given the same horoscope.
One need only read the 16 MBTI® Personality Types as defined by the Myers & Briggs Foundation, that read like horoscopes or fortune cookies. That's 16 personality types that all 8 billion humans fall into.
Clearly the MBTI is pseudoscientific nonsense that has no place in academics or business, yet it's still being used in some form or another in education testing centers, job questionnaires, and government agencies. Why is this? Because the Myers-Briggs Company is a business and it's in their financial interest to make sure institutional HR departments believe in it's effectiveness in measuring the personalities of employees, students, and job applicants. Are you just curious about taking the test for your own interests? No, you must fork out $60 USD to "discover self-awareness".
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