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Originally Posted by furball
It may be impossible to prove that it's not nonsense, but my category certainly seemed more accurate than any of the others. Or do you believe that it's impossible to categorise personalities?
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I think the more fundamental question is why you would want to categorise personalities. I dont think its an accident that the Myers-Briggs test has its origin in industrial psychology - it was intended for use in a corporate environment to ensure that people-pegs were put into the right holes, and this is still its most widespread application today. I find it hard to shake the idea that the whole thing is suited to a Brave New World type society where the fundamental social goal is to place people into their correct positions in order to ensure social harmony, regardless of whether this is condusive to individual happyness/development (I'm not suggesting that this was the actual motivation that the creators of M-B had, just that it fits into this sort of project in general). More specifically, I hate dislike M-B for the following reasons:
1) Trying to quantify personalities has its roots in positivist psychology and like most positivist psychology, it tends to ignore the complexity of human consciousness in order to reduce everything to 'neat' categories. Theres something really pathological about talking about there being 16 'types' of people, as if the huge amount of individual variance you encounter throughout human history is that easy to categorise. At most, M-B would be a typification of the people that existed in the society where the test was made, and if that society only allowed for 16 different types then that would be a pretty serious indictment of it. In any case, it's really not clear to me what the quantitative approach of M-B adds to the qualitative Jungian archetype theory which inspired it.
2) The Myers-Briggs test assumes that a 'personality' is something fixed that a person carries around with them through their day-to-day life, and that it makes sense to oppose character traits which are taken as mutually exclusive. In reality, people will generally exhibit different personality traits in different environments; someone who is 'introverted' in a workplace environment may be quite different in a pub with close friends, or in an internet chatroom. I think theres a real sense in which 'personality' doesnt exist; people generally act and think very differently in different circumstances, and trying to pick one particular set of conditions as being 'normal' and representative of their true self is somewhat dubious.
More fundamentally, trying to split personality traits into an either/or categorization schema implicity promotes the idea that its acceptable for a person to be too narrowly focused in one direction rather than striving for a healthy balance between extremes. This again goes back to the industrial psychology origins; if your goal is primarilly to have a productive workforce then it makes sense to have a test which puts people in boxes, but this sort of thing is probably opposed to the healthy development of individuals. I suppose its possible for a test like M-B to be used in a humanistic setting by making people aware of imbalances in their character due to modes of thought/living which they are neglecting, but this is not generally the use to which it is put.
3) M-B takes a strongly uncritical attitude towards politics and the education system by remaining silent on why people have the personality traits they do. This ties into the above; its not clear how you can distinguish between someone who is 'naturally' a Perceiving person, and someone who would become Judging if they were exposed to scientific education. It would only make sense to talk about a person's natural preference for a specific mode of thought if they had been exposed to many different kinds, and I dont think that this is generally true in modern society. Also, in its strongest form, M-B seems to suggest that the difference between (eg) a person who is extremely pro-science and one who prefers intuitive religion/spirituality is ultimately a subjective matter of personality traits rather than being something that can be judged as right or wrong and traced back to its social origins.
4) Even if it were possible to categorize personalities, there isnt really any evidence that the M-B test does so 'correctly'. Most of the questions are far too open and broad to be answered yes/no, and you could easily imagine different people selecting the same option for very different reasons (this is a problem with pretty much all quantitative psychology and psychometrics really). Theres also no scientific evidence that the assignments the test produces are 'correct', nor is it clear what correctness means here or how youd go about testing for it.
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but my category certainly seemed more accurate than any of the others. Or do you believe that it's impossible to categorise personalities?
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Then whats the point of asking all those questions? Why not just give people the list of categories and ask them to pick the one that best describes them?