In this video I describe the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a personality assessment created by Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Cook Briggs. Despite its popularity in career counseling and corporate settings, the MBTI generally isn’t held in high regard by most personality researchers and has been heavily criticized for poor validity and reliability. I discuss several criticisms of the MBTI and end with a reminder that we should focus on individuals rather than categories, especially when careers may be at stake.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to see future videos! Have questions or topics you’d like to see covered in a future video? Let me know by commenting or sending me an email!
Check out my book, Master Introductory Psychology, an alternative to a traditional textbook: http://amzn.to/2eTqm5s
Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. I’ve already made a number of videos about personality and this will be the last video in the personality unit, so some of you who’ve been watching the previous videos may have been wondering when I was going to talk about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. So this is one of the most widely used personality assessments today. It’s taken by over two million people each year although it’s worth noting that it’s not so widely used among personality researchers or people who use personality assessments for clinical purposes. But it’s mostly used for career and leadership purposes.
So why have I put off talking about this very popular personality assessment? Well part of the reason is that there’s a number of criticisms of the Myers-Briggs that we’re gonna look at in this video, and hopefully if you’ve watched the earlier videos on personality you’ll have a better understanding of these criticisms and why they matter.
Ok, so what is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI? So this is a personality assessment and it was created by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs. And here’s a picture of them here and they were inspired by some of the work of Carl Jung on personality types, to create an assessment to try to identify these types in people, although the types are modified a bit from Jung’s work. Ok, so what is the assessment that they created?
Well, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a self-report, so people are reporting on their own personality, and the way that they do this is that they’re given what’s called a forced choice statement. So there’s a statement about the self and each person then has to agree or disagree with that statement. They can’t choose both and they have to choose one, right? So it’s a forced choice between agree or disagree and then they do this for a series of statements. These statements are designed to assess for different dichotomies. So these dichotomies are introversion versus extraversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judgment versus perception.
Ok, so what do these different dichotomies mean? You’re probably familiar with the idea of introversion versus extraversion, although it’s slightly different for the Myers-Briggs. It’s not quite the same as the way that it’s assessed for something like the big five introversion versus extraversion trait. But you might wonder about these others. Sensing versus intuition, what does that mean? Well, what that is referring to is how a person gathers information. Do they prefer to trust their senses or do they prefer to rely on their intuition, their gut, or their feeling about something? And the idea here is not so much that it’s about aptitude, but it’s about preference. Which one do you prefer to use? It doesn’t mean that if you score, you know, towards sensing that you’re better at using your senses. It just means that that’s what you prefer to do. So thinking versus feeling refers to making decisions. Do you prefer to think about things or do you rely on your feeling when making a decision? And then lastly judgment versus perception refers to an overall preference towards judging versus perceiving. And again it’s about a preference, not an aptitude. It doesn’t mean people are better at perceiving or better at judging.
Ok, so based on these four dichotomies a person will get a four letter score so you either get an I or an E, then for sensing or intuition you either get an S or an N, that’s because the I was already taken by introversion, and then for thinking versus feeling you get a T or an F, and then judgment versus perception you get a J or a P. So you get a 4-letter type. So you could be an INFP or an ESTJ, and there will be 16 possible personality types, right? There’s 16 ways that you can combine those scores for each of the four dichotomies and that means we’ll have sixteen personality types.
Now you might, I mean, look at that and think well that means there’s only 16 types of people in the world according to the Myers-Briggs and that’s true, there’s only 16 possible scores you can get. And you might think well maybe there’s more personality types than that but maybe it’s a reasonable number. We can sort of keep track, we might be able to think about all these different types and if you search online you can see all of the different possible letter combinations and a little description about, you know, what that letter combination means right and how the combinations of letters might you know how they might interact with each other.
Ok, so the idea that there’s sixteen personality types brings us to one of the first main criticisms of the MBTI and this is that it’s a typology. So we’re talking about types not dimensions, right? So when I talk about the big five we talked about five different dimensions and here we’re talking about types. So why is this an important distinction? Well we could imagine something like introversion to extraversion, right? We could think of this as this possible range from very extremes of introversion and extraversion to sort of somewhere in the middle. Ok, so when we say this is a pretty broad categorization what I mean is there’s only two types, right? You’re either going to get an I or an E and this means that the difference within a type within a letter might be greater than the difference between the two different letters.
So what was that what does that look like? Well, let’s say that you’re a little bit introverted and so you’re on this distribution, you fall somewhere here. Well, when you think the Myers-Briggs you’re going to get the letter I. And let’s say your friend is slightly extroverted, well they’re gonna get an E, right? So you get two very different scores even though you’re actually not that far apart. You’re fairly close together. At the same time, somebody else could be extremely introverted and the difference in introversion between you and that other person is quite large; it’s much larger than the difference between you and your friend here who’s slightly extroverted. Similarly, you know, somebody over here who’s extremely extroverted is going to be very different from your friend but they’re going to have the same score, right? That means we give sort of this blanket categorization for both of these people who are quite far apart as both being, you know, E or both being I, right?
Now, the problem here is that this reduces the reliability and part of the reason it reduces reliability is most people are going to be sort of in the middle here, right? These extremes are going to be pretty rare. If we imagine maybe there’s something like a normal distribution here, right? For this trait, most people are going to be clustered around the middle, right? They’re not particularly introverted, they’re not particularly extroverted. They’re somewhere in between and this means if people retake the test they often get a new letter score because they’re real close to the border here. And maybe they, you know, give a slightly different answer for a few of the statements and that might cause them to get a totally new letter, even though you know their personality hasn’t really changed dramatically.
And so this reduces the reliability; this test-retest reliability is reduced. And this means that some studies have estimated as many as 50% of people get a new designation if they retake the Myers-Briggs assessment. This means that the letters start losing their meaning and if you say well I’m an INTJ or something and then well, you know, you think that fits your personality. Then you take it again and you get totally different letters then you might wonder what the point of having those letters really is?
Now a related idea here is that we’re painting people with broad brush strokes and they’re self-selected brush strokes. By that I mean it’s a broad categorization and people are choosing it; they’re filling out the form; they’re the one sort of deciding. They can make themselves appear slightly more or less introverted or, you know, having a preference towards intuition or sensing, right? People are self selecting these broad brush strokes and then filling in the personal details. So when you give people therefore a letter score they might say “wow, you know this really does seem like me” probably because they selected it themselves.
But then they start thinking of specific examples that seem to fit and this brings us to something else I talked about in a previous video which is the Forer Effect, also known as the Barnum Effect. This is the idea that if you give people generic, general feedback they find personal relevance in it. So if you tell somebody something like, you know, “you feel like you’re not living up to your potential”, well, the truth is everybody feels like they’re not quite living up to their potential. And what happens is the person will find a personal example “oh yeah, you know in this particular case I felt that way”. Or if you tell people, you know, “sometimes you, you feel withdrawn around people, you want to be alone when you’re around others”. Well, probably lots of times where everybody has felt you know a little bit like they want to get away from people for a while. Now that might happen more or less often but what happens is somebody hears that feedback and they might think of examples for their own personal life where that’s true.
And now they start believing that the feedback was accurate and that’s what Forer demonstrated. He gave this generic feedback to people after they took a personality assessment and they all thought :wow this is really accurate feedback” and then it turned out they all got the same feedback. So it wasn’t personalized at all but they all felt it was personal, right? So that’s another danger with the MBTI feedback. People look at their letter score then find ways to make it seem personally relevant, even though many people who have the same letter score, of course, are going to have quite different personalities in some ways.
Ok, so you might think well, who cares, right? I mean it’s it’s a convenient way to simplify the social world. You know, yeah sure, there’s probably more than 16 different types of people in the world, but you know we can’t have a thousand personality types because at that point this is meaningless, right? Nobody can remember them all and it’s, it’s too much so maybe 16 is a good number. It simplifies things a little bit. We get some general categories for people, what’s the harm in that?
Well the harm might come in how the test is used, right? And the ethics of using this type of personality assessment by corporations. The problem here is it is often used to make predictions about people’s skills and certain behaviors that they might be capable of doing. And it’s really not designed to do that. So people who score as introverted or extraverted, that might have an influence on whether they’re seen as being a potential leader in a company. You might say, well, this person scores an I and they’re introverted, and maybe that means they can’t do certain things that are going to involve social interaction. When in fact, that might not be the case and of course the person may be, may be very close to the border between introversion and extraversion. And of course you don’t know that just from the letter score.
So we have to keep in mind that when we think about personality assessment we should remember that we’re assessing personalities we’re not assessing people. So it’s interesting to think about ways that personalities differ, it might be interesting to think about different types of personalities and try to categorize them, but we should remember that at the end of the day when we’re making decisions for a workplace, we should be focused on the individuals themselves not on these broad categories of types of people.
This is something that I talked about when we talked about intelligence, right? We saw that in general, yes, there are group differences in intelligence but you can’t make predictions about individuals based on those group differences. And the same would be true for this type of personality assessment. Yes, there might be general differences in personality types between people but that doesn’t mean if you know somebody’s type that you know their specific skills and behaviors that they’re capable of. We should always keep that in mind. The focus should always be on the individual not on broad categorizations. Alright, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
