In my freshman year of college I was enrolled in an applied psychology course, which it turns out is not a psychology course at all, but rather, a course intended to show students what academic and career paths they should pursue -- sort of a 'what you should be when you grow up' class. At that time I was committed to becoming a visual artist, so I found the search for what I should be doing with my life to be a complete waste of time, but the class was an easy A, so I stuck with it. But one day, the instructor had us all take the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator test (MBTI), and she then put the students into groups, based on their results.
I pulled my desk over to the group of people that were supposedly like me, and they began to speak, while I sat and listened. They were all very excited to meet other people 'just like themselves' and went on and on about it. It didn't take long before I asked myself, if we're all the same, why am I sitting here, quietly stewing, while the rest of them won't shut he hell up? So I decided to join the conversation, and said, "I'm nothing like any of you; this is total bullshit." Then I walked to the instructor's desk, informed her that personality typing was a pseudo-science and that I was going to the registrar's office for a drop slip, which I would return with before the end of class so she could sign it. So yeah, I guess I've always been this way.
The MBTI was developed by a mother-daughter team during World War II to help women determine what type of employment to seek during the war. The two had no formal background in psychology, but the theories on which the typology was based were from a book by Carl Jung. That does make it sound more scientifically sound, but the theories in Jung's book, Psychological Types, weren't scientifically tested. Oops.
You would think that would be the end of it -- that educators, employers, and anyone else with an interest in people's personalities would, upon realizing that the MBTI had no basis in science, dismiss it as lacking validity. But whether due to people's bizarre desire to neatly categorize things or their need to sum each other up into known quantities, the Myers-Briggs test has remained perhaps the most common measure of personality used in America. It's also shown up as a Facebook quiz, which is what prompted me to write about it. I know my friends who took the test did so for fun, not because they needed it to tell them what kind of people they were, but the tendency to cooperate in our own categorization is still a little disturbing to me. Maybe that's just me -- any time I hear someone say, 'There are two kinds of people...' I cringe a little, and immediately begin making a mental list of all the additional kinds of people there are out there.
If the only strike against the MBTI was that it wasn't backed up by experimentation, I could still see some potential value to it, but that's not its only problem; for one, the test consists of a series of forced choice questions, meaning you're given a choice between two answers, and you have to pick one or the other. You're also supposed to be able to leave a question blank, but that option doesn't always exist on Internet-based tests. So take, for example, one of the questions from the Facebook version of the test: "Would you rather be a scientist or a senator?" For me, I was equally inclined toward each answer; I could see myself doing both of those things. If I had to pick one, I don't know which one it would be, and it might be a different answer today than it would be tomorrow.
In fact, the answers to a lot of forced choice questions could go either way depending on the mood of the person answering, or what he saw on TV last night. People can overthink their answers. They can lie in an attempt to get the result they want. They may not know themselves well enough to answer accurately, or they may answer based on value judgments that may not even apply to the topic of the question. One version of the MBTI asks the test-taker to answer yes or no to the statement, "You are consistent in your habits." Might a person answer yes, thinking that consistency is a good thing, when in fact she is anything but consistent?
Forced choice questions often, if not usually, present the test-taker with a false dilemma, which is a formal fallacy. Formal fallacies are statements, arguments, or ideas that are logically faulty by virtue of their very structure, but the false dilemma might be the most common one. We're surrounded by them every day: Coke or Pepsi, Republican or Democrat, gay or straight, dog person or cat person, pro-choice or pro-life, creation or evolution, and on, and on, and on. Frankly, the lack of any room for a third choice in our national psyche strikes me as pretty, well, stupid, but it's pretty easy for us to fall into the false dilemma trap.
Besides most of the questions on the MBTI being false dilemmas, the possible results are false dichotomies. The results of the MBTI are split into four parts, in which a person is said to exhibit one of two traits: extroversion or introversion (actually they spell it 'extraversion', but I'm not going for it), sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. The first letter of each term is used to make up the label for the subject's personality type, except for intuition, which is represented by the letter N, so a person can be an ESTJ, and INFP, or some other combination. Saving you the math, there are sixteen possibilities. People are said to have a natural inclination toward one or the other.
Each of the dichotomies is measured by percentage, so if you answer 83% of the questions like an introvert, you're an introvert, and if you answer 52% of the questions like an introvert, you're an introvert. The test itself is designed to force respondents to fall on one side or the other by asking an odd number of questions in each category. Go back and change one answer and you're suddenly an extrovert; and they say people can't change... If you have a hard time answering a lot of the questions, finding yourself leaning only marginally one way or the other, you might get a result showing a very high percentage on one side, instead of only a slight tendency.
And what about those traits? Introversion and extroversion are pretty clearly opposites, but sensing and intuition? Thinking and feeling? I both think and feel that to be a bullshit dichotomy. I'd pick it apart bit by bit, but it's not that interesting. Let's just say that the theory gets increasingly convoluted and arbitrary the deeper into it you get, and honestly, what's the point? Do we really need to understand people based on their 'type'? Here's an idea: people are unique, they don't fit into our metaphorical boxes, and our perceptions of personality are entirely subjective anyway. Even if the four dichotomies are valid (and you know what I think), the healthy place to be is right in the middle. If the theory and structure of the MBTI were completely valid and effective, the only measurable result would be evidence of personality flaws, not type, and as a friend recently told me, no test is needed to show what mine are.
