MBTI Needs To Change

[John K]

How much of this feeling "different" and "special" and "apart from society" is an innate personality trait versus a specific experience of life due to circumstances? And further, is this idea that the traumatic events we have gone through, and the impact of those events, truly groundwork to say "this is WHO I am" versus "this is WHERE I've been"?

My own experience tends to support this slant. I didn't actually know much about MBTI until I was 50 so I'm looking back before that with hindsight. I think my experience with other children when I was seven or eight pushed me into developing thinking skills in depth because I found I could use it to counter the devaluation I felt - I did a lot of Ti / Fe stuff back then. I bet this sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and unless they dig deep into exploring themselves, they may never see an alternative to their acquired preferences. I can confirm that for myself, Ni is a far more comfortable old sock than Ti could ever be, but i may never have consciously realised that without the language that Jung provided with which we can differentiate and express these ideas.

How much is this belief is a non scientific, self reported test holding back the personal development of those who use is as a framework to explain and justify themselves?

I think this is only a serious risk for people who mistype themselves and make life decisions on such as career choice and partner on the back of it. I don't think this happens very often - most people who come across MBTI probably treat it a bit like a tabloid quiz and nothing more than a bit of a laugh.

How do we know that the personality is set in stone, and even presuming somehow that was proven, how do we know that we have enough self awareness and impartiality to answer a self reported test in an accurate way that would reflect who we truly are instead of what we want to be?

I think your instincts a right here. Jung made it clear that personality isn't set in stone, and he thought that people are naturally wired to become increasingly conscious of their hidden selves as they go through life. He saw the period up to about 40 as when we develop our primary and secondary functions, with the rest of our lives focused on expanding out into ever increasing ability with the other functions. A lot of his patients were people over the age of 40 who were frozen and couldn't move on in that kind of way, and were mentally ill as a result. I've put this in terms of his typology, but that was only a part of the way he describes this process, which he called individuation, and which he thought in healthy people continued on right up to the end of our lives. And I say Amen to that !

 

[Y1gtfmd74i5u]

In other words, of my worsome defensive behind, I’m SUPER defensive about my spirituality I’m the case of how much typology IS becoming a spiritual thing as much as it is psychological now a days. That can be frustrating when a stranger like myself comes in and won’t get along with one of the most wholesome types such as intps like yourself.
Anyway. I’ll be screwing myself now.

 

[Ren]

4. Why would your own personal study be less biased than a test? You're deciding what parts of the reading you focus on, what data from your personal life you put into it, and so on. In a test at least you can try to standardize the data.

One important reason, I think, is that the cognitive functions are far more agnostic as regards social value.

You're likely to have a lot of subjective bias when a particular trait is perceived to be more valuable than another. Let's take the example of a question supposed to measure Extraversion vs. Introversion: "I'm comfortable with speaking in public". If there is bias, it's almost certainly going to be towards wanting to be more (rather than less) comfortable with public speaking. Because extroversion tends to be more socially valued than introversion (though that depends on the country to some extent). But if the phenomenon were reversed, notice we would have exactly the same problem.

Now take another question supposed to measure Intuition vs. Sensing: "I am really interested in reading and ideas". How likely is it that someone will be biased towards being not interested in reading and ideas? Probably not very likely. Once again, being a person with "a lot of ideas" is more socially valued than the reverse. Once again, however, if the phenomenon were reversed, we would have the same problem.

You can apply this to a myriad of traits supposed to be captured by the test questions. The core issue here is that 'extroversion', 'introversion', 'feeling,' 'thinking', 'intuition', etc. are not value-neutral terms. This is, among other things, what injects bias into the internal mechanism of the test.

It's quite different when you study the functions. Now extroversion is no longer about you as a whole person, it's about your intuition, or your feeling, or whatever. This displaces the valuation into the realm of the functional, rather than the social; and it is also clear from the beginning that everyone has both introverted and extroverted functions, feeling and thinking functions, etc. You're no longer 'a feeler', rather you have e.g. introverted feeling; as well as extroverted thinking, and so on. The study of the functions makes it much more clear that they capture how you operate at a certain level; they don't capture what you are.

Of course this is never going to be completely free from bias. Some people think Ne is better than Ni, or better than Se; others think Fi is better than Fe; etc. But the displacement of the traits away from the ego and towards the functions of the ego, is a significant leap towards mitigating for bias. It's probably much easier for a shy person in, for instance, a very extroverted society to agree that they are e.g. Ni dominant than to agree that they are "introverts".

 

[Vendrah]

What it captures is P(x), i.e. 'perception of x'. Sure, you can break this down into Pk(x) ('Krypton's perception of x'), Pr(x) ('Ren's perception of x'), etc. But what you will get is only an average of different perceptions, not x. There is no way to move from P(x) to x.

Actually, there is on personality assessor (but requires register) a test that you do each day for 5 days and it asks what you have been doing through your day and types you on Big 5 according to what you did that week - your behaviour week, basically. And although that approach is far from being perfect it actually evades what you say - its one way to evade it.

It's obvious looking at the way people behave related to the type they claim for themselves that MBTI does actually split people up into groups of distinct behaviour preferences. It's pretty crude, and there's a lot of overlap but that's to be expected. After all, it's only using 16 distinct types, and there are only three or four independent behavioural vectors in the classification, if indeed they are independent. Those vectors are limited in scope which means that there is plenty of human behaviour that falls outside of their range. The implication is that each MBTI type includes a very great range of behavioural variation. It's easy to see this by looking at an alternative typing system such as the Enneagram which shows there are plenty of E1, E2, E4, E5 and E9 types all happily accommodated within INFJ, with other E types also possible.

Thats true, and what I usually like to say - although I don't think I ever said it here once - is that if you use multiple systems you can know how close you are to the correct stereotypes and average person of any of the 16 types or 9 types of the enneagram - actually, it serves more to know if you are not. For example, a normal INFJ is a 4, and on Big 5 is Low Extraversion, High or mid-high Openness to Experience, High or Mid-high Conscientiousness. Any INFJ is already a deviation, and when a person types themselves with unusual combination that implies that not any of the 16 types are an actually proper description - same for enneagram if you use it as a starting point (Big 5 can really aid in both on this aspect). So, INFJ 5 in your case actually implies a sort of borderline on F/T ("strong tertiary thinking" if you like to call it) and it actually means an hybrid between INFJ and INTJ (INFJ with some INTJ traits) which means that the best description for you is an hybrid of that types. My case is actually more complicated than that to use me as an example, but I am an example of that either.

I have a not much developed hypothesis that the "individuation thing" (that is not as awesome as it looks like from the beginning) does interfere this; A lot of these systems relies in a bunch of internal correlations of characteristics (like, for example, being imaginative and liking to discuss ideas), but as deeper a person gets on the individuation thing, higher the chances of these "chains of internal correlations" to get broken. But when that happens it always lead to unusual combinations.

I had estimated that about 50% of people on types in general fits the average and proper stereotype (I am talking about stereotypes that are real in average - like 'introverts likes isolation', 'introverts are loners'), but that changes from type to type. I think for INFJ I had estimated 35-40%.

How much of this feeling "different" and "special" and "apart from society" is an innate personality trait versus a specific experience of life due to circumstances? And further, is this idea that the traumatic events we have gone through, and the impact of those events, truly groundwork to say "this is WHO I am" versus "this is WHERE I've been"?

That is a real thing difficult to avoid, although in enneagram that does lead to some types and you can know that by enneagram - but it will be tough to tell to somebody else and, of course, lots of people who loves the enneagram can scream at me when i start to point out enneagram flaws like these.

Now take another question supposed to measure Intuition vs. Sensing: "I am really interested in reading and ideas". How likely is it that someone will be biased towards being not interested in reading and ideas? Probably not very likely. Once again, being a person with "a lot of ideas" is more socially valued than the reverse. Once again, however, if the phenomenon were reversed, we would have the same problem.

Ok, this may sound unbelievable but most people world-wide answers more to the 'disagree' side and I can say that for sure because most people world-wide are sensors, although I am not quite sure if your phrase would work for a N/S (it is actually more NTish). Although your example was a bad one, that can happen for some other cases, but that is a complicated subject because it changes in country, gender and contexts what is valued or not. Jung theory in parts avoids this by using the concept of undifferentiation, but since MBTI ripped it off and tried to give everyone a type and "the internet" follows the same way (I got into tough fight just arguing on a thread "Am I a T or F?" saying that a person does not necessarily needs to choose and that Jung theory does have support for that and 21th century MBTI as well, even though they 'don't recommend' or think its bad in one way or another but both recognize this possibility). But in original Jung theory, there is room for defense against these things and it is one of the reasons Jung did not like "essays" (aka the tests), because it is actually hard to write defenses for that on essays.

 

[Ren]

Actually, there is on personality assessor (but requires register) a test that you do each day for 5 days and it asks what you have been doing through your day and types you on Big 5 according to what you did that week - your behaviour week, basically. And although that approach is far from being perfect it actually evades what you say - its one way to evade it.

Yeah, that sounds like quite an interesting approach. I'll look into it. Thanks for mentioning it.

 

[Wyote]

MBTI needs to take a shower, do its laundry, clean its room, fold its clothes, burn them and jump off a cliff

 

[Ren]

MBTI needs to take a shower, do its laundry, clean its room, fold its clothes, burn them and jump off a cliff

*reads 12 rules for life*
*cleans its room*
*jumps off a cliff*

Jordan Peterson you have failed counselling

 

[John K]

jump off a cliff

But which type of cliff ?

 

[Vendrah]

*reads 12 rules for life*
*cleans its room*
*jumps off a cliff*

Jordan Peterson you have failed counselling

@Wyote is Jordan Peterson!



I knew it!


OMG Ren, you revealed Wyote's greatest secret now! Now let me predict your future for today:
"Ren was permabanned due to revealing the greatest Jordan Peter... ops! Wyote's greatest secret! Ah, fu%¨$#@ leakers!"

 

[Ren]

@Wyote is Jordan Peterson!



I knew it!


OMG Ren, you revealed Wyote's greatest secret now! Now let me predict your future for today:
"Ren was permabanned due to revealing the greatest Jordan Peter... ops! Wyote's greatest secret! Ah, fu%¨$#@ leakers!"

Vendrah, have you been smoking dope?

 

[Daustus]

Vendrah, have you been smoking dope?

I thought we all switched to Coke. Did I miss another memo?

 

[Wyote]

*reads 12 rules for life*
*cleans its room*
*jumps off a cliff*

Jordan Peterson you have failed counselling

I knew you'd get this reference

 

[Wyote]

But which type of cliff ?

So many cliffs, so little lives

 

[Vendrah]

Vendrah, have you been smoking dope?

Ya wanna?