Debunking Myers-Briggs personality test: Can we pigeon­hole people?

Why the Myers-Brig­gs test is total­ly mean­ing­less (Vox):

“The Myers-Brig­gs Type Indi­ca­tor is prob­a­bly the most wide­ly used per­son­al­i­ty test in the world…The only prob­lem? The test is com­plete­ly meaningless…

The test claims that, based on 93 ques­tions, it can group all the peo­ple of the world into 16 dif­fer­ent dis­crete “types”…Even Jung warned that his per­son­al­i­ty “types” were just rough ten­den­cies he’d observed, rather than strict clas­si­fi­ca­tions. Sev­er­al analy­ses have shown the test is total­ly inef­fec­tive at pre­dict­ing peo­ple’s suc­cess in var­i­ous jobs, and that about half of the peo­ple who take it twice get dif­fer­ent results each time…

“Con­tem­po­rary social sci­en­tists are rarely study­ing things like whether you make deci­sions based on feel­ings or ratio­nal cal­cu­lus — because all of us use both of these,” Grant says. “These cat­e­gories all cre­ate dichotomies, but the char­ac­ter­is­tics on either end are either inde­pen­dent from each oth­er, or some­times even go hand-in-hand.” Even data from the Myers-Brig­gs test itself shows that most peo­ple are some­where in the mid­dle for any one cat­e­go­ry, and just end up being pigeon­holed into one or the other.”

To learn more:

• Why Myers-Brig­gs is total­ly use­less — but wild­ly pop­u­lar (The New York Times)