Why is Jow Forums so obsessed with the Myers-Briggs personality test? It's been shown time and time again to be an unreliable measure of one's actual personality. You can't group every human into 16 categories of individual, it's just not feasible.
"The Myers-Briggs proclaims a reliability (calculated using coefficient alpha) of between .75-.85 on all of its scales (see Myers-Briggs testing manual). These are general, industry standard reliability coefficients(indicating that if you were to retest, you would get a similar score, but not exact). However, the Myers-Briggs makes additional claims about bucketing individuals into 1 of 16 possible personality types. That you can shift up or down a few points if you were to retake the test on any of the four distinct scales means that you may be higher on one scale than another simply through retaking the test due to measurement error. In fact, literature shows that your personality type will change for 50% of individuals simply through retesting. (Cautionary Comments Regarding the Myers-Brigg Type inventory, Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and research, summer, 2005). This result indicates very low decision consistency. The low decision consistency is also a mathematical inevitability given 16 personality profiles using 4 scales and scale reliability around .8.
Given the low decision consistency, and given that claims the Myers-Briggs makes about about your personality(validity information) depends on the decisions made by the test to be consistent and not subject to change simply based on retesting, it is highly unlikely that there can be a solid validity argument supporting the Myers-Briggs as a personality indicator. Maybe there are studies showing that it can be used in a very specific context, but sweeping generalizations about the tests use are not going carry much weight."
Now, as a working professional in the field, the Myers-Briggs does NOT have a good reputation as being a decent assessment. It has marketed well to school systems and has good name recognizability, but it is not a well developed exam. There are much better personality assessments available, such as SHL's OPQ32 or The Hogan personality inventory. Now, I don't want to say any of these are good. The best correlations between job performance and personality assessments is about .3 (indicating about 9% of the variance in a persons job performance can be accounted for by a personality assessment). That is the BEST personality assessments can do in terms of job performance... and a correlation of .3 is not worth very much (considering that tests like ACT or the SAT can correlate upwards of .7 with first year college GPA under ideal circumstances).
Not to mention the NEO-PI five factor model of personality, which is an almost universally used personality test in the field of psychology, is ignored by the wider public in favor of the Myers-Briggs, seemingly just because it's more publicized and easier to understand. Explain this to me anons, what's the appeal of putting humanity in a polarized box like this?
IDC if it's reliable. I was confused about those threads even if the test were fine. Every single time 500 straight replies of "lol I'm IIMNPT" "no way I'm JWMP" "I'm WXYZ" blablabla discord weebs. Brain dead horoscopes. Something about this board brings out the woman in people.
Samuel Martinez
On that, I think it's also just comforting to say "I'm in this category and everyone I don't like or don't understand is in one of these other categories". It makes the world a lot less scary to think that everything is understandable in such simple terms as "these 16 categories can explain all of human behavior", instead of the Big 5 and each of their much more intricate subcategories, which still don't account for environmental factors and things such as personality changes with age. So yeah, basically horroscopes and bitchiness.
>calling others braindead when the entire point of his post is talking about how he doesn't understand (a fairly simple something at that)
Dylan Collins
myers briggs does not determine your personality. it determines how you process the world.
Levi Clark
Look at how ferociously people here are modifying what robot means and trying desperately to fit in and then gatekeeping it to feel exclusive and special. It's because anons here want to be part of a larger SPECIAL group and feel accepted for once in their life. That's about it.
OP here. I get the appeal, but I don't get why it's so widely used in seemingly serious conversations when it's at best a horroscope, like user said. Are people just unaware of its lack of validity and reliability or do they just not care?
A) Technically that's how it's described in the literature, but even then through retesting it's completly unreliable. B) The 16personalities website literally says "free personality test on the front page in massive font", so in this case it's really the perception I'm referring to.
You're not wrong, but I will let you in into something
This board, really, really, really, really wants to be a /soc/ for "outcasts".. think of it as alternative soc in the same way /d/ exists, but there's this rule that forbids those kinds of threads, that's why the MBTI and other "test" threads exist, to gather some info about a robot under pretense of a simple fun question and then ask for their discord or whatever.
Xavier White
That's probably the biggest component to it, I have to agree. I don't really buy the interpretation that it's a "fun" conversation starter like said considering the ferocity with which the groups insult each other on this board. There's always variance to that, so I don't doubt that's a factor in its usage here, but it doesn't seem to be the primary function when you look at the catalog.
Hudson Thompson
As a regular to the threads, MBTI is heavily, heavily flawed, but placing it on the same level as a horoscope is dumb. MBTI uses feedback that you provide yourself in order to make judgments about your personality (granted, some of those dimensions - namely the N/S axis - are a bit nebulous, but introversion and extroversion are completely legitimate concepts that even caveman likely had some understanding of). That's an inherently much superior starting point from determining personality based on the placement of the stars.
It's a conversation starter for sure, but as you said it's just another component. Basically a mix of both. It's a way to start conversations with your specific group that's above the rest and a way to directly attack another group that's not as special, not as hurt or a group that doesn't have the potential like your group does. This way you can all stroke each others ego or push yourself into a victims spot (depending on the mood) to reinforce whatever belief your group is supposed to have. You can tell each other excuses that >yeah I feel X because i'm Y so what can you do lol
Ofcourse there are some very superficial truths to MBTI, but it's faulty. The categorizing power is as strong as putting someone who plays mobile games for 30min and someone who grinds out hardcore intense PC/console games for 14 hours a day into the same group. Afterall they both play games so they belong to the same batch. It's still better than horoscopes tho, because those just categorize based on birth dates and try to define how people act.
Hudson Brooks
The horroscope thing was hyperbolic, yeah. I more meant in the sense that conformation bias plays a big role in your indentification with a group that, upon restesting, you may be entirely separated from. Like you said, since there is such a lack of clarity and reliability on the N/S axis, you may find yourself leaning towards N on one test and then identify with it majorly, while if you got S through random chance you would have had the same reaction (attachment towards that identity). In the same sense, one can be classified as a Scorpio on an old Zodiac calendar, while being an Ophiuchus on a new one, and can then be polarized towards either identity based on their first impression of themselves. There is science to back up facets of the M-B, but overall it's presentation in media and especially on r9k are deeply flawed.
Basically this.
Julian Young
(Add-on to the first thing, the science supports prediction of potential choices based on characteristics, not as in one's category being reliable or valid)
Jackson Cook
>considering the ferocity with which the groups insult each other on this board You're on Jow Forums, they think insulting others is the norm and the cool thing to do
Tyler Bennett
Same point nonetheless
Jaxon Barnes
Ehm, let me correct you. The TEST has been shown to be unreliable at determimg what your type is. And the test is a self report test, meaning it relies on your own self awareness and ability to accurately answer about yourself. So in other words it has been proven that people are unreliable at knowing themselves. Doesnt have anything to do with Jungs personality type theory
James Ortiz
Shut the fuck up faggot weeb. You are projecting hard. If you want to be a robot you cannot be a robot.
Andrew Reyes
you can switch your personality at any time, pretend to be other personalities, insult people over something as silly as a personality test result, and take tons and tons of tests to get semi-personalized feedback about how amazing and talented you are
Angel Jenkins
You can't conclusively attribute it to that though. It could be any number of confounding variables, such as the wording of a question or the understanding of a question varrying from person to person. Saying that so conclusively is dishonest. The fact that those variables exist and seem to be unaccounted for (say by increasing the number of questions and changing wording substantially across questions regarding the same category, like with the NEO-PI) is what I'm criticizing about the test.
Hopefully sarcasm lol.
Noah Carter
Why would you ever think thats sarcasm? Because you dont like it? Fuck off normalshit
Tyler Edwards
Praise op you renew my faith in personality tests*. Mbti and all the other pop ones are such BS it's literally just a mirror of the responses you entered with no analysis and extremely variable depending on your mood.
