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[liv]

staranise made a post recently which led me to get a bit more of a clue what's going on with MBTI types. In particular, I understood about MBTI dividing people into 16 "types" based on four pairs of preferences, but I never really got my head round the meaning of four special pairs within each type called "cognitive functions". And staranise explains it! Amazing!

So I have known for a long time I'm ESTJ. I've done enough online personality quizzes and read enough around the subject that I can pick out the ones that are as close as they dare to get to the "real" MBTI instrument without violating anybody's commercial interests. Similarly it's hard to find a more rigorous description of the personality types than Wikipedia because the information is commercially protected.

staranise also says it's totally accepted to reverse engineer the quizzes based on which type description actually fits you. Which kind of aligns with my view that the point of MBTI is to give you back a terse description of how you already see yourself. That's not a criticism; I think it's a valid and often useful thing to do, ask people a bunch of questions about what sort of person they are and then give them a diagnosis based on what they actually say about themselves. As long as you don't pretend that doing that is some kind of magical insight beyond reflecting back what you've been told, and I think genuine MBTI stuff doesn't try to do that.

So to drill down: I am ridiculously Extroverted and hardly Introverted at all, except when I'm already extremely exhausted and stressed. I am also very solidly more Judgement than Perception. I tend to be more Thinking than Feeling, but I do tend to some F type approaches sometimes. I think I have aspects of both iNtuition and Sensing; which result I get depends on the phrasing of the questions (I do try to give the first answer that comes to mind rather than over-thinking, but I'm hyperlexic and tend to be rather literal and pedantic, so I find it difficult to "just answer"). I think that I am more likely to come up S on quizzes that are well-written and close to the real MBTI, as opposed to internet memes based on a very superficial understanding of the system or that ask ambiguous or leading questions. Also the ESTJ descriptions fit my personality way better than the ENTJ ones.

Knowing I'm ESTJ doesn't get me all that far, though the Wikipedia summary of the Keirsey description of ESTJs is almost absurdly good as a fit for my personality:

ESTJs are civic-minded individuals who dedicate themselves to maintaining the institutions behind a smooth-running society. They are defenders of the status quo and strong believers in rules and procedures. ESTJs are outgoing and do not hesitate to communicate their opinions and expectations to others.

But now I am starting to get a feel for what the cognitive functions are there for, maybe that gives me some more insight. Conveniently, I'm exactly the opposite of staranise's MBTI type, so she gives people like me as an example:

their dominant function would be extroverted thinking, and their fallback would be introverted sensing. So most of the time, they look at the world in terms of facts and realities around them, and then privately think about their lived experiences and specific examples.

So, my Dominant function is Extroverted Thinking Te. And that is so very true; I have very often noted that I think by talking things through with anyone who will listen. I understand myself and the world by keeping a public blog and engaging in discussion as much as I can. I'm happiest when I'm having deep conversations about things I care about. Indeed, what am I doing right now if not trying to understand my own personality by initiating a conversation with hundreds of people!

My Fallback function is Introverted Sensing Si. This explains something else about me that I never really knew was connected with my MBTI type. In my private thoughts I spend a lot of time going over memories and creating stories about my experiences, and yes, I like routines, procedures and the status quo.

My Tertiary function is Extroverted Intuition Ne. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but based on Wikipedia it's about imagination of various coexisting possibilities, less strictly logical than Te. I can see how this is something I do, and if this is my Tertiary function I can see how that makes me come out somewhat N-ish on some tests.

And my Inferior function is Introverted Feeling Fi. I do tend to have some difficulty with making explicit value judgements about things, I'm inclined to see all sides. And even though I think of myself as a rational, logical person, I do sometimes surprise myself with a somewhat intuitive people-sense. It's also true that when I am not coping, I can be uncharacteristically introverted, feeling overwhelming emotions that I can't handle and pushing people away because even someone expressing sympathy and comforting me feels like it's putting a big demand on me, draining my energy.

Some people cynically say that MBTI is just astrology for skeptics. I don't think it's method of fortune-telling, for sure, and I know it can be very much misused, such as in businesses where they make all their employees take a quiz and assume that once they've put people into one of 16 boxes then they know everything about them. Obviously people have other aspects to their personality beyond their MBTI type; you can't just divide the whole world into 16 groups. I also strongly disapprove of the kind of career counselling which tries to treat your MBTI as if it were your inescapable fate; I don't believe that there's any job that can't be done by people of any given type. Most jobs after all need a variety of different strengths and skills.

I think what MBTI and similar systems is most useful for is that it gives you a kind of shorthand way to explain what sort of person you are to others. Of course, if you want to have any sort of ongoing relationship, you want to add in other aspects of your personality, your life experiences, your background etc. But it gives a kind of starting point of, this is what to expect from this person, this is what they're likely to feel comfortable with, this is an area where they may have difficulties.

Poll #13987 MBTI

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 40

View Respondents

Ticky box time!

View Answers

I have a good idea of my MBTI type
31 (77.5%)

My MBTI type is a good fit for my personality
25 (62.5%)

MBTI is a useful way of understanding how people work
17 (42.5%)

MBTI is meaningless
4 (10.0%)

Personality tests killed my grandmother, you insensitive clod
1 (2.5%)

I have opinions which don't fit in your tickyboxes!
17 (42.5%)

Ticky (aka I have filled in your poll)
13 (32.5%)

Comments

[jae]

My non-conforming opinions:

I'm dubious of all personality tests that aren't based on the actual current state of personality research done by trained academics. As I understand it from people who know much more about this sort of thing than I do, the only distinction in the MBTI test that's based on a current understanding of personality research is the extroversion/introversion one. (Caveat: I'm not a psychologist, but I am a social scientist, and I know many psychologists. So I'm not a professional or even a knowledgeable amateur--my knowledge about this is all second-hand--but I do trust those sources)

On the other hand, I have rarely felt more eerily comprehended than when I've read descriptions of my MBTI type. So there's that.

-J

[siderea]

I don't see why you shouldn't be dubious about personality tests that are based on the actual current state of personality research done by trained academics.

As a mental health professional, from my cursory investigation, the signal difference of the current state-of-the-art personality typology (OCEAN, aka Big-5) and the MBTI, is that the former has a fifth axis, and was developed by men.

[liv]

That seems pretty fair. I think the MBTI stuff was originally evidence-based to some extent, but it may well have been superseded by now.

I am fairly skeptical of the feeling of "omg that description sounds exactly like me!", because I've seen examples of supposed types which are just vague enough that they apply to nearly everybody but just specific enough that people feel they're uniquely understood, eg there's a "universal horoscope" quoted in Hofstadter somewhere. And I think it's a fairly common bias for people to read descriptions of groups and feel convinced that they belong to the group depicted.

[laurashapiro]

It's not very INTJ of me, but I tickied both "useful" and "meaningless" because I do believe it's both. It's useful in the same way a tarot reading can be useful: you can impose your life patterns and thoughts on it to create meaning that makes sense to you, but in and of itself it's inherently meaningless. People just aren't that simple.

[purplecthulhu]

I did much the same thing for similar reasons.

I find MBTI as a useful educational tool for demonstrating that people can think very differently from each other. I also seem to fit my classification, INTJ, very well. But there are others i know who don't fit into MBTI categories very well at all.

I've heard some totally bollocks spoken by MBTI practitioners, who seem to think that the 16 classifications are all there is, that there are no borderline cases, and that you only shift from one classification to another through mental illness or severe trauma. I had a rather 'interesting' discussion with such a practitioner about this at a research council summer school at one point. I don't think had ever gone up against a skeptical quantitative scientist before :-)

[emperor]

I seem to come out consistently as INFP in these things (including one done at work, which I think I LJd about at the time); it seems to plausibly represent some of how I deal with the world.

[liv]

Fair enough. I can't remember if MBTI is supposed to have an "opposites attract" type of theory; I have a feeling it varies for different types whether they get on with people similar to them or their opposites. But I generally find it easy to like people I know to be INFP.

[jenett]

I'm generally of the school that the MBTI (and I've had it done twice by licensed people, plus a couple of times in 'as near as you can get without the licensing' formats) does a couple of things:

(For reference: I've tested reliably INFJ or XNFJ since college, so going on 20 years now. I'm pretty clearly an introvert who runs extrovert in specific limited situations (notably teaching: I'm lousy at parties, but put me in a classroom, and I will be bouncing off the walls with recharging by the time I'm done), I test moderately N and F, and I am way off the scale J. [1])

1) Gives me a lever for explaining to Administrative Types that I work better in some settings than others, and can we adjust my work set-up to allow for more of the ones I do better with?

2) Gives me a way of reminding myself what some of my preferences are, so when my life starts feeling out of balance, I have a place to start with rebalancing.

3) Useful for looking at some kinds of larger scale group dynamics, if taken with a fair bit of salt.

One of the things I remember from my library school days was a class on research and search behaviour, in which we ended up taking the MBTI partly to talk about search preferences, and partly as a potential data set for discussion of basic research analysis.

Except that it turned out that of a class of 16, 14 of us were INFJs, one was an ENFJ, and the other was something else awfully close. (And that made a lousy data set.)

Which as a single class could be cooincidence, but I think it also says a lot of interesting things about the things that are challenging the library profession as a whole, and the places that people who are able to work through their preferences to building skills that are less comfortable for them sometimes have a *lot* of influence, because there's not much competition in that space.

(Which is sometimes tricky, because it can turn into one of those nasty irregular verbs: I speak my mind, you are courageous in creating new space for this conversation, he/she/they are sleazy self-promoters fixing a problem that doesn't need fixing, for example.) But anyway, being aware of the *communal* tendencies can help with framing some stuff in ways people won't flinch so much about, or will respond more openly to, or more easily to.

[1] I firmly believe that astrology is more complicated than sun sign, and am aware (as most people aren't!) that the psychology-of-astrology stuff is actually remarkably recent. (I've been told by a reliable source that it came in in the 1930s and 40s, to get around anti-divination and anti-witchcraft laws).

I am, however, so totally a Virgo it's not even funny, and if that helps people get a handle on the stuff that will drive me up a tree, that's actually useful, y'know? Sometimes shorthand is really handy.

[ephemera]

I'm a librarian, and according to a quick crass web-version of the inventory, I too score INFJ...

[nicki]

Unless a person is an extreme in each category, the test/retest consistency isn't there. I have taken the actual Myers/Briggs a number of times (psych/counseling person, we take a lot of these things in classes) so, for example, I know I always come out an I, but EVERYTHING else has varied for me. It can be kind of helpful in helping one understand one's self, but should NEVER be used as THE definitive test for anything because it just isn't consistent.

[liv]

Huh, that's interesting, I'd picked up the idea that test-retest was reasonably good for at least the majority of people (though utterly awful for a substantial minority). Maybe I've been swallowing sources that are trying to sell MBTI and aren't really objective. Mind you, people with actual psych backgrounds test badly for nearly everything; most of these psychometric tests are designed for at least vaguely naive subjects.

But in any case I'm totally happy to use MBTI as a way to contemplate myself and understand how I work, even if it isn't totally rigorous. Like where siderea hints that in her professional opinion I might be more ENFJ than ESTJ, ok, I'll go and read some stuff about ENFJ and see if it tells me anything I might not have considered before. Might be the test isn't consistent, might be I haven't taken it properly, might be I've changed somewhat since I concluded I was ESTJ, but any of those scenarios is potentially interesting.

[ptc24]

I remember looking into this a while back, to see the evolution from Jung to the MBTI, and also the Kiersey temperament sorter that was roughly based on it. In my highly inexpert opinion, it's definitely better than astrology, probably better than ignore-the-dates-and-pick-the-description-you-identify-with astrology, almost certainly better than four randomly populated axes, probably substantially better, but not as good as it could be. Quite possibly not as good as cooking up a questionnaire yourself, getting answers from some volunteers, and doing factor analysis, but that could just be me being flippant. I don't think much of the "four functions" in the introvert/extrovert/introvert/extrovert pattern, except even now and again I think "Hmmm, that's reminiscent of that thing in the MBTI".

The one that gets attention from psychologists is the Big Five, which... the researchers really don't go out of their way to be nice to/about people, to a level that even makes me get startled sometimes. I often see Big Five traits correlated with other things. They also have a collection of facets for each trait, which can often have some interesting correlations.

Anyway, I typically come out INTP, with a question mark over the P. I forget what exactly they're claiming about it these days.

[elf]

INTJ usually; INTP sometimes when I've been getting deeply into spiritual work. I tend to score over 90% on the "I" section. (I have arranged my current school schedule with the notion that I will seek absolutely zero social contact outside work and home for the next 10 weeks. I won't stick to that exactly--there's a weekend-long party coming up that I'll attend, as I have for the last 15 years--but I'm not making *any* effort to find contact with people.)

My boss once attended a weekend seminar thing that involved MBTI, and asked me how to skew the results toward the "best" answer. Bossman was probably opposite me, ESFP; he was great to work with (except that he had the attention span of a hummingbird on speed); he respected my boundaries and I didn't interrupt him.

I had to tell Bossman that no, really, there is no 'best' answer; he seemed skeptical. He really couldn't quite wrap his head around a "test" that wasn't attached to grades, nor the idea that a personality test could point people at the kind of career options that would work best for them.

[simont]

He really couldn't quite wrap his head around a "test" that wasn't attached to grades, nor the idea that a personality test could point people at the kind of career options that would work best for them.

I can easily imagine someone reading that sentence alone and thinking "Well, in that case, almost by definition, there is a best answer to the test and it's the one that gets you into the career option that pays highest!" In particular, if there's a type that correlates well with management aptitude, I could easily imagine a lot of people trying to skew the test towards that one.

(Catbert would probably argue that the mere attempt to game the test for a career boost is evidence of management aptitude all by itself...)

[lilacsigil]

I test strongly as INTJ (especially I) which I've found useful for working out how I tend to behave in certain situations and how I can work on that if I'm not happy with my usual reactions. I think it's a generally useful tool for looking at your own behaviour, or the behaviour of others in certain limited situations (like a workplace where you are forced together) but it's a single tool, not an all-purpose one.

[adeliej]

I test as INTP, with the 'I' very marginal, and although I was very skeptical of the test at first, reading the various descriptions online was a little creepy (as jae said). (I should note that I've only taken it once, so I'm not sure about the consistency aspect.)

My whole year did it back in high school, and it seemed generally pretty accurate. It clarified some of my observations of myself, but not in a way that's made it useful outside the general interest side, as it was mainly confirmation. I was very much not surprised to discover that one of my closest friends at the time also tested INTP, which is one of the rarest types (statistically only one person testing INTP would have been expected in my year, if we reflect the general population data).

Generally, the MBTI seemed interesting but not particularly useful. It certainly provided a lot of procrastination material, though, as I researched it in the couple of months afterward!

[siderea]

Missing ticky box: Type professional.

And I am WAY dubious about your being an S type. I mean, I suppose it could happen, and I have a policy of taking people's word on these things. But do you have any idea how rare ESTJs are among (1) scientists, (2) essayists and (2) DW?

The Type Table opposite [...] [shows] 705 science majors from Cal Tech. [...] The self-selection area for Cal Tech science students consists of the IN quadrant (in which the highest SSR is 3.88 and the lowest one 1.97) plus the two ENT types. [...] The degree of interest that the science students have for the ES quadrant can be judged by the self-selection ratios they award it: 0.22 [ESTP], 0.17 [ESFJ], 0.12 [ESTJ -- 1.8% of N], and 0.02 [ESFP].

[ Of 71 male Rhodes Scholars, 0 were ESTJ ]

[...later chapter...]

Medicine is the occupation for which the relationship between type and career choice has been studied most intensively. Over 4,000 medical students who took the Type Indicator in the early 1950s have been followed up, first in the early 1960s from data about their specialties in the 1963 directory of the American Medical Association (Myers & Davis, 1965) and again in the 1970s in a much more inclusive study for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare by a clinical psychologist at the University of Florida and Director of the Center for Applications of Psychological Type (McCaulley, 1977).

[...]

By far the least attracted type was ESTJ, the businessman and businesswoman type, in which all four preferences correlate with business interests on the Strong and economic values on the AVL Study of Values. Apparently the high financial reqards in medicine, which should have special interest for an ESTJ, did not offset that type's relatively low interest in the scientific and humanitarian aspects of the work itself.

Gifts Differing, Isabel Briggs Myers, 1980

Unpublished data: I stuck a copy of the KTS up on a server at MIT in the early 1990s and got similar results there.

As far as I know, nobody's ever -- EVER -- in the history of the internet gotten an ESTJ discussion forum off the ground because ESTJs have no interest in involved online discussion to begin with, and all the more for abstract, psychological, or scientific topics.

If you are an ESTJ, I figure you must find the vast majority of the people you work with pretty unintelligible mutants.

Now, I have no trouble believing you're a T type, but you also have certain strengths and approaches to life which signal F. Have you looked at a good ENFJ profile?

ETA: The wikipedia page is entirely inadequate to this purpose.

[luscious_purple]

When I take online versions of the MBTI, I always come up as E and P, but the other two letters vary from time to time. Not sure why.

[403]

I test as IxTP leaning towards N, with what's turned out to be high test-retest reliability over the years. (I searched my IM logs for "MBTI" to check myself on that, given the context in which I usually take the things.) Results of the official test, on the one time I happened to be offered it for free, was INTP.

The descriptions of INTP traits that I've read do hit the high points of how I think of myself and the way I interact with people. In contrast, descriptions of ISTPs seem more like a gear that I can put myself in rather than a default component of who I am.

As an anecdote that may point towards something useful coming out of the function-order data, the one time I tested while utterly exhausted gave me a strong INFJ result. (Deciding based on my trailing Fe rather than leading Ti.)

Take all of this with the usual large grain of salt for tests in general. Like a map, it's a useful tool but should never be mistaken for the territory it represents.

[wychwood]

I like the MBTI. It's not a cure-all, and our in-house MBTI administrator is very clear on the fact that it's about preferences and will have at least some situational component, but she also correctly predicts people's results a surprising amount of the time *g*. I find it a useful short-hand for discussions and understanding people's approaches, that sort of thing.

When I take it at work, I'm ISTJ; fairly mildly I (I think I'm more introverted in my private life) and extremely STJ. Like some of the others, I tend to find my type description disconcertingly accurate. I think I used, back at university, to be an INTJ; that may reflect the fact that I was spending my time writing broad survey essays on topics that I mostly only had time to look at relatively superficially. Or maybe I'm remembering wrongly.

[jack]

I still need to actually try M-B.

My impression of most sorts of personality tests, from the extremely simple (introvert/extrovert) to those used by professionals, is that there's always a usefulness in having a pre-observed set of labels for various sorts of common personality traits, so you can see which ones fit, and ask other people "If you have trait X, did you find situation Y difficult? How did you handle it?"

But that most tests imply there's more than a loose correlation, that people fall into these groups more than you would expect by chance, and the test should be able to tell you more about yourself than a useful label for what you already know. (eg. there are medical conditions which some people have to a medium extent, but most people either DO have or DON'T have.)

Now, I think there's a spectrum between (a) they never promised that, it just feels like that to me and (b) they're not supposed to promise that, people just get too dogmatic about them and (c) they actually do promise that and are right or wrong.

So I always feel like I'm missing something, because people use bold declarative statements that people Work Like This, and I don't know if they're just taking good rules of thumb and hyping them up, or if they're stating Proved Truth, and if I fall somewhere between two axes I'm Doing It Wrong.

[jack]

For instance, I'm still mulling over introversion vs extroversion. Are there advantages to being introverted, other than understanding other introverts?

I often describe it as "an introvert and an extrovert may both enjoy social interaction, but an introvert spends energy and an extrovert gains energy". But is that exact? Would it be more true to say "an extrovert is net-energy-positive on more forms of social interaction than an introvert"? Or even "the forms of social interaction which an extrovert is net-energy-positive on are more common in society?"

[naath]

Today I appear to come out ESTJ (I don't remember what I've been labelled as in the past).


Looking at http://www.personalitypage.com/html/ESTJ.html that's pretty good for me, except for "traditions" and "social order" and similar it's wrong IF I'm meant to read those as referring to "of British society". But if I may instead refer them to "of my social group" then that's better.

[simont]

I recall doing a test in the distant past and coming out as INTJ, but I think that was the simplified 'Keirsey' thing that ptc24 mentions above. I've never seen anything that even claimed to be the 'official' MBTI test.

I don't have any great knowledge of how good / accurate / useful this sort of personality testing is, and I can see from this discussion alone that people don't even all agree on how best to measure goodness / accuracy / usefulness in the first place; off the top of my head, it seems to me that the definition of usefulness that strikes me as most obviously sensible is predictive power. The interesting question to me is whether the zillions of tiny little facets of personality that you could imagine writing out as individual test questions ('in this kind of situation, do you tend to do/feel/think that or the other?') are sufficiently well correlated that a very small number of well-chosen bits can correctly (on average) predict a very large number of those tiny facets in one go.

[damerell]

Fortune-telling, no, but actual astrology does its best to avoid any testable predictions as well. The vague and vaguely complimentary descriptions seem straight out of astrology's book.

I think it's easy to dream up suitable blind tests of Myers-Briggs, and to ask why those haven't been done.

[pretty_panther]

I think personality tests are interesting for inner reflection and thinking about one's self and such, but when it comes to other people knowing your results it gets tricky for me. I think it has become very popular recently to take these sorts of tests and post your results. Many profiles on blog platforms have these results and I now find it very restrictive for the same reason I hate star signs. I happen to think star signs are bullshit but that isn't my point. If someone learns I happen to be a Virgo they create a mental image of me in their head. They decide who I am based upon that one piece of information and I think that is happening with these tests. People see someone is an X or a Y result and decide that means they will be an introvert and that means they will do this and won't do that and I think that is too black and white a way of looking at people. I think it shuts more doors than it can possibly open when others have that information about you.

[tig_b]

I've been subject to this a few times, and come out differently in different circumstances over time. I tend to come out near the middle for most of these tests, so appear to swing from one extreme to the other.

It can be useful, but in the hands of people who read an article of management book and think they understand it can be very bad.

But the worst experience was having to do this with other managers with the Boss-from-Hell before she was TBFH. I'd only been there a few weeks, and my results were one of the triggers for her behaviour.

Why? Because several of my results put me near the centre but this was converted to E ot I, etc. So I can out as E - and she had a decided preference for the whole management team to be like her.

When the trainer announced my results, TBFH exclaimed "But you can't be, you're supposed to be a statistician."

After which she donned the opposite of rose-coloured specs.

[ephemera]

I think I've done a couple of on-line versions of the test over the years, but I can't remember the answers, and suspect they were very bowlderised anyway. I think the basic idea is somewhat useful, though - it's useful to have prompts to think about default tendencies in yourself, and a shared language to talk about the same - just not enough for me to pay for the privilege.

[ptc24]

Aha! It turns out that wikipedia has correlaions with The Big Five, academic research psychology's inventory of choice. Applying the usual T-shirt sizes, it looks like two of the MBTI axes have fairly strong correlations with Big Five axes, and two have very strong. There's some links - this one supports my interpretation; that the MBTI isn't bad as a set of four axes, but that the idea of 16 distinct types is not supported, and that the official interpretation of the J/P axis doesn't check out.

Actually, looking this up has made me think a lot more positively about the MBTI.

[mair_in_grenderich]

I only skimmed the comments so I don't know if this was said already, but for me the lightbulb moment was not anything MB told me about myself, but the discovery that other people DON'T all - for example - need quiet to think things out, and they might not understand that I DO (for the same reason I hadn't realised that they didn't).