[Closed] Myers Briggs - whaddya think? What sort are you?

PITA

unvalidated pop psychology, unfortunately adopted by many as fact

Logician for me. I need a sensitive and caring partner, any volunteers?

Unsubstantiated b0llkcs

The idea very premise that we have one behaviour type and demonstrate it at all times is daft, people are way smarter with much greater complexity than a simple default position

..[b]some[/b] people are way smarter with much greater complexity than a simple default position

FTFY.

I'm pretty much as described, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

ISFJ

According to Myers-Briggs, ISFJs are interested in maintaining order and harmony in every aspect of their lives. They are steadfast and meticulous in handling their responsibilities. Although quiet, they are people-oriented and very observant. Not only do they remember details about others, but they observe and respect others’ feelings. Friends and family are likely to describe them as thoughtful and trustworthy.

About 80% correct, not that interested in people....

Logician here.

PMs Kryton 😉

INTJ - Architect

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Also INTJ. Have been forced to do three "formal" ones in my lifetime, all have spat out the same result. I consider it a spectacular waste of time.

They did give us the breakdown of the various personality types at our company vs the general population which was mildly interesting. The general population taking the test generates INTJ about 1% of the time; in my role it's skewed towards 30%.

Having said that, of course:

Rules, limitations and traditions are anathema to the INTJ personality type – everything should be open to questioning and reevaluation, and if they see a way, INTJs will often act unilaterally to enact their technically superior, sometimes insensitive, and almost always unorthodox methods and ideas.

I identify with the above.

The idea very premise that we have one behaviour type and demonstrate it at all times is daft, people are way smarter with much greater complexity than a simple default position

I take it you've never successfully led a team then.

Utter garbage, no basis in fact or science whatsoever.

ENFP - I generally have no idea what's going on, but you're all lovely and it's all very exciting.

ENFJ Diplomat. pretty accurate

The idea very premise that we have one behaviour type and demonstrate it at all times is daft, people are way smarter with much greater complexity than a simple default position

Utter garbage, no basis in fact or science whatsoever.

I take it that neither of you have actually studied the psychology behind it, then, know much about Jung, or been instructed in Myers-Briggs test itself. 🙄

As an introductory test that reveals aspects of how we each function, it can be both interesting and helpful. It makes no further claims for itself.

INTP here. [url= http://www.16personalities.com/intp-personality ]Pretty much on[/url].

550E for me.

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Logistician (ISTJ-a)

And a scorpio too.

ESTJ which is what I usually 'score' 🙂

Sadly the sceptics have a point here. Much as it pains me to say MBTI while popular and accessible isn't especially robust. It certainly has close to no predictive validity in terms of work performance and so cannot ever be used as a tool to support a hiring or promotion decision.

The reason it pains me to agree with the sceptics though is that they will be dismissing it without being able to articulate why. The sceptics review all organisational psychology and psychology in general worth the same disdain. They won't know the science that underpins most psychology.

And a scorpio too.

I could sense that in your aura.

Also, I read it in the cards.

And other such bollocks.

so cannot ever be used as a tool to support a hiring or promotion decision.

You're confusing [b]cannot[/b] with [b]should not[/b].

DISC is far more accurate than MB as not only does it show dominant patterns/type but also those behaviours we revert to under pressure, so a much more useful tool.

You use something like MBTI to support a decision like that and you'll be in a tribunal. Ok so maybe someone somewhere has done it but it still breaks any number of employment laws.

DISC is far more accurate than MB

Accurate in what way?

so cannot ever be used as a tool to support a hiring or promotion decision.

Ok so maybe someone somewhere has done it but it still breaks any number of employment laws.

Really, what laws are those then?

Plenty of companies use them for hiring decisions, been through it myself several times with job interviews.

DISC is far more accurate than MB

I'd love to see anyone try and design a proper double blind trial for accuracy of any of these tests.

MTFU, obvs

Saxon, geetee, I have a degree in Psychology and just last month I finished a masters in Occupational Psychology. For once on here, I actually know what I'm talking about! I know very much the science behind legitimate tools and sadly the damage to their credibility that rubbish like myers briggs causes.

Campaigner Efnp-a for me, haven't got a clue what it means and i won't lose any sleep over it either.

Piemonster - it'll never work unless you are the fillipino Facebook girl I've taken a shine to. 8)

legitimate tools

Got any interesting links unknown?

I'm open minded to this, so any critiques or alternatives would be very useful to have a read around.

ENTP or INTP. Done the full test several times with no great insight imparted. Found birth order more useful in understanding team dynamics.

And top marks to IHN for the MTFU comment above. Now need to do laundry and involuntarily blurting red wine over the duvet. This place can be very funny sometimes...

Well I've come out with INFP-A, which apparently is a "mediator". Seems legit.

I once did something similar for a job interview and when I saw the write-up (I got the job) it included the gem: "It is important to ascertain whether Steve's total lack of achievement to date is due to lack of opportunity, or lack of ability"!!

Nice.... (I hate to think what the unsuccessful candidates were like)

INTP here

Did it twice in two years with the same result.

One accurate description was that an INTP cannot decide what to have from a menu. Spot on.

So now I am VERY decisive on what to have from a menu, so I might well be something different now!

It was a quite interesting exercise with a team of 30 plus, and then we did the stand arounde the room in a certain order and see who is diagonally opposite. I was diagonally opposite a complete control freak, who I got on very well with despite being polar opposites. Which was interesting as we complemented each other whilst frustrating each other at the same time.

So I'm a skeptic who was mildly converted. Or am I just indecisive?

ENFP-A which didn't tell me anything I didn't know really. I guess the interesting bit was that it would have given a prospective employer a good picture of me in 10 mins which is quite clever

...assuming that I wasn't trying to screw it up of course.

Easy to scoff at these things but the test(and I mean the full one) does seem to through up consistently accurate results and I've had other folk correctly guess my "type".

Don't make the mistake of confusing reliability with validity. A broken compass could consistently point north when I'm facing east, it's reliable but not valid.

As for accuracy... the test asks you what you're like, you tell it what you're like ( based on meaningless binaries), then it tells you what you're like (based on meaningless binaries). Throw in a bit of confirmation bias and of course it seems accurate. It's still total guff though.

The man has made an utter fortune from selling this and Situational Leadership to gullible HR departments of large companies.

Mildly interesting but also mildly patronising to believe everyone can be pigeon holed into four broad brush groups. Or are the psychologist creating boxes for us to identify with and feel comfortable to work within those parameters...

The man has made an utter fortune from selling this and Situational Leadership to gullible HR departments of large companies.

That 'Man' would be Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers.

Unknown - clearly we are in entire agreement on this subject. Drop me an email as I work in the industry and we are hiring currently for instructional designers and a background in Org Psych is precisely what we need.

Ha ha! I stand corrected

Sorry must have dropped off as it was being shovelled.

I
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🙂

I worked for years in a company that published, amongst other things, a 32-scale Personality definer.

Passed all the training courses in administration and interpretation, feedback and reportage...

I can confidently state that statistical psychology is complete bollocks.

Thankyew. Try the fish. I'm hear all weak.

Really, what laws are those then?

Employment law generally covers the principle of fair and transparent hiring; you can't make decisions that discriminate against anything other than ability to do the job. For example, you can't say you hired person A over person B 'because their face fitted better'; you have to be able to substantiate that with objective data that shows that person A was better able to do the job than person B.

Cultural fit is a key component of that decision for sure, but it's a risky criteria on its own as it could easily be that 'culture' is just a cover for race, gender, ethnicity etc, none of which are ever factors in job performance.

And that's the key - you have to substantiate your hiring decision based on likely job performance. If you're going to use a tool to help inform that assessment, then that tool has to be able to give you some degree of insight into likely job performance (the degree of accuracy will be low for various reasons). That correlation between the data generated and it's description of some unknown future performance is called 'predictive validity'. Any tool with little to no predictive validity, in relation to job performance, can't be used to substantiate a hiring decision because the data is false. You'll likely end up hiring someone like yourself and in the process indirectly discriminate against candidates that aren't like you. While not a foregone conclusion, you're more likely than not to end up discriminating against candidates from other diverse backgrounds (race, gender, ethnicity etc).

Note, I am not saying that the results of MBTI correlate with those characteristics; I'm pretty sure they don't. But if you're hiring strategy is based on hiring in your own self likeness, then you definitely increase the chances of that happening.

Plenty of companies use them for hiring decisions, been through it myself several times with job interviews.

There are any number of tools that have high (relatively speaking) predictive validity that companies routinely use to increase their hiring accuracy.

I'd love to see anyone try and design a proper double blind trial for accuracy of any of these tests.

Lordy where do you want to start; fancy doing a literature search and review for a thesis? Proper Psychology, as distinct from the popular, bottom feeding variety taught in too many so called academic institutions, is based very thoroughly on robust statistical analysis and there are many books written on the subject.

As applied in business, Organisational/Industrial Psychology has an incredibly robust business model behind it based on incremental improvements in your hiring decisions. Even though the very best, most robust approaches to assessment only ever get you to a correlation co-effecient of about 0.7 (and that's on a good day with a tail wind, your average process will get to about 0.4) if you think about it, you only need to improve your decisions and the subsequent outcomes but a little bit to make a big improvement in organisational performance.

If you have a company of 50,000 people and an attrition rate of 7% (which would be a bit below average for an anglo saxon economy business) and you're average cost to hire is say £10,000 (this is total cost including incurred costs [i]and[/i] opportunity costs), then the cost to the business is £35,000,000 (note that this is not a cash cost, that would be more like £8,750,000).

If you have no process for robust measurement and 30% of your hiring decisions go wrong within 12 months, then that's 1500 people at a cost of £15m to the business. If you were able to reduce that to say 15%, which would be realistic, you'll save £7.5m. The degree of predictive validity doesn't need to be very high in order to achieve that so the business case ends up being pretty solid.

I answered all of the questions honestly and it came up that I am an introspective, dreaming artist! Which couldn't be further from the truth. Apart from deducing that I dislike social functions (which is an understatement - I'd rather pull my fingernails off than go to a works "do") I didn't recognise any of my supposed "traits ".
Clearly I'm a very complex character...

Having spent the last 20 years in Psychology (studying, academia, teaching, research, selection/recruitment, etc.) I obviously don't think its bollocks. I do think a lot of the pop-psychology & instruments like the MBI give it a bad name.

The Myer-Brigg’s indicator is based on Jung’s 1920s theories, which typecasts subjects into a system of 16 categories. The questionnaire, and hence conclusions drawn from it, can be criticised on the basis that it is ipsative, it places people into discreet types and its psychoanalytic roots render it unsuitable for providing quantitative data that can be related to job performance or general personality rating.

When all you've got's a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

unknown - Member
Don't make the mistake of confusing reliability with validity. A broken compass could consistently point north when I'm facing east, it's reliable but not valid.

As for accuracy... the test asks you what you're like, you tell it what you're like ( based on meaningless binaries), then it tells you what you're like (based on meaningless binaries). Throw in a bit of confirmation bias and of course it seems accurate. It's still total guff though

Is it not useful as a tool for structured reflection then? Asking someone questions and reflecting back their answers to them can be very helpful in a counselling situation.

My wife is very nearly a chartered Occ. Psychologist and here's a surprise for you, she is trained in and uses Myers Briggs (amongst lots of other things).

It's a tool and has limitations. Properly applied it can be useful, even if it just gets a workforce to come to the realisation that their colleagues have different preferences for how they approach things. Your 'preferences' are supposed to fed back to you by someone who knows what they're doing. Just having your result passed back to you by a computer isn't how it's supposed to work.....but very often that's how it's applied!

Unfortunately it's widely misused, e.g. as a selection tool. It gives no indication of ability in a role, how could it?

Yep Mr Woppit, confirmation bias is an important psychological concept that must be controlled for!

Is it not useful as a tool for structured reflection then?

In my professional experience, getting someone to successfully reflect on their behaviour, approach to work, style etc, is about as good an outcome as you can ever hope for. You should hope for more of course, but just getting to here is a huge step for a lot of people and not an easy one to achieve. Any tool that achieves that has value in my view.

ENFP as always (see confirmation bias comments above!).

The only value I've taken from it is how to better manage my boss - he's your classic successful corporate type: ISTJ.

In my professional experience, getting someone to successfully reflect on their behaviour, approach to work, style etc, is about as good an outcome as you can ever hope for. You should hope for more of course, but just getting to here is a huge step for a lot of people and not an easy one to achieve. Any tool that achieves that has value in my view.

I agree

The only value I've taken from it is how to better manage my boss - he's your classic successful corporate type: ISTJ.

The successful corporate type is actually ENTJ, also known as 'the field marshal'.

The idea very premise that we have one behaviour type and demonstrate it at all times is daft, people are way smarter with much greater complexity than a simple default position

Thanks for summing up what I was thinking.

CONSUL (ESFJ-T) i.e. a wet lettuce 😉

ISTP on this one, same as when previously done in full.

No surprises there.