I've never used, trusted or felt comfortable using the results of personality tests. Results fluctuate with moods, circumstances and time of life.
However I believe a lot of people (including myself) enjoy doing them because they offer a unique reflective space. We don't often give time to the nuances of who we are, and this is the part that is useful! The results are almost null and void, but we get pleasure in either accepting or rejecting the answer in security of feeling we know who we are.
It is mostly about our need to feel special. These tests are extremely popular in East Asia, to the point that people even put their results on their social media profiles.
The authors are empirical psychologists weary of unscientific systems. They operate under the assumption that human behavior must be categorized rigorously or not at all. They dismiss the popular desire for simple, narrative-driven identities as a structural flaw in the public's reasoning. Dinner party conversation is viewed as an administrative failure of the Big Five model.
Hmm. So is a personality theory only useful if it can predict life outcomes? What about being able to forecast interpersonal compatibility or conflict resolution styles? I'm glad that The Big Five does a good job at predicting future outcomes for individuals. This is useful information, but it is far from flawless or a complete map of human nature. The Big Five has massive conceptual blind spots. It measures the superficial outputs of human behavior rather than the underlying physiological and cognitive architecture. It's descriptive, not explanatory. Cognitive typology, at least attempts to model how the mind processes data. When viewed through the lens of teenage internet memes, false pop psych add-ons, and superficial tests for corporate team-building projects, of course scientific communities will dismiss advancing its research. No one ever gave the original cognitive function theory a chance, and no scientist or psychologist has ever debunked the actual original theory, only the test and the rigid 4 letter codes everyone uses for the sake of simplicity.
No. The big 5 is the gold standard measure of personality. Overall, 87% of replication attempts of predictive validity were in the expected direction: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30950321/
2) Satisfying my curiosity is not worth $35 to read the study itself (at age 71), but I accept the abstract and your endorsement.
3) As s CPA, I will never understand how a test that generates 87% statistically significant replications can on the other hand be described as “23% accurate.”
Statistics as a subject reminds me of this exchange in “Through the Looking-Glass”:
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
“‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
“’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’”
I think it’s a mistake to conflate usefulness with predictive validity here, outside the narrow critique of corporations using these for hiring decisions. Certainly it’s a fatuous claim that there are 16 kinds of people in the world, and knowing your ‘type’ will unlock some sacred understanding, but throwing MBTI and related tests in the same boat with astrology feels somewhere between disingenuous and lazy—there is valid and potentially useful data to plumb from drawing awareness to our tendencies and default settings, and in interrogating the contexts where we follow or deviate. from these tendencies.
Certainly, there is a whole marketing wing of this enterprise that oversimplifies and overstates the value of these instruments, in ways that are exploitative and gross, but dismissing them as appealing-but-invalid because they lack predictive value and are just easier to interpret than the ‘real’ psychometric is reductive.
(And fwiw, the MBTI and TJ 16 Personalities tools are NOT the same, as I’m sure the lawyers from both teams would scramble to point out).
But the way we tell whether measures are measuring what we expect is through their correlations with other measures and their prediction of behaviors/outcomes. If a supposed personality test is not very predictive of long term outcomes, then can we truly say we are accurately measuring it? The answer is no, because we would expect personality to influence long term outcomes and behaviors
I agree that the MBTI is no more valid or reliable than a fortune teller or star chart. People are multi dimensional and complex. I believe that the OCEAN/Big-5 and then PANAS-X can give leaders a quick shortcut to predict how professionals will respond to new initiatives and stress. I welcome you to try these tests for free on www.crescere-strat.com and share how you can leverage the tools. —Rene
An interesting article, thank you!
I've never used, trusted or felt comfortable using the results of personality tests. Results fluctuate with moods, circumstances and time of life.
However I believe a lot of people (including myself) enjoy doing them because they offer a unique reflective space. We don't often give time to the nuances of who we are, and this is the part that is useful! The results are almost null and void, but we get pleasure in either accepting or rejecting the answer in security of feeling we know who we are.
we love horoscopes because it’s the only part of the newspaper about us. Written for us.
poweful.
Bottom line, most people prefer bullshit over uncomfortable or hard to discern truth.
It is mostly about our need to feel special. These tests are extremely popular in East Asia, to the point that people even put their results on their social media profiles.
The authors are empirical psychologists weary of unscientific systems. They operate under the assumption that human behavior must be categorized rigorously or not at all. They dismiss the popular desire for simple, narrative-driven identities as a structural flaw in the public's reasoning. Dinner party conversation is viewed as an administrative failure of the Big Five model.
Good day.
Hmm. So is a personality theory only useful if it can predict life outcomes? What about being able to forecast interpersonal compatibility or conflict resolution styles? I'm glad that The Big Five does a good job at predicting future outcomes for individuals. This is useful information, but it is far from flawless or a complete map of human nature. The Big Five has massive conceptual blind spots. It measures the superficial outputs of human behavior rather than the underlying physiological and cognitive architecture. It's descriptive, not explanatory. Cognitive typology, at least attempts to model how the mind processes data. When viewed through the lens of teenage internet memes, false pop psych add-ons, and superficial tests for corporate team-building projects, of course scientific communities will dismiss advancing its research. No one ever gave the original cognitive function theory a chance, and no scientist or psychologist has ever debunked the actual original theory, only the test and the rigid 4 letter codes everyone uses for the sake of simplicity.
Reactome is the one. Truth is out there and we found it.
“…we highly recommend using a scientifically valid personality test like the Big 5.“
With an accuracy rating of ≈23%, the Big 5 could hardly be called “scientifically valid.” Or were you being ironic and I missed it?
No. The big 5 is the gold standard measure of personality. Overall, 87% of replication attempts of predictive validity were in the expected direction: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30950321/
1) Thank you for the link.
2) Satisfying my curiosity is not worth $35 to read the study itself (at age 71), but I accept the abstract and your endorsement.
3) As s CPA, I will never understand how a test that generates 87% statistically significant replications can on the other hand be described as “23% accurate.”
Statistics as a subject reminds me of this exchange in “Through the Looking-Glass”:
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
“‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
“’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’”
I think it’s a mistake to conflate usefulness with predictive validity here, outside the narrow critique of corporations using these for hiring decisions. Certainly it’s a fatuous claim that there are 16 kinds of people in the world, and knowing your ‘type’ will unlock some sacred understanding, but throwing MBTI and related tests in the same boat with astrology feels somewhere between disingenuous and lazy—there is valid and potentially useful data to plumb from drawing awareness to our tendencies and default settings, and in interrogating the contexts where we follow or deviate. from these tendencies.
Certainly, there is a whole marketing wing of this enterprise that oversimplifies and overstates the value of these instruments, in ways that are exploitative and gross, but dismissing them as appealing-but-invalid because they lack predictive value and are just easier to interpret than the ‘real’ psychometric is reductive.
(And fwiw, the MBTI and TJ 16 Personalities tools are NOT the same, as I’m sure the lawyers from both teams would scramble to point out).
But the way we tell whether measures are measuring what we expect is through their correlations with other measures and their prediction of behaviors/outcomes. If a supposed personality test is not very predictive of long term outcomes, then can we truly say we are accurately measuring it? The answer is no, because we would expect personality to influence long term outcomes and behaviors
I agree that the MBTI is no more valid or reliable than a fortune teller or star chart. People are multi dimensional and complex. I believe that the OCEAN/Big-5 and then PANAS-X can give leaders a quick shortcut to predict how professionals will respond to new initiatives and stress. I welcome you to try these tests for free on www.crescere-strat.com and share how you can leverage the tools. —Rene