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
Bottom line, most people prefer bullshit over uncomfortable or hard to discern truth.
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