Let’s examine the evidence
The world of behavioural science is spreading its reach and becoming more commonplace across diverse industries and communities. With this deluge of new information, for those without a professional background in the field of psychology, it can be difficult to know what is a legitimate tool and what things we should be avoiding.
To address this, we’re embarking on a BAD myth-busting series, where we walk you through some common methods and tools and look at these through a critical lens. This will help you determine the difference between Be-Sci and BS, while building on your ability to critically evaluate and spot important factors to take into consideration.
Who ARE you?
First we’re going to look at the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), commonly known as the Myers-Briggs personality test. It’s a personality assessment tool that aims to provide insights into how people interact, work, and communicate.
The results categorise people into one of sixteen different personality types, based on how they answered questions around four dichotomies.
These are:
Introversion (I) vs.Extraversion (E): How people focus their energy
Sensing (S) vs. Intuition(N): How they gather information
Thinking (T) vs. Feeling(F): How they make decisions
Judging(J) vs. Perceiving (P): How they approach structure and organisation
MBTI is commonly used in industry, particularly corporate and organisational settings, for activities such as team-building, leadership development and career counselling.
According to the Myers & Briggs Foundation, more than 2 million people take the MBTI annually, with companies like IBM, General Motors, and many Fortune 500 firms using it as part of their employee development programs. Its simple design and the ease with which it facilitates discussions about work styles and interpersonal dynamics makes it appealing to use.
Despite its popularity in industry settings, MBTI has faced a range of criticism from the academic community for years. Let’s take a look at some pros and cons.
The Cons
Lack of Scientific Validity
Reliability Issues
Oversimplification of Personality
Limitations of Jungian Approach
Lack of Predictive Power
The Pros
Accessibility and Popularity
Promotes Self-Reflection and Dialogue
Popular and Practical in Business and Education
Lack of Scientific Validity
The MBTI is often criticised not being supported by strong scientific evidence. For example, it claims to categorise individuals into 16 distinct personality types, yet research suggests that personality traits are continuous, not binary. Unlike the Big Five personality traits (also known as the 5-Factor Model of Personality), which have a robust empirical foundation and strong predictive validity, the MBTI’s categorisation lacks the ability to reliably predict behaviour or outcomes. This can render it as being unsuitable for extrapolating insights from.
Reliability Issues
The MBTI has been found to lack test-retest reliability. Test-retest reliability is an important factor for testing, which means that results should be consistent when the test is taken multiple times. Research indicates that individuals may receive different personality types when taking the test on repeated occasions, sometimes as short as weeks apart. This inconsistency suggests that the MBTI may not effectively capture stable personality traits,undermining its usefulness as a diagnostic tool.
Oversimplification of Personality
The MBTI’s forced binary choices (e.g. Introversion vs. Extraversion) ignore the complexities and nuances of human personality. Modern personality psychology emphasises that traits like extraversion exist on a spectrum, and individuals may exhibit behaviours that fall in the middle of these extremes. The MBTI’s rigid classification system fails to account for these shades of grey, potentially leading to inaccurate portrayals of personality. Going back to the pervious point on reliability, we may also be inclined to respond differently depending on our current circumstances, which is also ignored through this simple approach.
Limitations of Jungian Approach
The MBTI is based on Carl Jung’s psychological theories from the early 1900s, which were developed through personal reflection rather than scientific studies. Contemporary psychology relies on data-driven models like the Big Five which have been shown to have greater validity and reliability. The reliance on outdated theories makes the MBTI less credible in modern academic psychology.
Lack of Predictive Power
Research shows that the MBTI has limited capability in predicting key outcomes like job performance or interpersonal success. While the Big Five model has been linked to job satisfaction, leadership potential,and workplace success, the MBTI has not demonstrated similar predictive capabilities, which diminishes its value as a tool for organisational psychology.
Accessibility and Popularity
One of MBTI’s strongest features is its accessibility. It provides a simple, easy-to-understand framework for people to think about their personality, making it widely adopted in personal development, team-building,and workplace settings. The four dichotomies are intuitively appealing and can help individuals reflect on their preferences and communication styles. This makes it an effective tool for non-experts, such as employees or students, to engage with psychological concepts in an informal manner.
Promotes Self-Reflection and Dialogue
The MBTI encourages people to think about their strengths and preferences, which can be particularly useful in improving self-awareness and interpersonal communication. By categorising individuals into distinct personality types, it provides a language for people to discuss their differences in ways that feel non-judgmental and constructive. It can also help facilitate conversations around diversity in cognitive styles and preferences which can be useful in both professional and personal contexts.
Popular and Practical in Business and Education
Many businesses and educational institutions use the MBTI for leadership development, team-building exercises, and career counselling.Despite its scientific limitations, its widespread use has been beneficial in fostering collaboration and improving work relationships through greater understanding of different work styles and problem-solving approaches.
So is it BeSci? Or BS?
Kind of neither! In summary, the MBTI offers value as a self-reflection and communication tool but lacks the scientific rigour that we’d expect in modern personality psychology.
It is popular and useful in non-academic contexts like team-building and personal development, where the focus is on enhancing interpersonal understanding rather than making precise psychological diagnoses. However, its lack of reliability, empirical validity, and oversimplification of personality traits make it less suitable for rigorous psychological research or as a predictive tool for behaviour.
Therefore, if you want to dig into personality traits and make inferences and predictions based on personality type, we’d recommend using the Big Five personality measure which is a more scientifically grounded approach to understanding personality.
