Saturday, August 15

Myers-Briggs

The problem is that these tests are taken by humans, who, for better or for worse, are subjective in the way they see themselves. Combine this with unclear delineations, such as T/J and F/P confusion, and I find many of these results to be silly.

For example: Sometimes people confuse terms like "feeling" with "random" and "logic" with "order". So someone who scores ISFJ may actually be an ISTP like their real life actions suggest.

Or they mark the test the way they would like to be, or how they see themselves relative to their ideal self. Like when my wife marks that she is "disorganized", because she is not as organized as she would like to be, however, objectively, she is ten times more organized than me, especially in her own head (which is what matters since she's an N).


Also, many people have misgivings and prejudices about some of the functions as inferior, especially S, F, and P. Sensing in particular, since I would imagine that many people would look at the numbers S 75%/ N 25% and quickly make the leap that S = "Stupid" and N = "Intelligent", and that in order to seem smart, they need to be an N (which is, to be fair, how it works in real life, since college-educated doctors, scientists, and computer programmers make more money than bricklayers.)

Or that feelings are generally looked down upon as being irrelevant and invalid, with thinking being "smart" and "logical". Or that unclean people who are constantly late are subject to ridicule as being "flaky", while our constant, structured, and punctual brethren get a promotion.

Or take the word "methodical", which has the dual meaning of being both "ordered" (J) and "logical" (T). Confusing...

The real issue is that this is an objective test, with subjective people taking it.

1 comment:

  1. Which is why they introduced Ni/Ne, Te/Ti, Fe/Fi, Se, Si. The larger letter being the MBTI letter and the smaller letter representing introvert/extrovert, those represent if your type displays your MBTI letter outwardly or inwardly which makes it easier to figure out who you are by reading the descriptions of those combinations. For Example if you are an INFJ, your primary function is Ni followed by Fi then Te, and Se. Since the Ni/Fi are both introverted functions, people might actually see less of those in that person and see more of the Te/Se since those are the extroverted functions, what they display to people, making that person seem like an ISTP instead of an INFJ. However, an INFJ would spend the majority of their time Feeling and thinking abstractly to themselves but when talking to other people they may seem like a Te because their T is extroverted and that is what they use to win arguments. There is also the fact that people like to pretend to be someone else. Like my secondary type is probably ISFJ just because I grew up in a S household, I'm better at doing those things and take them over when they are needed in a situation (which happens a lot at Jerry's parents' house since they have no SJ in their house and can't organize any function efficiently). There are just a ton of variables so if someone doesn't want to spend the time really analyzing themselves they are going to come up with something that is not really them, just the person that they want to be or prefer to be.

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