Don't know why this is seen as legitimate. MBTI makes the bad assumption that people that fall on either side of a bell curve (say in terms of extraversion) are categorically different people. More self-fulfilling than anything.
Pseudo-science.<p>And isn't it funny how just about everyone advertising their MBTI happens to be an INTJ?<p>If you encounter someone making hiring or dating decisions based on this, walk away.
"Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless"<p><a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless" rel="nofollow">http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personalit...</a><p><i>"There's just no evidence behind it," says Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who's written about the shortcomings of the Myers-Briggs previously. "The characteristics measured by the test have almost no predictive power on how happy you'll be in a situation, how you'll perform at your job, or how happy you'll be in your marriage."</i>
The only model of personality taken seriously by academics at present is the five factor model [1].<p>It's well researched, the traits were not 'designed', rather the traits popped out of linguistic analysis and statistics, and it's stable across different populations and over most of a person's lifetime.<p>There is an open test called the IPIP Neo which has either 120 or 300 questions, which you can take online [2].<p>If you're really interested in what is being taught these days about the theory, this is a good set of lectures take takes you from the early theory of personality through to what is considered science today [3].<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j/IPIP/" rel="nofollow">http://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j/IPIP/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAhrMCQUa6sde_Y9DVbLYRv" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAhrMCQUa6s...</a>
Ugh. This comes up so often on Hacker News that I've prepared a FAQ paragraph about how unvalidated the Myers-Briggs test is. Read the articles you'll find at the links for much more information than I have time to type here with arthritic fingers. The Skeptic's Dictionary discussion[1] is a good place to start, but there are other critiques of the test too. Don't miss the discussion of the National Academy of Sciences review of the test.[2] "Overall, the review committee concluded that the MBTI has not demonstrated adequate validity although its popularity and use has been steadily increasing. The National Academy of Sciences review committee concluded that: 'at this time, there is not sufficient, well-designed research to justify the use of the MBTI in career counseling programs,' the very thing that it is most often used for." Psychologists who really know about personality testing don't regard the Myers-Briggs test as a worthwhile test.[3]<p>An article from the <i>Washington Post</i> newspaper sums up the matter pretty well:<p>"Now, 50 years after the first time anyone paid money for the test, the Myers-Briggs legacy is reaching the end of the family line. The youngest heirs don’t want it. And it’s not clear whether organizations should, either.<p>. . . .<p>"Yet despite its widespread use and vast financial success, and although it was derived from the work of Carl Jung, one of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, the test is highly questioned by the scientific community."[4]<p>[1] <a href="http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.psychometric-success.com/personality-tests/personality-tests-popular-tests.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.psychometric-success.com/personality-tests/person...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/develop/mbti.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.indiana.edu/~jobtalk/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/deve...</a><p>[4] "Myers-Briggs: Does it pay to know your type?" 14 December 2012<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/myers-briggs-does-it-pay-to-know-your-type/2012/12/14/eaed51ae-3fcc-11e2-bca3-aadc9b7e29c5_story.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/myers-b...</a>
This survey was taken on CodeProject.com, a site which seems biased toward C#, C++, .NET, Java, and mobile devs.<p>Perhaps it's just that sample of developers who skew toward INTJ, ENTJ and INTP.<p>I suspect that the results would be different in a survey of developers from a more open source-focused community, e.g. if GitHub conducted that survey and a lot of idealistic open source developer types responded.
That chart -- Ow, my eyes! The multi-direction, multi-frequency cross hatching (and it's wrong in the legend). The bars showing the difference (but only absolute value, ignoring sign) between the two other bars. The cheesy 3D effect. A Tufte Hall of Shame candidate.
So, we have a marketing company that helps others advertise to developers based on Myers-Briggs results showing 3 main results? Guess I'm not supposed to be a developer since I keep scoring ENTP (why I've had to take the damn thing multiple times starting at 13 is a bar discussion on various jobs / government grants).
Looking at this thread and not arguing for / against the Myers-Briggs, I do have a question.<p>Has anyone reading this who took the test scored an S (sensing) instead of the N (intuition)? I see variance in the other three slots but not that one.
Psychologists don't like this test because it's unscientific, and I agree. But something is up in that developers seem to be overwhelmingly INTJ and the rest of the population is not.
On the validity of MBTI, the main use I've found is to use the eight functions as part of my vocabulary. It's a pretty handy approximation to be able to say to someone in conversation "wow, Stephen Fry has a really developed Fe" and have them know what you mean. There an approximation is all you need, and in exchange you get neat symbols to hang entire categories of ideas onto.<p>On the flip side, it's all too easy to move symbols around in your head without investigating whether the model you've built corresponds to reality...