"Myres Briggs was not based on science, but Jungian pseudo-science. It's since morphed from an interesting theory (which happened to be mostly incorrect) to a pop-culture superstition."
Just because something starts from intuition, does not make it non-science. (Although, I suppose that's usually the case... there's plenty of pseudo-science to go around.) I've heard that Maxwell was motivated by "elegance" when he came up with Maxwell's equations.
The question is: does it stand the test of scientific rigor?
You said that Jung's theory "happened to be mostly incorrect". Do you have links to research on this? I am genuinely curious.
I think that the Myers-Briggs temperament sorter can and should be subjected to scientific scrutiny.
Let me propose a hypothetical personality test: "Do you prefer Pepsi or Coke?" From here, we can do simple statistical correlations. Suppose we dug a little deeper and discovered that: 62% of the people who prefer Coke prefer going to movies over sports games on Friday night. 71% of the people who prefer Pepsi prefer going to sports games over going to the movies on Saturdays. (This is a hypothetical example that I just invented in my head.)
There might be a deeper reason for this... Coke advertises at movie theaters like crazy, and Pepsi advertises at sporting events like crazy. Or whatever.
So... if you are oblivious to the underlying science of the questionnaire, and if you answer honestly, then I can use basic statistics to guess something about your personality, at above chance levels.
(BTW, these are just preferences. Just because you prefer Pepsi doesn't mean that you don't occasionally enjoy a Coke, etc.)
Likewise, there could be a study of the Myers-Briggs temperament sorter. (For those who don't know, the Myers-Briggs temperament sorter has four dimensions: Extrovert-vs-Introvert, iNtuitive-vs-Sensing, Feeling-vs-Thinking, Perceptive-vs-Judging.) We can do plain-old statistical correlations between people's answers on the test and their life choices. Are "SJ"s more likely to become police officers or school teachers? Are "NT"s more likely to become programmers or scientists? (And/or, if they don't become those things, do they wish that they did?)
It's a straight-forward question to put this onto rigorous scientific grounding. I'm curious if this has been done yet... (you said that it "happened to be mostly incorrect"... do you have links to research papers?)
Yes, if you pick 4 attributes (almost any attributes) then they'll correlate to something.
Myers-Briggs tends to emphasise classification, which implies bimodal distributions. In reality, the traits it measures are more normally distributed.
Also, every attribute but introversion seems pretty meaningless. If it were a scientific model, the traits would be open to debate. But people treat it like an astrology chart that's been handed down through the ages. It's not the initial attempt at creating a framework which I'm critical of, but the way it's so uncritically accepted.
I agree that it shouldn't be uncritically accepted. We need to measure, statistically, just how accurate it is, and for what.
Sorry to nitpick, but:
> every attribute but introversion seems pretty meaningless
Every attribute is defined. In fact, every question on the test assigns one point to one attribute. Therefore, implicitly, every question is an example of one attribute and a rejection of the supposed opposite attribute.
But you're right -- too often it's treated like astrology. Too often, people are more concerned with assigning categories than with understanding people and what makes them tick.
Just because something starts from intuition, does not make it non-science. (Although, I suppose that's usually the case... there's plenty of pseudo-science to go around.) I've heard that Maxwell was motivated by "elegance" when he came up with Maxwell's equations.
The question is: does it stand the test of scientific rigor?
You said that Jung's theory "happened to be mostly incorrect". Do you have links to research on this? I am genuinely curious.
I think that the Myers-Briggs temperament sorter can and should be subjected to scientific scrutiny.
Let me propose a hypothetical personality test: "Do you prefer Pepsi or Coke?" From here, we can do simple statistical correlations. Suppose we dug a little deeper and discovered that: 62% of the people who prefer Coke prefer going to movies over sports games on Friday night. 71% of the people who prefer Pepsi prefer going to sports games over going to the movies on Saturdays. (This is a hypothetical example that I just invented in my head.)
There might be a deeper reason for this... Coke advertises at movie theaters like crazy, and Pepsi advertises at sporting events like crazy. Or whatever.
So... if you are oblivious to the underlying science of the questionnaire, and if you answer honestly, then I can use basic statistics to guess something about your personality, at above chance levels.
(BTW, these are just preferences. Just because you prefer Pepsi doesn't mean that you don't occasionally enjoy a Coke, etc.)
Likewise, there could be a study of the Myers-Briggs temperament sorter. (For those who don't know, the Myers-Briggs temperament sorter has four dimensions: Extrovert-vs-Introvert, iNtuitive-vs-Sensing, Feeling-vs-Thinking, Perceptive-vs-Judging.) We can do plain-old statistical correlations between people's answers on the test and their life choices. Are "SJ"s more likely to become police officers or school teachers? Are "NT"s more likely to become programmers or scientists? (And/or, if they don't become those things, do they wish that they did?)
It's a straight-forward question to put this onto rigorous scientific grounding. I'm curious if this has been done yet... (you said that it "happened to be mostly incorrect"... do you have links to research papers?)