Why myers briggs is bullshit

Meanwhile, Myers was too possessive, insisting that all assessments be hand-graded. The folks at ETS had trouble reshaping the test into something useful, and it remained among their "experimental" evaluations rather than their standard range until the company finally dropped it in By this time, Myers was aging and in poor health.

She had to find a new publisher for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator; her only taker, Consulting Psychologists Press, was a small outfit run from someone's basement in California.

But that basement operation figured out how to turn the test into a goldmine. Myers-Briggs was well-positioned, in the mid-'70s, to ride the wave of "self-actualization," the trend that brought us a dizzying array of personal growth programs and gurus. The new publisher offered the test not just to schools and corporations but to consumers as a "self-test"—individuals could buy the assessment and grade it themselves.

This was a new market for such tests, which previously had only been sold to organizations, with the answer sheets sent back to the publisher for grading. The DIY option was perfect for the "me" decade. People who felt unfulfilled could send off for a little green booklet with a self-scoring guide. Like reading a horoscope or doing a love quiz in Cosmopolitan, bored suburbanites could fill out the Myers-Briggs chart during the commercial breaks of Kojak and discover their "true type.

The story of the Myers-Briggs follows the history of personality testing in the 20th century. Earlier self-improvement ideas, like those of Dale Carnegie, focused on doing the right thing. After the s, the focus shifted to being the right thing. Neurolinguistic programming and self-hypnosis suggested that we could change ourselves. Myers-Briggs gave a softer option: It would help us know ourselves, uncritically.

But the knowledge is a mirage. Reading through the questions is like looking at a script for a cold reading. Every answer could apply to everyone to some degree, possibly changing depending on mood. The first half of The Personality Brokers is slow, with rather dilatory explorations of the lives of the two women.

We don't get to the Myers-Briggs test itself until halfway through the text. The test's creators and intended audience are people best described as affluent and anxious. Briggs wanted to perfect her children. Myers wanted to prove her worth as a professional, to justify her education, and to gain the respect of the psychology community. She never really managed that last task.

The test has been most influential among the kinds of businesses given to weekend "success seminars" in Ramada ballrooms. Today you'll still see people putting their Myers-Briggs type on their LinkedIn pages, the way others might mention their astrological sign on a dating profile.

Consulting Psychologists Press is a for profit company. Then again, newspapers still publish horoscopes every day and Donald Trump is still leading in Republican polls. Entire critiques have been written on this very problem.

Myers-Briggs is a relic of pseudo-science from the early to midth century and its been in near continual use since WW2 in some form or fashion. It has tradition on its side. Why would a Human Resources Director question tradition when their boss is telling them to use the test? Myers-Briggs is a faith-based indicator , not a fact-based one. Oddly, it seems to me that dedication to Myers-Briggs among many people who take the exam is based on the exact same concept that gets people to take Buzzfeed quizzes.

They want to be told who they are. They want to see how they compare to others. The most important element to note is that neither Katharine nor her daughter Isabel were formally trained in the disciplines of psychology and psychometric testing. There are many problems with the MBTI test. Plus, most of the studies that support its scientific validity have been poorly designed or funded by institutions with a conflict of interest.

How convenient is it that all the research they publish in their own journal shows that the MBTI is scientifically supported? In fact, it has been estimated that between a third and a half of all the published material on the MBTI has been produced for the special conferences of the Center for the Application of Psychological Type or as papers in the Journal of Psychological Type. Let that sink in. Hard to produce research that is more biased than that. The content itself is not even that practical or useful.

In fact, it could apply to anyone. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:. The Barnum Effect was coined in by psychologist Paul Meehl who related the vague personality descriptions used in certain psychological tests to those given by famous showman P. The same effect is used when writing horoscopes to give people the impression that they are tailored specifically to them.

In , he gave a fake psychology test to 39 of his psychology students.