Myers-Briggs and Me

A few weeks back I was talking to a friend of mine (yo Madeline) and she brought up the Myers-Briggs personality test, which is an innocuous enough topic to bring up. I remember taking it—years ago—and being interested in the results. I read over the different categories, thought it was interesting, felt that it described me. But when Madeline brought it up, I had a different emotional reaction than the default I strive for, which is enthusiastic engagement. For reasons I didn’t really understand at the time, I said “Ehhhh. It’s kinda bullshit.”

Alright, so, why did I say that? Do I have a problem with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), on psychological grounds? I’m not a psychologist, not by a long shot. I do have a few objections on purely systematic grounds. Let’s say we test four people for a trait, and give them a percentile score. This trait could one of the four MBTI variables, or in reality it could be pretty much anything. Anyway, everyone with a 50% or below, we are going to put in group A, and we will call them Type A people. Everyone above that threshold will be Type B people. Our four subjects score a 5%, a 45%, a 55%, and a 95%. That makes sense. For most traits, people will fall into a normal Gaussian distribution, a bell curve. We expect most people should be in the middle of the scale, because that’s what the middle of the scale means. However, because of the way we bin our results, Mr 5% and Mrs 45% are treated identically by our test. In fact, Mrs 45% is more like Mr 55%, yet they belong to two different types—and in Myers-Briggs, these types are supposed to form a binary opposition! In addition, if the standard deviation of the distribution is too low—that is, if people are really clustered around 50%--then most people will be just a few percent off, which is probably within the error of the test. If your test grade is +/- 5%, and you score 46%, Myers-Briggs has wholly failed to sort you into a category, despite the fact that these categories are defined to be essentially bipolar.

That’s a pretty real objection, but it doesn’t address the issue much. After all, just because the bins are too large doesn’t invalidate the idea of the bins. In addition, it may be that people aren’t actually normally distributed in the Myers-Briggs traits. (Although you can check the Wikipedia page; they are.) I also strongly suspect the feeling of “oh yes, this is me” that people (including yours truly) get from the descriptions. I just took a Myers-Briggs test, and got INTJ (but with only “slight” preference on the last two, so, that illustrates my above point). INTJ is a pretty classically “nerdy” type, and it is what I usually score. I think I’ve also gotten INFJ or INTP or something before, but that’s not really important. Let’s look at the first paragraph of the description:

To outsiders, INTJs may appear to project an aura of "definiteness", of self-confidence. This self-confidence, sometimes mistaken for simple arrogance by the less decisive, is actually of a very specific rather than a general nature; its source lies in the specialized knowledge systems that most INTJs start building at an early age. When it comes to their own areas of expertise -- and INTJs can have several -- they will be able to tell you almost immediately whether or not they can help you, and if so, how. INTJs know what they know, and perhaps still more importantly, they know what they don't know.

This boils down to “INTJs are smart at particular things, but not at everything. They have an accurate self-image of how much they know.” The first is pretty much universal, while the second is the sort of thing that everyone would like to believe about themselves, which to me smacks of the empty vagaries of newspaper horoscopes. . The description goes on to be more specific, of course, and in many respects it does seem to describe me (“Typical INTJ career choices are in the sciences and engineering”). However, it also identifies me as Ensign Ro from The Next Generation, and I never liked Ro. So, I have to object on Star Trek grounds.

So, I took another test. This time I got INFP, with both of those last ones fairly strong. Reading the INFP, I’m struck by how well this one describes me as well (“never lose their sense of wonder” “switch from fantasy to reality and back” “like Dr Bashir from Deep Space 9, isn’t he the greatest”). Interestingly, it does so by talking orthogonally to INTJ. That is, whereas INTJ focused on things like, how I go about doing work and how I formulate problems, the INFP description focuses on my moral sense and my attitude towards the universe. These don’t contradict at all. But if I can be –FP and –TJ at the same time, how are we placing these in binary opposition? Again, it’s a test that seems to describe me, but I’m not convinced that their classification is actually revealing anything.

At this point I’m being overly harsh, just like I was in my conversation with Madeline earlier. Certainly it gets enough aspects right that my knee-jerk dislike for it isn’t really justified. So what, exactly, is behind this emotional reaction? To tell the truth, I have a philosophical objection to the whole enterprise. You see, I really hate the idea that a personality could be determined by four parameters, each of which has two possible values. That a person’s attitude towards life, relationships, and work can be stored in a four-bit string. Obviously, this isn’t an unreasonable position to take—the unreasonable part is me putting Myers-Briggs up as something that claims this. I don’t think anyone claims that there is a personality test or type that would fully encapsulate who we are.  

Still, humans have this terrible instinct to put people into boxes and act as if that box contains them. We hear jokes about people planning love lives based on astrology or the like, but the fact is that people do that. (To clarify, I think Myers-Briggs is a good deal better than astrology, being based on some semblance of reality. Astrology serves to get us out of the specifics of the problem and demonstrate my general boxing issue, though.) Of course, throughout history we’ve come up with ways to do this. We do it with race—how many different ethnicities are covered in “black”?  We do it with gender, and only recently is our society starting to untangle that particular pair of boxes.

I identify as a humanist. “Humanist” is not a code word for “atheist” for me. It’s not a way to dodge accusations of ideological servitude to Richard Dawkins.  I am a humanist, with atheism as an aspect of that.  I am a humanist because, truth be told, I love people. I love it when they build things and care about things and when they tell stories. I love it when they set out to discover more than they know. I love the look in a person’s eye when they get excited. I love the acts of kindness we hear about, however rarely we hear of them. (I suspect what’s rare is the hearing.) People are fascinating—really, every single one of them. I know people who have spent their whole lives growing up in the same rural region of Oklahoma. You know what? They’re full of stories. They know so much about the land and the people around them. It’s wonderful. They’re not well-traveled, but they don’t need to be.

I have experienced only a narrow, infinitesimal slice of humanity. There are types of music I have never heard or dreamed of. There is art that would make me weep, from cultures I never knew existed. Yet even the half-dozen or so people I would consider close friends represent tremendous differences in personality. I’m like them, in many ways. But in many ways—arguably, many important ones—I’m not. Somehow that makes things better between us, because all these differences add to our relationship.

That’s the sort of spiritual reverence I have for humanity, for the “miracle of human consciousness.” I accept that mental phenomena are ultimately physical phenomena somehow. (From a Buddhist point of view, I’ll add “and vice versa” but that’s not relevant.) Obviously there is some finite amount of information that would represent my personality. But the practice of putting people into boxes or bins—whether by star sign, or Myers-Briggs type, or college major—seems to me to cheapen not just my own uniqueness, but the stunning beauty that is human society. An irrational response, I admit, one founded in sentimentalism and my own secular quasi-religious feelings.   It’s as if, instead of the Mona Lisa, you looked at a Polaroid photo of it. In a more modern analogy, think extremely low quality bitmap image. True, this representation doesn’t remove the original—people still have complex inner lives and the painting is still hanging in Paris, regardless of how we communicate it to people. Yet, if I showed you a blurry, pixilated image and said “this is the Mona Lisa,” wouldn’t you feel a little cheated?

There are more things in heaven and earth, Myers-Briggs than is dreamt of in your psychology.

Fun and relevant quotes:

"It's like, that people … well, that everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds … not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe." -- Neil Gaiman, A Game of You

"What is sacred to Bokonists?" I asked after a while.

"Not even God, as near as I can tell."

"Nothing?"

"Just one thing."

I made some guesses. "The ocean? The sun?"

"Man," said Frank. "That's all. Just man."

--Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle