The MBTI reigns as the most commonly found personality classification in popular culture; one glance on twitter will leave you berated with self-proclaimed INFJ’s reminding everyone they’re the ‘rarest personality type’. The biggest clients of the MBTI though, perhaps surprisingly, are large-scale businesses. Particularly in America, the MBTI is widely used to screen prospective employees. Reportedly, around 70-80% of Fortune 500 companies use the MBTI. A brief Google search will return with hundreds of articles telling you which type earns the most on average, which types suit which careers.
‘in reality, it’s not a particularly valid or reliable measure of personality’ Psychologists, on the other hand, are largely banded together in their hatred of the MBTI. In reality, it’s not a particularly valid or reliable measure of personality; people often get different results at different times (which explains why last year I was an INFP and this year I’m an ENTP). Statistical methods for uncovering the core dimensions of personality, provide little support for the four dimensions of the MBTI. Furthermore, dichotomously characterising people on each dimension is likely unrepresentative of how personality actually works. In a normally distributed population, most people fall around the middle of each dimension in a pattern that resembles more of a continuous curve than two distinct ‘types’. And yet, large companies continue to use the MBTI, so we remain stuck with continuing research that means little more than astrology.
ty, restrictive by nature in how it insists on categorising people. Better liked by Psychologists are trait theories, which instead describe personality by the extent to which people possess certain core traits. The most popular one of these is ‘The Big Five’. The five core traits in the Big Five are:
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Extroversion Openness Neuroticism Conscientiousness Agreeableness
The Big Five has emerged as much more reliable than the MBTI so far. It is supported by biological evidence to some extent, and reasonably well by statistical analysis. It also has some predictive validity for behaviour and life outcomes. For example, conscientiousness has been found to correlate positively with later career success. The Big Five, however, has not managed to receive the same following in popular culture as the MBTI. This is probably due to it not having the support of hundreds of businesses, and the ability to describe yourself quite as succinctly in terms of traits as you can in four letters. The Big Five is not entirely infallible; some of the dimensions are less well supported than others. Some researchers argue that Openness should not be a part of the Big Five, others that there should be a sixth dimension. Other cross-cultural research has previously indicated that three factors would be a better universal model. Personality is such a hard construct to quantify, and almost certainly dependent on situational factors that models struggle to account for. What we can draw from the field so far though, is that the MBTI ought to be left in the past where it belongs.
The MBTI is an example of a type theory of personali-
Is psychology a real science? Layla Amawi
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f you are in any way involved in the field of psychology, you’ve probably had someone make snarky jokes about it not being a “real” science. I’ve had well-intentioned friends and family ask me if I’m sure my degree is a Bachelor of Science (yes,
it is). “Real” scientists indignantly describe how psychology differs from their own very real, very hard sciences, and acquaintances half-jokingly nod and remark, “sure, but it’s not a science science, is it?”.
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