With most traits, humans fall on different points along a spectrum. If you ask people whether they prefer to think or feel, or whether they prefer to judge or perceive, the majority will tell you a little of both. Jung himself admitted as much, noting that the binaries were useful ways of thinking about people, but writing that there is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum. But the test is built entirely around the basis that people are all one or the other. It arrives at the conclusion by giving people questions such as You tend to sympathize with other people and offering them only two blunt answers: yes or no. Actual data tells psychologists that these traits do not have a bimodal distribution. Tracking a group of peoples interactions with others, for instance, shows that as Jung noted, there arent really pure extroverts and introverts, but mostly people who fall somewhere in between. All four of the categories in the Myers-Briggs suffer from these kinds of problems, and psychologists say they arent an effective way of distinguishing between different personality types. Contemporary social scientists are rarely studying things like whether you make decisions based on feelings or rational calculus — because all of us use both of these, Grant says. These categories all create dichotomies, but the characteristics on either end are either independent from each other, or sometimes even go hand-in-hand. Even data from the Myers-Briggs test itself shows that most people are somewhere in the middle for any one category, and just end up being pigeonholed into one or the other. This is why some psychologists have shifted from talking about personality traits to personality states — and why its extremely hard to find a real psychologist anywhere who uses the Myers-Briggs with patients.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 15:41:14 +0000
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