So many people I know through the workplace have done the Myers Briggs nonsense and hold onto their persona like a badge of pride. They’re well meaning, intelligent people who don’t know the background of MB and how it’s as scientifically rigorous as those paper chatterboxes we made in school to help you find out which boy you were going to marry by picking a colour.
I don’t say anything when people bring it up. I also have a few star sign friends. Sigh.
as a philosophy and sociology nerd myself (i.e. not at all qualified) i will simply say that there are many better alternatives.
The big five is a pretty good one, a lot of people like it, i really like the enneagram. It’s really broad but incredibly specific at the same time, does a pretty good job at concatenating behaviors down into traits.
Other than that, stop taking personality tests. Start quantifying your own behaviorism’s, it’s fun, just don’t take it seriously.
The idea of taking a complicated system and boiling it down to an essential value (or set of values) that describe everything is high-key fascism. It’s fine to simplify a system to better understand it, but the moment you start saying these abstractions have any kind of predictive capability outside their original contexts, that’s when you start getting into the eugenics shit.
That escalated fast.
Might be worth waiting for a couple decades without a major replication crisis in your field of study before holding academic rigor over the heads of others but go off king
After a couple of Myers-Briggs tests I wound up on a web forum for self-identified INTJs. It was the smuggest, most insufferable place I’d ever seen, to the point that I gave different answers next time to nudge me into another category.
