Common MBTI Tool Misconceptions | Hackston Interviews Dr. Gordon
Dr. Aqualas Gordon, a professor at Maryville College and expert on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) instrument, earned his Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology at the University of Texas-Austin, and teaches General Psychology, sports psychology and other subjects.
John Hackston, chartered psychologist and Head of Thought Leadership for The Myers-Briggs Company, continues his conversation with Dr. Gordon, discussing the common misconceptions about the MBTI assessment.
Here are some excerpts from the conversation (you can watch the video here):
Hackston: You’re an academic psychologist — a lecturer and researcher. I know that many academic psychologists are at least somewhat dismissive of the type approach in general, and of the MBTI in particular. How would you respond to some of the criticisms levied at the instrument — for example, Pittenger’s 1996 piece?
Gordon: There’s an article I wrote [in Psychology Today] in defense of the Myers-Briggs. I wrote it independently before I met you. I really break down that the article [Pittenger, 1996] — it has a lot of problems. Its intent was to talk about the MBTI with regard to helping somebody choose a career, but its criticism of the MBTI broadens its lane.
But what we find in that article is that really if you compare those results — if you look at the stats of that article and you compare it to the reliability validity of say the Big Five or any other kind of academically recognized personality test — it’s no better it’s no worse. It’s almost exactly the same.
And what the MBTI has going for it is that it is based on theory. Somebody said, this is how I think the world works, and they went out and tested it. And sure enough, we’ve got results that confirm this is one way to look at human psychology in terms of personality.
Other tests are sort of shooting in the dark, looking for ‘p equals less than .05’, and once they get that they say ‘okay that must be my theory’. That’s a bit problematic.
I would also say that because it doesn’t ground that theory in a way that’s accessible to people, that’s why nobody talks about their ‘Big Five type’. The MBTI is grounded in a theory that thinks about people, the way people think about themselves, and then puts it back together in a way that they can understand.
People can think about the difference between Introvert or Extravert, or someone who leads with Thinking vs. Feeling. Somebody who’s really literal or somebody who has the head in the clouds. We already have this sense of folks.
I would say go look at that first half of Jung’s typology chapter. Before he delves into the different types, he’s basically giving his thesis of the ways in which we tend to think about personality. He looks at the ways that we’ve done it classically up until what for him would have been modern science, and then he delivers on his own theory.
So it’s not this pie-in-the-sky thing. It really is based on a way that people think about people. And for psychology to be useful at all it’s got to work for human beings — not for computers.
Hackston: Absolutely. And as human beings, one of the ways that we operate is by understanding how we’re similar to or different from other people, so that we can work with them. The MBTI plays right into that. It looks at those differences between types generally — those differences between us and that other person.
But it allows us to look at them in a positive way, and see how we could actually work together or play together or live together, rather than putting things on a scale that may look more scientific, but ultimately may be less useful for human beings.
Gordon: Absolutely. I don’t want to beat up on the Big Five. Maybe I do a little, but the only place that you really see it used is in academics. I don’t see it used much in the business world, and you certainly don’t see it used for the kind of casual interchange — you know, folks just trading personality types or talking about that sort of thing.
The only place it’s used is in academics, and in that regard, it’s got some good things going for it. It correlates really well, it’s easy to regress and calculate in terms of all of these other variables that you might be looking into in psychology. But again, when you pull it off the paper and try to talk about human difference — how is Kathy different from Mike — all you can really say is what’s on the page. Perhaps Mike is more extraverted on a scale. What does that mean?
It doesn’t break down the way the Myers-Briggs does.
Hackston: The Big Five or any trade-based questionnaire is very useful to academic psychologists because of the statistics it provides. You can do correlation analysis easily, which has been the mainstay of academic psychology since at least the 1920s.
I read a paper a little while ago called The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® and mainstream psychology: analysis and evaluation of an unresolved hostility, which I thought was a wonderful title for a paper. It was in a publication called the Journal of Beliefs and Values.
Gordon: What came out of that? I’m curious.
Hackston: The takeaway really is that the two approaches [type and trait theory] are actually closer than many trait theorists would suggest. They’re essentially looking at the same ballpark, they’re just different ways we’re going to say ‘ball park’.
There may be things about type theory that type theorists could think about modifying, and there are lots of things the trait viewers could leave behind in order to come together. But sadly they probably never will in the short term because camps are too entrenched.
