Re:In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
by sunstone on Sunday February 28, 2021 @01:07AM
(#26291061)
The best that can be said of MBTI is that it has a slight correlation with one of the Big 5 dimensions. So it's not useless but it's close to useless. On the other hand it's expensive whereas the Big Five has been validated and it's free. Really MBTI is just a waste of time and money.
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Not that correlation with Big 5 should be a determining factor, but...
The chart in the article shows that E/I is strongly correlated with extraversion, S/N is strongly correlated with openness, T/F is moderately correlated with agreeableness (and weakly with conscientiousness), and J/P is moderately correlated with conscientiousness (and weakly with openness).
It's not a slight correlation, so if MBTI is useless then so is Big 5. Again though, choosing Big 5 as the standard is arbitrary and unfair. That automatically judges all other systems as inferior, without examining their merit.
Only one of the two systems stands up to modern standards of psychological science. If you are an HR rep and you want to predict an applicant’s job performance, you are using inferior data if you choose an MBTI test. It may have other uses, like fostering a useful discussion during an interview, but there is a very real case in which it is inferior and 5-factor personality is the standard to be judged against.
If you place any weight on Ffi in recruitment you are also doing it wrong though. The studies reporting ffi correlations with real world outcomes give confidence intervals not prediction intervals. For individual cases it’s mostly just noise.