This framing isn’t meaningful, nor useful. All 3 of those are ambiguous.
The point of any of this is to better predict human behavior, and better describe variation in behavior between people. That’s the value pitch that society might plausibly get, from taxonomizing personality tendencies. These should be updated based on actual data, and whatever makes them more predictive. Not just speculation.
So for example, when HEXACO began distinguishing Honesty-Humility from Agreeableness, that wasn’t done because someone speculated that they thought a 6th trait made sense to them. Including more languages in the lexical studies resulted in a 6th factor emerging from the factor analysis. So it’s a more representative depiction of the clusterings, than Big Five.
Also, e.g. H-H is more predictive of workplace deviance than the old Big Five Agreeableness trait was. That’s an example of why anyone might plausibly care about adding that 6th category. Differentiating Disagreeableness from Dark Triad might plausibly be useful, and anyone who thinks that’s useful can now use HEXACO. Progress.
Your suggestion that we can use MBTI to “improve” Big Five is funny to people familiar with the literature. Sticking to MBTI is going WAY back to something much more crude, and much less supported by data. It’s like saying you’re going to improve 21st century agriculture with an ox and a plow.
Similarly, your proposed change to Big Five is highly unlikely to improve it. E.g.:
So, for example, for our question about whether people naturally think in terms of what other people think about something or think in terms of how they think about things, we would have that be the extroverted thinking vs the introverted thinking cognitive function (or Te/Ti for short).
You have little reason to think this is even a good description of personality clustering. But the behaviors are probably captured by some parts of Extroversion and Agreeableness.
I think you should just go learn about the modern personality psychology field, it’s not helpful to spend time pitching improvements if you’re using a framework that’s 80 years behind. We talked about this on Manifold and I think you’re kind of spinning in circles, you don’t need to do this—just go learn the superior stuff and don’t look back.
1) Basically, the idea is that any given flow of information could be said to be divided into one of the eight cognitive functions and there would be few exceptions where you couldn’t divide a flow of information in the brain into one of introverted thinking, extroverted thinking, introverted feeling, extroverted feeling, introverted intuition, extroverted intuition, introverted sensing and extroverted sensing. So, null hypothesis: these categories either fail to describe a large amount (say 10%) of the information flows in the brain or a large amount (say 10%) of information flows could be said to fit into multiple categories. Obviously, the other issue here is that we might just have a random set of points and draw a line around each shape and find any number of different ways to separate things but I think that the functions are distinct enough that we can avoid that possibility.
Just briefly:
Introverted thinking: Figuring out what you think about something (comes to a single conclusion)
Extroverted thinking: Thinking about lots of different possible conclusions you could draw about something
Introverted feeling: Figuring out how you feel about something (comes to a single conclusion)
Extroverted feeling: Thinking about lots of different possible ways you could feel about something
Introverted intuition: Figuring out what is my future and willing yourself to put it into action
Extroverted intuition: Figuring out lots of different things you could do
Introverted sensing: Remembering what actually happened in the past
Extroverted sensing: Seeing what is actually happening in the present
2) This just means that these distinctions actually allow us to make useful predictions about people. So, for example, I gave an example before, of being informative vs direct, which was something that as far as I’m aware of the factor analysis tests have trouble answering. So, informative people would tend to say what they observe where as direct people would tend to talk in terms of how other people should think about it based on their interests. So, I gave the example before of the direct person saying “Can you go get some more milk?” vs the informative person saying “We don’t have any milk”. Admittedly, I’m not sure about the specific details of which types are each, but I think the fact that they claim to be able to determine these things should give us pause for thought. Honestly, this criteria is probably very easy to meet so I’m not going to give it a null hypothesis.
3) Different people prioritize the cognitive functions in different orders. Basically, the null hypothesis here would be that within 10% or so, different people use different cognitive functions about the same amount.
I hope that clears up what I meant by the hypotheses. Also, don’t be condescending. I think it is a sign of arrogance and you must as a scientist always be willing to question your conclusions. I assume it is frustrating to see people trying to stir up a theory you already debunked. That said, I think the claim that is “superior stuff” is clearly flawed. While it may be superior at the moment (as was the model of the planets going around the Earth when the Copernican model was first invented was), until Big Five or Hexaco can get around the issue of measuring people’s unintrospective self-reports, they will not be able to describe all aspects of cognition as I argued in this article. The MBTI as it’s used in pop culture is total hocus pocus as I’ve discussed but the original MBTI was created based on the cognitive functions that Jung developed in his therapeutic practice and I think there’s a good chance that the cognitive functions hold (though I don’t have super good proof). As I mentioned in another comment, the cognitive functions match up with EEGs, and MBTI types actually affect how people show up on the EEG which is honestly a miracle, especially considering how bad the MBTI tests is probably mistyping ~60% of the people who take them (sorry, no source again). Anyway, of course, I don’t know anything but I just wanted to open people’s eyes up to this theory about cognition, even if there is a good chance that it is flawed. That said, until someone shows me how it’s flawed, I don’t see a reason to not try and improve the theory until it can be accepted into mainstream psychology (even if the probability is low in an absolute sense (just because the model is probably flawed)).
You understand what I said about how cognition itself is required to answer the questions on the test? I think a purely factor based approach will be unable to capture this variable. That said, I will admit that I don’t have a very good reason to believe that MBTI is the answer, but I thought I would write this post because I thought it was interesting that (at least in its purest form) it attempts to answer that question of what is the cognition beyond what someone can answer on a test. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll go check out the HEXACO test at some point. I will go back to my affirmation of “I do not limit my horizons”. My goal with this post was to see if the MBTI could actually answer some of these cognition questions that a test really can’t answer. I don’t think we should give up on this area of research of looking into the true nature of cognition until we have better models that go beyond just what people answer to a number of different questions on a test. Either that or find how we can adapt our current best models (eg. HEXACO, Big Five, etc.) to be able to determine traits themselves not just people’s self-reports; that would certainly be a bit of an improvement. Anyway, do you agree that a paradigm shift is required in psychology to be able to answer those deeper questions of psychology of how do you think not what you think, or do you think that our current methods already do that?
This framing isn’t meaningful, nor useful. All 3 of those are ambiguous.
The point of any of this is to better predict human behavior, and better describe variation in behavior between people. That’s the value pitch that society might plausibly get, from taxonomizing personality tendencies. These should be updated based on actual data, and whatever makes them more predictive. Not just speculation.
So for example, when HEXACO began distinguishing Honesty-Humility from Agreeableness, that wasn’t done because someone speculated that they thought a 6th trait made sense to them. Including more languages in the lexical studies resulted in a 6th factor emerging from the factor analysis. So it’s a more representative depiction of the clusterings, than Big Five.
Also, e.g. H-H is more predictive of workplace deviance than the old Big Five Agreeableness trait was. That’s an example of why anyone might plausibly care about adding that 6th category. Differentiating Disagreeableness from Dark Triad might plausibly be useful, and anyone who thinks that’s useful can now use HEXACO. Progress.
Your suggestion that we can use MBTI to “improve” Big Five is funny to people familiar with the literature. Sticking to MBTI is going WAY back to something much more crude, and much less supported by data. It’s like saying you’re going to improve 21st century agriculture with an ox and a plow.
Similarly, your proposed change to Big Five is highly unlikely to improve it. E.g.:
You have little reason to think this is even a good description of personality clustering. But the behaviors are probably captured by some parts of Extroversion and Agreeableness.
I think you should just go learn about the modern personality psychology field, it’s not helpful to spend time pitching improvements if you’re using a framework that’s 80 years behind. We talked about this on Manifold and I think you’re kind of spinning in circles, you don’t need to do this—just go learn the superior stuff and don’t look back.
Also, in terms of the specific hypotheses:
1) Basically, the idea is that any given flow of information could be said to be divided into one of the eight cognitive functions and there would be few exceptions where you couldn’t divide a flow of information in the brain into one of introverted thinking, extroverted thinking, introverted feeling, extroverted feeling, introverted intuition, extroverted intuition, introverted sensing and extroverted sensing. So, null hypothesis: these categories either fail to describe a large amount (say 10%) of the information flows in the brain or a large amount (say 10%) of information flows could be said to fit into multiple categories. Obviously, the other issue here is that we might just have a random set of points and draw a line around each shape and find any number of different ways to separate things but I think that the functions are distinct enough that we can avoid that possibility.
Just briefly:
Introverted thinking: Figuring out what you think about something (comes to a single conclusion)
Extroverted thinking: Thinking about lots of different possible conclusions you could draw about something
Introverted feeling: Figuring out how you feel about something (comes to a single conclusion)
Extroverted feeling: Thinking about lots of different possible ways you could feel about something
Introverted intuition: Figuring out what is my future and willing yourself to put it into action
Extroverted intuition: Figuring out lots of different things you could do
Introverted sensing: Remembering what actually happened in the past
Extroverted sensing: Seeing what is actually happening in the present
2) This just means that these distinctions actually allow us to make useful predictions about people. So, for example, I gave an example before, of being informative vs direct, which was something that as far as I’m aware of the factor analysis tests have trouble answering. So, informative people would tend to say what they observe where as direct people would tend to talk in terms of how other people should think about it based on their interests. So, I gave the example before of the direct person saying “Can you go get some more milk?” vs the informative person saying “We don’t have any milk”. Admittedly, I’m not sure about the specific details of which types are each, but I think the fact that they claim to be able to determine these things should give us pause for thought. Honestly, this criteria is probably very easy to meet so I’m not going to give it a null hypothesis.
3) Different people prioritize the cognitive functions in different orders. Basically, the null hypothesis here would be that within 10% or so, different people use different cognitive functions about the same amount.
I hope that clears up what I meant by the hypotheses. Also, don’t be condescending. I think it is a sign of arrogance and you must as a scientist always be willing to question your conclusions. I assume it is frustrating to see people trying to stir up a theory you already debunked. That said, I think the claim that is “superior stuff” is clearly flawed. While it may be superior at the moment (as was the model of the planets going around the Earth when the Copernican model was first invented was), until Big Five or Hexaco can get around the issue of measuring people’s unintrospective self-reports, they will not be able to describe all aspects of cognition as I argued in this article. The MBTI as it’s used in pop culture is total hocus pocus as I’ve discussed but the original MBTI was created based on the cognitive functions that Jung developed in his therapeutic practice and I think there’s a good chance that the cognitive functions hold (though I don’t have super good proof). As I mentioned in another comment, the cognitive functions match up with EEGs, and MBTI types actually affect how people show up on the EEG which is honestly a miracle, especially considering how bad the MBTI tests is probably mistyping ~60% of the people who take them (sorry, no source again). Anyway, of course, I don’t know anything but I just wanted to open people’s eyes up to this theory about cognition, even if there is a good chance that it is flawed. That said, until someone shows me how it’s flawed, I don’t see a reason to not try and improve the theory until it can be accepted into mainstream psychology (even if the probability is low in an absolute sense (just because the model is probably flawed)).
You understand what I said about how cognition itself is required to answer the questions on the test? I think a purely factor based approach will be unable to capture this variable. That said, I will admit that I don’t have a very good reason to believe that MBTI is the answer, but I thought I would write this post because I thought it was interesting that (at least in its purest form) it attempts to answer that question of what is the cognition beyond what someone can answer on a test. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll go check out the HEXACO test at some point. I will go back to my affirmation of “I do not limit my horizons”. My goal with this post was to see if the MBTI could actually answer some of these cognition questions that a test really can’t answer. I don’t think we should give up on this area of research of looking into the true nature of cognition until we have better models that go beyond just what people answer to a number of different questions on a test. Either that or find how we can adapt our current best models (eg. HEXACO, Big Five, etc.) to be able to determine traits themselves not just people’s self-reports; that would certainly be a bit of an improvement. Anyway, do you agree that a paradigm shift is required in psychology to be able to answer those deeper questions of psychology of how do you think not what you think, or do you think that our current methods already do that?