It’s a great post in that it seemingly tries to engage with the question in true faith. That said…
We don’t ask people on how they come to their datapoints because we can’t trust their answers. That kind of introspection is deeply unreliable in most people, they (we) aren’t, in this respect, enough of a lens that can see its flaws. That’s why Big Five questions skipped that, not by careless omission as your post seems to imply. The MBTI-type cognitive function gears would be “big if true”, but most big if true models are wrong, and not just in a technical sense of “all models are wrong, some models are useful”, but in failure to properly connect to reality by providing wrong compressions; the post provides literally no arguments for why these are useful gears.
Offer an alternative hypothesis. “A fair fight”, as HPMoR puts it. To understand if it’s valid, you need to be able to imagine both a world in which it is and a world in which it isn’t and outline what the differences would be.
If my hypothesis was that people think in terms of the MBTI cognitive functions and different people prioritize different cognitive functions, what could my null/alternate hypotheses be?
Oh, there are many. One, MBTI supposes the functions are antagonistic in very specific ways, so null hypothesis is absence of those antagonistic pairings even if the functions themselves are as it says. Two, each cutting out of a function is a subhypothesis of clustering the thingspace (in this case, cognitionspace), and the null hypothesis is that it doesn’t cut at reality’s joints.
Hypothesis: Cognitive functions are antagonistic as predicted by the MBTI.
Null hypothesis: Cognitive functions are not antagonistic.
So, let’s say we made an experiment and made the subjects do something that required extroverted feeling and then after we made them use introverted thinking. We could test if that is harder for people than other combinations of cognitive functions.
So,
Hypothesis: People will have a harder time using a cognitive functions when they have just used the antagonistic cognitive function.
Null Hypothesis: People will not have a harder time using a cognitive functions when they have just used the antagonistic cognitive function.
Well, that at least is an experiment one could set up. Time of reaction should probably be a reasonably-appropriate measure for “harder” (perhaps error rate, too, but on many tasks error rate is trivially low). But this requires to determine how “using a function” is detected; you’d need, at the very least, “clear cases” for each function.
I think the biggest issue that the MBTI faces is that the test is so inaccurate that it puts people off the whole theory. Also with data, we could not only convince ourselves of the existing theory but we would be testing to see does it hold up in practice and maybe we could even subdivide or combine parts that right now are separate.
I would argue that most of what we experience inside our minds is either a thought, a feeling, a sensation or an intuition. And at certain times, your brain is taking in thoughts, feelings, sensations or intuitions so that would be an extroverted version, and at other times, your brain is giving out thoughts, feelings, sensations or intuitions so that would be an introverted thinking. Generally, a feeling is a conclusion, a thought is a hypothesis, a sensation is just interpreted sensory data and an intuition is a complex set of concepts.
Would you say there is anything that is either ambiguous between these categories or not included in the categories which is important for cognition? Of course, there are things like auditory processing and language processing and all the other areas of the brain that contribute but when I talk about cognition, I just mean like conscious cognition not things that happen outside of your awareness.
Ultimately, the best argument I can provide for the theory is not that I have strong empirical evidence but just that the model helps predict things about the world. It is just a thing that people do: thinking or feeling, and introverted or extroverted.
For that full discussion, you can see this market on Manifold. Basically, we came to the conclusion that they were real things with real meanings but people were unsure of the attributes’ usefulness.
My point is that the Big Five tries to describe traits where the MBTI tries to describe cognition which is more complicated. I’m not saying that the MBTI is all correct, in fact most of it is pretty badly tested. I think the best approach is to take it one step at a time and test each observation. For example, I think listening to other people’s thoughts and coming up with own thoughts are things that everybody does. It should stand to reason that some people prefer to do one and some people prefer to do the other, even if it is a fuzzy line. The same goes for the other MBTI traits in various ways. See also this comment to get an idea of my position.
I was thinking about it and I think that the characteristics themselves have validity but not as a sharp line. Like let’s take for example one characteristic (J/P). According to them, Js act first to get things done faster expecting the details to iron themselves out while Ps first figure out what the best plan of attack is so they don’t waste time doing things unproductively. I think you could test this through an experiment. What if you gave people a task to complete and then you saw how much time they spent planning and how much time they spent doing the task (maybe you could just measure the delay in starting the task from experiment start for consistency and easy data)? If you repeated this experiment across multiple different tasks and kinds of tasks (to confidence in that kind of task), you could classify people into J/P based on how much their delay is in starting tasks on average, and obviously there would be some people in between. And I think you could do the same for the other letters and you would get similar results though maybe you’d have to think of a more elaborate experiment. I’m not sure about aLboP’s claim that everyone fits into one box or the other. Anyway, their claim that they could figure those things out based on someone’s face intrigued me so that’s why I decided to order their typing package. I am curious whether it is just total bs or not, but I think that at least the characteristics are real things with real definitions. I haven’t through all the letters though so feel free to disagree with me.
I think you’d be hard pressed to disagree that these things could be measured empirically. As for other empirical evidence, there were studies that found that when people were using their dominant cognitive function, their EEG scans lit up more compared to other things.
My point is not that MBTI is the correct model, just that this science should be investigated further, while right now it is frequently ostracized as empirically inferior to the Big Five. I think both have their own uses. If we find another model that fits better, great! I’d be all for it.
It’s a great post in that it seemingly tries to engage with the question in true faith. That said…
We don’t ask people on how they come to their datapoints because we can’t trust their answers. That kind of introspection is deeply unreliable in most people, they (we) aren’t, in this respect, enough of a lens that can see its flaws. That’s why Big Five questions skipped that, not by careless omission as your post seems to imply. The MBTI-type cognitive function gears would be “big if true”, but most big if true models are wrong, and not just in a technical sense of “all models are wrong, some models are useful”, but in failure to properly connect to reality by providing wrong compressions; the post provides literally no arguments for why these are useful gears.
If I wanted to determine the validity of the MBTI, what do you think would be the best way to go about it?
Offer an alternative hypothesis. “A fair fight”, as HPMoR puts it. To understand if it’s valid, you need to be able to imagine both a world in which it is and a world in which it isn’t and outline what the differences would be.
If my hypothesis was that people think in terms of the MBTI cognitive functions and different people prioritize different cognitive functions, what could my null/alternate hypotheses be?
Oh, there are many. One, MBTI supposes the functions are antagonistic in very specific ways, so null hypothesis is absence of those antagonistic pairings even if the functions themselves are as it says. Two, each cutting out of a function is a subhypothesis of clustering the thingspace (in this case, cognitionspace), and the null hypothesis is that it doesn’t cut at reality’s joints.
So,
Hypothesis: Cognitive functions are antagonistic as predicted by the MBTI.
Null hypothesis: Cognitive functions are not antagonistic.
So, let’s say we made an experiment and made the subjects do something that required extroverted feeling and then after we made them use introverted thinking. We could test if that is harder for people than other combinations of cognitive functions.
So,
Hypothesis: People will have a harder time using a cognitive functions when they have just used the antagonistic cognitive function.
Null Hypothesis: People will not have a harder time using a cognitive functions when they have just used the antagonistic cognitive function.
However, just in case, you only covered my first suggestion, not both.
Well, that at least is an experiment one could set up. Time of reaction should probably be a reasonably-appropriate measure for “harder” (perhaps error rate, too, but on many tasks error rate is trivially low). But this requires to determine how “using a function” is detected; you’d need, at the very least, “clear cases” for each function.
I think the biggest issue that the MBTI faces is that the test is so inaccurate that it puts people off the whole theory. Also with data, we could not only convince ourselves of the existing theory but we would be testing to see does it hold up in practice and maybe we could even subdivide or combine parts that right now are separate.
I think what is needed is data. That will be what really convinces people.
Are you aiming to convince or to actually check whether it holds?
I would argue that most of what we experience inside our minds is either a thought, a feeling, a sensation or an intuition. And at certain times, your brain is taking in thoughts, feelings, sensations or intuitions so that would be an extroverted version, and at other times, your brain is giving out thoughts, feelings, sensations or intuitions so that would be an introverted thinking. Generally, a feeling is a conclusion, a thought is a hypothesis, a sensation is just interpreted sensory data and an intuition is a complex set of concepts.
Would you say there is anything that is either ambiguous between these categories or not included in the categories which is important for cognition? Of course, there are things like auditory processing and language processing and all the other areas of the brain that contribute but when I talk about cognition, I just mean like conscious cognition not things that happen outside of your awareness.
Ultimately, the best argument I can provide for the theory is not that I have strong empirical evidence but just that the model helps predict things about the world. It is just a thing that people do: thinking or feeling, and introverted or extroverted.
I would be interested to know your thoughts.
For that full discussion, you can see this market on Manifold. Basically, we came to the conclusion that they were real things with real meanings but people were unsure of the attributes’ usefulness.
My point is that the Big Five tries to describe traits where the MBTI tries to describe cognition which is more complicated. I’m not saying that the MBTI is all correct, in fact most of it is pretty badly tested. I think the best approach is to take it one step at a time and test each observation. For example, I think listening to other people’s thoughts and coming up with own thoughts are things that everybody does. It should stand to reason that some people prefer to do one and some people prefer to do the other, even if it is a fuzzy line. The same goes for the other MBTI traits in various ways. See also this comment to get an idea of my position.
I think you’d be hard pressed to disagree that these things could be measured empirically. As for other empirical evidence, there were studies that found that when people were using their dominant cognitive function, their EEG scans lit up more compared to other things.
My point is not that MBTI is the correct model, just that this science should be investigated further, while right now it is frequently ostracized as empirically inferior to the Big Five. I think both have their own uses. If we find another model that fits better, great! I’d be all for it.