It’s been described as “basically a horoscope,” and I can see how the types are general and lean into confirmation bias, but why is it considered pseudoscientific specifically? Doesn’t it just describe personality traits people have? I’ve been seeing it as a shorthand way of describing general personality/worldview but I’m guessing that’s not the issue people have with it.
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It is based on observed behaviors of non-representative groups. Think kids from one Montessori school and not 5 kids from each district. It is also based on self reporting – which is inherently biased. It is also subjective and diffucult to measure.
Some general properties a “good” personality test should have are
1) It should be consistent when people take it repeatedly, otherwise it’s not a personality test, it’s a mood test.
2) People in the same category should be more similar than people in different categories.
3) Ideally, the results should have some sort of predictive ability about people’s behavior.
MBTI doesn’t do great on any of these. The main issue is that for each axis it measures on, people generally fall on a bell curve with most people concentrated in the middle. By splitting it into a binary, all these people in the middle are sorted into one of two categories.
So when these people take it on different days, they may switch from an E to an I for example. Or someone who’s just barely E may be more similar to someone who’s barely I than they are to someone extremely E.
And in terms of predictability, there’s really no evidence that MBTI does a good job of predicting aptitude for certain roles or future behavior.
In general people don’t like being generalized lol. Any sort of a system for splitting people into categories is going to see push back sooner or later but the most valid criticism of MBTI is that it’s just a set of self-reported characteristics. Once you’ve taken an evaluation if you didn’t like the way it categorized you and you’re smart it’s pretty trivial to respond certain ways to get other categorization the next time you take it. Its been around long enough now and become well enough known that people will presume other people have manipulated their own results and invariably sooner or later it ceases to be scientific at all. Of course, this rationale applies to nearly the entire realm of psychology if you aim it broadly enough.
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A lot of people in here not answering your question lol.
Something is pseudoscience when the work put in is to prove something right.
This is directly opposed to the scientific method which fundamentally attempts to disprove claims and after going through the wringer, you accept that it’s true.
Horoscopes are actually a good example. It’s not hard to convince yourself there’s something to them if all you do is look for proof there is. But the moment you start trying to use similar process to disprove it you see pretty quick.
Simply put, it hasn’t undergone the rigorous process of the scientific method and so isn’t science.
>”basically a horoscope… can see how the types are general and lean into confirmation bias…”
You answered your own question. There is no scientific method, it’s all heresy and speculation based on generalizations.
Aside from it’s other problems, the thing that actually makes it pseudoscience is that it was just made up and never tested. If it were science, it would be tested, and if it didn’t do what it claimed to do, it would be refined or abandoned. (or refined until it had to be abandoned)
The psychometrics are poor. This means that it’s not a great measure of the constructs it is intended to measure.
The MBTI uses a forced-choice method. This is a poor method of measuring things, so test-retest reliability is low. This means that if people take the test multiple times, they are likely to get different results.
The MBTI also categorizes people into different categories instead of placing them on a scale of low to high. Categorization discards a lot of variance.
A better method of personality testing is the Big 5. Four of the Big 5 traits map pretty well onto the MBTI:
Introversion/Extroversion is similar to Extroversion
Sensing/Intuiting is similar to Openness
Thinking/Feeling is similar to Agreeableness
Perceiving/Judging is similar to Conscientiousness
The MBTI lacks categories that are similar to Neuroticism
Basically it measures most of the same traits as the Big 5, but isn’t as accurate in measuring them.
Psychologist here. Let me try to explain like you are 5.
The biggest problem with MBTI is the false dichotomy.
Take Thinking and Feeling for example in making decisions. Do we either think or feel? Do some people think more than they feel? Both constructs do not come from the same parent construct so it’s essentially forcing two disparate phenomena and making sense of nonsense. The actual continuum should be thinking and not thinking. Feeling and not feeling. This means that as a person, we actually do think and feel, many times both at the same time. The closest construct that they have is Introversion to Extroversion, which is replicated in the Big 5.
Now after this logical error, they make it even more complex by putting them neatly into a type. 4 non-continuum constructs being forced into 16 types. They, which in reality cannot be added, are somehow regarded as additive and churned out as 16 personalities, of which they claim can account for all personalities in the observable world. Typology removes the percentages and the nuances of each continuum, now you only see 16 types. An INTJ may actually be vastly different from another INTJ but because you somehow hit 51% T and 49% F, all your 49% F is gone. It oversimplifies.
Add this in with it being a self-report and few successful replication studies, it’s considered a pseudoscience in psychological science and can be dangerous if used in applications such as job or school screening.
Pseudoscience: “a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method”.
MBTI is based on an assumption of four (or eight) “cognitive functions” that Jung simply came up with. He did not find them out there in the wild or measure them. He did not even scientifically define them, merely talked and wrote extensively about them. He did not have brain imaging equipment or any modern knowledge about how the brain works.
This same issue with the starting point is with us to this day. The functions are poorly defined and every information booklet describes the functions in a different way. Modern descriptions are quite far from Jung’s. If anything, the only thing these different sources have in common is that the functions are vague and unmeasurable. How do you even know what you are supposedly measuring if you don’t know what you are talking about? (Hence the unreliability of the tests.) Without unambiguous terms, no scientific tool or method will save you.
People take the existence of these functions as a given for the rest of the theory to work, just like for horoscopes to work you must take it as a given that planets influence your personality. But the entire starting point is unscientific.
Ironically, Jung himself never intended his theory to be taken that seriously. For him, it was a *clinical* tool, not a scientific theory, that he used in his work as a doctor to help people understand each other and themselves. However, it is barely different from helping quarreling gamer-friends by pointing out that one is competitive and one is not and thus they react differently to different games. This alone does not make competitive/non-competitive a scientific theory or a reliable, stable measure of personality, although by looking more into competetiveness you may find other, stabler traits. (This is how Big 5 works.)
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