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.
In: Other
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.)
Latest Answers