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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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.
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