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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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.
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