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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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.)
The test relies on the Barnum effect, or the Forer effect https://youtu.be/xV_FxLntxVU the results are somewhat vague and people tend to pick what they like out of the results. The tests themselves have never been scientifically proven and due to the Barnum effect it would probably be impossible to prove.
To add to what others have said, any self reported test is usually unreliable at best.
It ends up boiling down to how the individual feels about themselves at a particular point rather than a true overview.
MBTI is a pseudoscience because it isn’t a science (i.e. it’s not falsifiable or evidence led) but it’s presented in a way that is kind of scientific, so it’s a pseudoscience.
The bar to clear to be a pseudoscience is low. All you have to do is act like something is a science when it’s not.
If MBTI proponents said “It’s fun, it might be real, it might not be” then it’s not pseudoscience, because it never claimed to be science.
It’s the combination of *claiming* to be a science, but not actually *being* science.
It’s just nonsense basically. The method to derrive a “type” is too simplistic, there aren’t enough types to fit everyone, there is no basis for such a thing as a personality type, or at least none that are scientifically defined and accepted, and of course it’s subject to a lot of bias by the person taking the test. It’s also fairly inconsistent.
It’s fun to fuck around with it I guess but it doesn’t really say anything about a person aside from what they really want to tell others about themselves, how they want to be perceived.
“Pseudoscience” basically means “claims to be scientific but does not in fact follow the principles of science”.
For you to fully understand the answer to your question, you’re going to have explain what you personally think makes something a science. When you do that, I think people will point out the flaws in your understanding, and why MBTI therefore doesn’t qualify as science.
So, what do you think makes something a science?
Myers-Briggs has never been scientific. It was created by two people with no background in psychology or psychiatry who were big Carl Jung fans and it is based on the Jungian archetypes.
It’s full of Barnum statements that anyone can see themselves in, has poor reproducibility and doesn’t actually have much to say about what happens after the test. You might be an ENTF, so what? What should you do with that in mind?
It’s management consultancy nonsense for people that dropped science at secondary school.
The difference between science and pseudo science is that any scientific hypothesis can be experimentally tested, and possibly found to be wrong.
pseudo science cannot be experimental tested.
If I were to say that there is a chocolate teapot in orbit around Pluto, it sounds vaguely scientific, but it’s untestable.
Not arguing scientifically here, but to me it represents some kind of algorithmic thinking which can never compete with emotional intelligence and empathy.
I have taken that stupid test several times over the years. Once as part of a job application, once as part of a teambuilding exercise, and a couple of times just as general, “you should know this about yourself” – where employers are convinced the results are immutable. I score all over the grid, depending on what I think I need to be for a particular role – writer, editor, project manager, department head. The test assumes people have fixed behavior, when most of the time they adapt to the situation.
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