A Critical Review of The Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI)
I have a feeling Jung would not have liked it
Psychometric tests are used to objectively measure psychological attributes such as personality traits. Measuring personality using the quantitative personality measurement tool – the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) has been widely popular in a variety of professional and non-professional settings in the last fifty years, however, despite widespread application, its utility remains dubious (Pittenger, 1993a). While its authors and users maintain its usefulness to be sound (Myers,1993; Carlson, 1985; Carlyn, 1977), the MBTI is shrouded in controversy within psychological research (Pittenger, 2005; Randall et al., 2017; Boyle, 1995). This review will discuss the usefulness of the quantitative approach to psychology through a critical overview of the Myers-Briggs personality type measurement inventory. Criticisms of the MBTI address a dubious adoption and interpretation of Carl Jung’s psychological types (Barbuto, 1997) as its theoretical and practical foundations, and the value of using quantitative measurement of psychological attributes to maintain psychology as a scientific discipline (Mitchell, 2000). Indeed, despite the potential usefulness of the MBTI as a valid inventory (Carlson, 1985; Carlyn, 1977), the flaws in its underlying theoretical foundations and fundamental assumptions highlight the psychometric test as an attempt to reduce the “complexities of human personality into an artificial and limiting classification scheme” (Pittenger, 1993b, p.51).
The Myers-Briggs Type Inventory is an adoption and development of C.G. Jung’s psychodynamic type theory (Myers and McCaulley, 1985). Jung maintained that fundamental to one’s personality or psychological type are two attitudes and four functions of the psyche (Barruto, 1997). An individual possesses an attitude, or direction of energy as tending to flow outwards to other people (extroversion), or inwards towards oneself (introversion). While the extroverted type tends more towards relations with other people and external experiences, the introverted type tends towards inner processes and solitude (Murray, 1990). Jung’s view of extraversion and introversion was that a person possesses both, and only the one which is developed in the conscious mind is expressed while the other remains dormant in the unconscious – “only the relative predominance of the one or the other determines the type” (Jung, 1971, p.10), and the same is true for functions (Barruto, 1997). Functions include thinking and feeling as opposing rational functions, and sensation and intuition as opposing irrational functions. While the rational dominant functions (thinking and feeling) tend to oppose each other, they can be auxiliary to, and thus complemented by irrational functions (sensation and intuition) and vice versa (Murray, 1990). For example, a person might have a dominant thinking function complemented by intuition. Personality, Jung (1971) postulated, is then determined by the degree or proportions to which each attitude and function is express in the conscious and unconscious. Importantly, Jung (1971) maintained that “there can never be a pure type in the sense that one is entirely possessed of one mechanism with a complete atrophy of the other” (p.13), thus an individual’s personality is only likely to be categorised as a certain type because of observable behaviour that reflects the degree to which attitudes and functions are expressed, while tendencies that are not expressed remain unconscious and may be developed into consciousness. While Jung’s typology supposes that people are characterised by certain types, he believed that the attitudes and functions determining these exist along continuous dimensions that are fundamentally shaped by their proportion in awareness and repression (Jung, 1971). To understand one’s personality as a predisposition to behaviour, Jung implied a need to understand these psychological variations in awareness and repression that may explain fundamental differences in people.
The authors of the MBTI maintain that the inventory is a way that Jung’s ideas can be applied to understand differences between people, and to identify one’s own motivations, strengths, and areas of growth (Myers, 1998). The questionnaire measures self-reported preferences along four scales: introversion-extroversion, thinking-feeling, sensation-intuition, judgement-perception (Myers, 1962). Theoretically, the MBTI quantitatively assesses personality type by identifying an individual’s one of sixteen possible types based on the results of the questionnaire. How people report on their own attitudes identifies their personality preferences which in combination define their type which reflects one’s preferences. The type can then be used to allocate people to career roles, determine learning styles, and enhance problem solving (ibid.). However, as highlighted by many reviews of the inventory (Murray, 1990; DeVito, 1985; Coan, 1978; Garden, 1991; Barbuto, 1997;), the authors of MBTI base their theoretical foundations on a dubious interpretation of Jung’s theory of psychological types.
Jung recognised eight possible combinations of attitudes and functions (Barbuto, 1997) and while he did not explicitly define the dominant and auxiliary functions as discrete functions in his typology, the Myers-Briggs interpretation of the dominant and auxiliary functions led to the development of the judgement-perception scale in order to identify these (Garden, 1991). While Jung (1971) postulated that people are generally judging or perceiving, this is seen as either a dominant or auxiliary function in both introverts and extroverts. Judging and perceiving types are determined by how dominant their functions are in judging (thinking or feeling) or perceiving (intuition or sensing) in a kind of balancing act, however, as this is determined by other functions, judging and perceiving are not explicitly stated as discrete functions (Garden, 1991). Jung maintained that thinking and feeling types are determined “by the supremacy of the reasoning and judging functions” (Jung, 1971, p.359), and so the expression of one function does not invalidate the other as both exist simultaneously, emphasised in different degrees depending on the levels of awareness and repression (Jung, 1971). Contrary to this, Myers refers to judging and perceiving functions as ‘extroverted’ (Myers and McCaulley, 1985). For Myers, having an ‘extroverted function’, that which is experienced in the ‘outer world’, means that for extroverts this is the dominant function, while for introverts their extroverted function is the auxiliary function (Garden, 1991). Thus, each person has a discrete ‘judging’ or ‘perceiving’ function extroverted which for extroverts is expressed as the dominant and introverts as the auxiliary function, “for introverts a judging type has a dominant perceiving function” (ibid., p.4). Coan (1978) refers to the addition of the judgement-perception scale as a “departure from Jungian theory” (p.974) as an explicit tendency towards judging or perception is implied here, stating that people are either judging or perceiving, which is different from having a dominant judging function which doesn’t negate the auxiliary perceiving function.
Another difference is that Jung (1971) implied that only the dominant function is conscious while auxiliary functions remain “half conscious or even quite unconscious” (p.540), while the MBTI treats both as in the conscious mind and thus expressed in behaviour. Therefore, the MBTI assumes these as measurable with the judgement-perception scale. This is different from Jung’s (1971) statements that behaviour is as much determined by conscious as unconscious functions in a balance of attitudes and functions along their continuous dimensions. Moreover, differing from Jung’s (1971) ideas about the more-or-less dynamic nature of attitudes and functions, the MBTI seems to ignore the degrees in which these can exist in the conscious and unconscious mind. Jung recognised that a person may be, for example, mostly introverted, but tend towards extroversion in some degree. However, in the testing, scoring, and application of the MBTI this is not recognised, and type preferences are treated as a dichotomy – a person can theoretically only be introverted or extroverted with no in-between (Myers, 1962). While a person may be aware of, and prefer some introverted and some extroverted tendencies, this is ignored (Myers and McCaulley, 1985). Highlighted by Barbuto (1997), as the inventory assigns a type to a person and does not test for degrees in which a person may be tending towards an attitude, researchers (Apostal and Marks, 1990; Tegano. 1990) treating the dichotomous scale as continuous are applying misconstrued Jung’s theory, while those interested in Jung’s original conception treat the scales as continuous, but not as intended by Myers (1962). A proposed inventory with continuous measures has been explored by Tzeng et al. (1989) that adopts Jung’s ideas, and as intended by Myers (1998) would be a better way to understand and adopt Jung’s theory. Indeed, in treating the introversion-extroversion scale as dichotomous, the resulting type one may be assigned can result from only reporting slight tendency for either of the attitudes (DeVito, 1985). A broader problem with the general typological nature, continuous or dichotomous is that it nonetheless does not provide sufficient insight into the distinct personality of a person; as Allport (1937) observed, “a concept broad enough to categorise all attitudes toward objective and subjective reality is of necessity too loose and vague”. While the inventory may be useful in determining individuals that are more likely to accept a group learning situation (extroverts) and those that are less likely (introverts) (Kilmann and Taylor, 1974). Its theoretical grounding is dubious and treated by critics as assumptive of Jung’s theory (Garden, 1991, p.5) posing further questions of validity as the inventory is not as useful in objectively measuring both conscious and unconscious attitudes and functions that determine personality types.
Finally, as a way to establish the field of psychology as a rigorous science, quantitative psychologists rest on the idea that it ought to resemble ‘hard’ sciences like physics by employing the hypothetico-deductive method to discover objective ‘laws’ surrounding psychological phenomena (Seale, 2018). Establishing these ‘laws’ involves critical scientific enquiry by making objective observations and collecting data, producing theories and predictions, and testing these. Psychology is thus dominated by the idea that phenomena ought to be measured and methods ought to produce numerical data for research to deliver palpable findings and objective facts that are statistically, and mathematically precise (Breakwell et al., 2014). Quantification thus maintains psychology’s reputation as a science. While measuring and quantifying psychological attributes like cognition, intelligence, or personality traits using psychometric tests psychology gains insight into mental properties that are otherwise unseen, some argue that this is wrongly based on the assumption that what is measured indeed has a “quantitative structure” (ibid., p.61). Psychometric tests, as a ‘scientific’ mode of critical enquiry, hinge on the hypothesis that psychological attributes like personality are quantitative. According to Mitchell (2000; 2008), this premise is overlooked by mainstream psychologists and psychometricians, a situation which he argues is produced in the interests of “presenting psychology as a quantitative science” (2008; p.1) and thus upholding its reputation in the scientific community. Thus, psychology reduces human processes and attributes to numbers in experiments which, as argued by qualitative researchers (Breakwell, 2012), takes away from the breadth and depth of the complex human experience. Instead, psychology ought to study its subjects within human contexts and subjective experiences which produce meaning. As Asch (1987) contended, “because physicists cannot speak with starts or electric currents, psychologists have often been hesitant to speak to their human participants” (p.15). As the study of personality types began with Jung, the focus of personality research may have more value in the qualitative psychoanalytic traditions as they encompass the richness of the person it studies.
To conclude, the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory is a quantitative personality type measurement tool that was inspired by Jung’s theory of personality types. Developed as a way to apply Jung’s ideas in determining the differences between people, the MBTI is a widely popular instrument used in a variety of settings where personality type is used to determine and predict preferences that people appear to exhibit in, for example, the work environment (Myers and McCaulley, 1985). While arguably useful in some settings if used appropriately, the MBTI is often misused by practitioners and researchers (Barbuto, 1997; Pittenger, 1993a; 1993b). Furthermore, the theoretical foundation and fundamental assumptions of the MBTI seem to rest on a dubious interpretation of Jung’s personality types, calling into question its praised claim as a way to understand and apply Jung’s theory. The greatest criticism faced by the measure, however, is that the quantitative nature of psychometric testing reduces human experiences like personality to numbers in an attempt to maintain psychology as a hard science, which psychology arguably cannot be by the nature of its subject matter. Quantitative psychology thus loses much of richness and depth that is offered by qualitative approaches that offer a much more holistic view of lived human experience.
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