How accurate is the Myers Briggs (MBTI) personality test What is a Myers Briggs, or MBTI, Test? Prepare yourself for the shortest crash course on pop-psychology. Imagine the people of the world to be divided into various permutations of four sets of rigid personality traits, or set of factors. Introvert(I) vs Extrovert(E) – reserved vs outgoing Sensing(S) vs Intuition(N) – prefer hands-on vs abstract Thinking(T) vs Feeling(F) – logical vs emotional Judgement(J) vs Perception(P) – make decisions by interacting, using thinking and feeling vs make decisions using sensing and intuition. These traits combine to form 16 (4 X 4) personality types. So for instance, you may be an ISTJ – a quiet, practical, logical, and analytical sort – your buddy …show more content…
The MBTI test has since been used in corporations, schools, career counseling, leadership seminars, manager workshops, and by countless many eager to understand what personality club they belong to. In fact it is taken by over two million people each …show more content…
In layman speak, it checks to see correlations between related and unrelated factors. As you might have already guessed, the analysis for related MBTI factors should yield a strong correlation, if it is to be considered reliable. So say you score as someone who is more practical, than driven by emotions, your response to ALL questions about your pragmatism should yield a similar score. And since the questions should dig out the four pairs of independent factors, a question on your shyness should not mess around with the scores of a question on your emotions. That is the four set of factors are mutually exclusive. And finally, the bunch of queries should be motivated to trigger responses feeding the factor dig rather than creating a big, and irrelevant, picture of the individual with no convincing trait. Studies, published in Educational and Psychological Measurement (Sipps, Freidt) and Journal of Personality (McCrae, Costa), have shown that factor analysis of the MBTI questions leave a large room for error. And for us mere mortals, it probably means that the error is big enough to fit a second individual, a camel, and a