- Don't let your children take the Myers-Briggs.
Whatever you do, don't let them do it!
We've got an article on Psychology Today
written by Benjamin Hardy, PhD.
This article was sent to me by a viewer,
and basically it's ripping on Myers-Briggs,
which if you haven't noticed,
is the thing I talk about on this channel.
Now look, at first I'm gonna play a little hardball
with Dr. Hardy here
because I think he just doesn't know what he's talking about
with a lot of Myers-Briggs stuff.
Maybe I'm wrong, just doesn't seem like he does.
But then a lot of his articles has good points
that I think we can all take something away from.
And by the end we will know,
should your children be taking this test?
Will it turn them into a Satanist?
Well they become crack addicts because of it?
Before we get into this sizzling-hot topic,
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So the subtitle is, type-based tests are not scientific.
It's like, we never said it was.
But he starts off by saying
that there's no such thing as a personality type.
That's not how personality works.
One of the problems here
is that his definition of personality
and the whole thing of personality type,
they're talking about slightly different things.
And so yeah, he's right,
but that doesn't necessarily mean
that Myers-Briggs has no value.
Psychologists have gone as far as saying
that type-based personality profiles
are no more scientific than horoscopes.
This always rankles me, if you will,
when people bring up horoscopes
as being equivalent to Myers-Briggs,
because they're not the same thing at all.
Horoscopes are saying you were born this day,
this is what's gonna happen to you.
Whereas Myers-Briggs is like,
hey, you seem to be this way,
therefore we're gonna classify you as this type.
Totally different.
Yes, neither are scientific.
But I really don't like
how they get thrown together so often.
I do understand why that happens.
It's because people don't get very far into Myers-Briggs.
They approach it from a very shallow level
and they just look
at the fun description on 16personalities.com,
which basically could be like a horoscope
in the sense of anyone could read it and be like,
oh yeah, I can see how that's true.
But if you get deeper into Myers-Briggs,
into any kind of personality system,
there's way more to it than the horoscope
you read in the newspaper.
Rather than viewing personality
as an isolated entity or trait
that is hardwired as birth,
as Katherine Briggs viewed it,
which I'm not sure she viewed it as a trait,
Myers-Briggs is not talking about fixed traits.
So already the language here is a little iffy.
The Big Five theory of personality, which is scientific,
views each personality trait as a spectrum
wherein a person scores a percentile rank.
Now this is where the issue comes up so often,
and it's like I feel like I'm beating my head against a wall
when this comes up.
Because yeah, when you get your type, INFJ, ENTP, et cetera,
it seems to just lock you into one or the other.
It seems like a binary choice.
But really, it would be the same as if
on the Big Five scale we said
you're an introvert or extrovert
based on if you scored above or below 50.
Even though when you get further into it
we have things like cognitive functions and whatever,
no one is fully one thing or another.
No one is a full introvert or extrovert,
no one is a full thinker or feeler.
You do everything.
We're just talking about preferences here.
He makes a good point in saying
research has shown the conditions
in which you take a personality test
can greatly affect, influence,
the way that you answer the questions
and the score you get.
Yeah, I mean, we've all taken multiple tests online,
personality tests, and scored differently.
If you look at my Big Five, the scientific one,
I took a couple years ago,
my scores are way out of whack.
They can't be right.
But it's just how I was feeling at the time.
Other research seems to suggest
your personality will change over your lifetime
regardless of intention.
Okay, yes.
To a degree this is true,
but I think it's also not the most salient point,
if I'm using that word correctly.
There is a study which I'll link below
that shows Big Five traits
have a tendency over your lifetime
to go one way or another.
For example, people tend to get less extroverted
as they get older
and they tend to get more agreeable as they get older.
But the thing is, you're still dealt a hand of cards
when you're born.
You have a personality when you're born
and you're working off of that baseline.
So it's gonna be different for everyone.
You're not gonna go from super extrovert to super introvert
just arbitrarily.
The other side of that is
Myers-Briggs is not looking at the same stuff
as the Big Five.
The Big Five is looking at these traits that are,
you know, pretty clearly observable
whereas Myers-Briggs is looking at preferences
for how you perceive the world
and then how you make judgments,
which is a little bit different.
Put simply, says Dr. Hardy,
personality isn't hardwired into you.
It's not fixed.
Moreover, viewing personality as rigid types
in which a person neatly fits
is an inaccurate view of personality.
This is just a total misunderstanding
of what Myers-Briggs is.
Myers-Briggs doesn't say you fit neatly into this,
there are only 16 types of people in the world.
If it was that simple,
then it would've clearly been proven.
But it's a lot more complex than that.
We're just talking about tendencies.
Dr. Hardy drags Carl Jung into this.
Myers-Briggs is based on Carl Jung's psychological types
and his theory about personality.
And Jung, I don't think,
really liked Myers-Briggs very much.
I think he thought it was systematizing something too much.
Jung, I don't think, wanted it to be
this kind of rigid system.
But the quote that Hardy uses here from Jung
is "There's no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert.
"Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum".
Even Carl Jung disagrees with Myers-Briggs, ah ha!
But the thing is,
the very next thing that Jung says in that quote
in the interview that that's taken from is,
"These are only terms to designate
"a certain penchant, a certain tendency".
Even Myers-Briggs, "Therefore when circumstances permit
"the introvert concentrates perception
"and judgment upon ideas
"while the extrovert likes to focus them
"on the outside environment.
"This is not to say that anyone is limited
"either to the inner world or to the outer world".
The same way that when we say
so-and-so is right-handed,
we're not saying they don't have a left hand
or that their left hand is totally useless
and they do everything with their right hand, man.
But then we get to the heart of things.
Dr. Hardy says, and this brings me to a core problem
with type-based personality tests
and why you should not give them to your children,
who you love.
Identity versus personality,
this is an important distinction
that Dr. Hardy makes.
They're two different constructs.
Identity is how you view and explain yourself
whereas personality is how a person consistently acts
or responds to various situations.
And this is a really important thing for everyone,
especially the people in the typology community, to realize.
We sometimes mix those things up,
and it's why, a lot of times,
these self-reported tests
don't work.
Because we're reporting our identity,
we're putting down how we view ourselves,
but that might be very disconnected
from our actual personality,
which is how we act, like, consistently in the world.
And that is a big thing about typology
that I think is good
is that if you can get your type,
if you can do the work to find your real type,
it's opening yourself up to your blind spots.
You're seeing beyond your constructed identity for yourself
and starting to see who you really are.
Typology should be a somewhat,
maybe very humbling experience.
You should be a little bit embarrassed
because it's gonna expose you to some of the stuff you do.
But then you take your type and use it
to improve yourself,
not just say, this is me, this is where I am.
And this is the whole thing
that I think Dr. Hardy is going for.
As wrong as he gets Myers-Briggs,
and I don't think he has truly delved into it enough
to address it
in a meaningful way,
the next part is really important
when he talks about how identity
shouldn't be fixed.
Like, the problem is a lot of people
doing these typology tests
take the answer and make it their identity,
even if it's not really their identity,
they're just like, ooh, this looks good, this looks like me.
And it becomes fixed.
If you are an INFJ, for example,
you shouldn't just be like,
okay, lemme just be an INFJ forever and do my INFJ thing
and be intuition, feeling all the time.
You should really be trying to grow beyond that.
To realize that being an INFJ
does mean you have some strengths
but it also means you have weaknesses.
The weaknesses aren't insurmountable.
So Dr. Hardy points out,
people with the fixed mindset view themselves
as unchangeable.
They're defined by who they are right now.
So it's kind of like you're trapped in yourself.
Whereas people with a growth mindset
don't define themselves by who they are now.
They realize that who they are is a bit malleable
and can grow and get better.
To me, typology is like, oh, now I have the blueprint.
Now I understand how things are working.
So now I can work on that and improve it,
and you know, see what is wrong.
Not wrong, but just like, what are my shortcomings,
what am I hiding from myself,
what are the things that I am doing over and over in my life
and I don't realize it
that are causing problems for myself?
Now I know, now I can go out and I can fix it, I can grow.
And a lot of people, I think, once they get their type
they don't even see themselves
as being anything outside of that.
And that's really unhealthy because it keeps you stuck.
So he wraps it up, would any parent
ever wanna encourage their child to have a fixed mindset?
That's the risk
of taking type-based personality tests seriously,
or any label seriously.
It is true, if you go into typology
just being like, lemme slap a label on myself,
that ain't good.
That's not gonna end well.
And so I think while he's ultimately wrong
on his take on Myers-Briggs being something
that you should not engage in at all,
I do think you should engage in it in a healthy way.
You should understand what it's actually doing
and what your type actually means
and how you can then use that.
I think Dr. Hardy is coming from a good place here,
I just don't think that he understands
what Myers-Briggs is really about
beyond a shallow level.
But in fairness, a lot of people who are into Myers-Briggs
don't understand it beyond a shallow level.
And that can be dangerous for the reasons he listed.
Here's some other videos you can check out.
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