Myers-Briggs is often criticized, but my understanding is that each of the four categories tracked are variables that actually do vary from person to person- just the traits are distributed on a unimodal bell curve, instead of being binarily distributed (it is continuous, instead of being a thing that is either-or). But just like how height is a real thing, that matters and is continuous, the Myers-Briggs categories are real things that matter; just as there are short people and tall people, there are extroverts and introverts, and there are thinkers and feelers.
But there’s still something missing: I often describe people as not just tall or short, but there are also many average-height people. If I describe someone as short, you know that they’re decently short, and if I describe someone as tall, you know they’re decently tall, and most people are just “medium height”. Myers-Briggs as it is currently commonly expressed, fails to communicate about this prevalent middle-ground. There are extroverts and introverts, but there are also many people who are right in the middle. There are thinkers and feelers, but there are also people who do a little bit of both. There are sensers and intuitors, but many people just walk the middle ground.
I think it’s valuable to be able to express when a person is around the median for a particular trait: I’m close to middle between introversion and extroversion (though I’m clearly on the introvert side), my thinking style very much has qualities of both sensing and intuition, whereas I’m much more clearly on one side or the other in terms of being a thinker and a “perceiver”. I don’t yet have a good notation for this, but you could call me an ~~TP or an I~TP, where the tilde (~) indicates a median trait.
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Just like there’s kinda tall people (6’ 1”) and very tall people (7’ 0”), there are also people who are only slightly extroverted, vs. very extroverted; there are the extreme tails, and the defined slopes. It’s valuable to be able to communicate whether a person is very much a certain way, or only slightly that way. Perhaps I’m not ~~TP, but rather [I]~TP or [I]~[T]P, where the brackets ([ ]) indicate mild levels of that trait, as opposed to a more noticeable and pronounced personality. There may be a better way to notate this, but I do feel it helps communicate about people’s personalities in a slightly more detailed way.
This is fair, but I think the more common objection to MB is that its dimensions are too correlated and thus measuring the same thing. The Big-5/OCEAN model is explicitly designed to not have this problem.
Myers-Briggs is often criticized, but my understanding is that each of the four categories tracked are variables that actually do vary from person to person- just the traits are distributed on a unimodal bell curve, instead of being binarily distributed (it is continuous, instead of being a thing that is either-or). But just like how height is a real thing, that matters and is continuous, the Myers-Briggs categories are real things that matter; just as there are short people and tall people, there are extroverts and introverts, and there are thinkers and feelers.
But there’s still something missing: I often describe people as not just tall or short, but there are also many average-height people. If I describe someone as short, you know that they’re decently short, and if I describe someone as tall, you know they’re decently tall, and most people are just “medium height”. Myers-Briggs as it is currently commonly expressed, fails to communicate about this prevalent middle-ground. There are extroverts and introverts, but there are also many people who are right in the middle. There are thinkers and feelers, but there are also people who do a little bit of both. There are sensers and intuitors, but many people just walk the middle ground.
I think it’s valuable to be able to express when a person is around the median for a particular trait: I’m close to middle between introversion and extroversion (though I’m clearly on the introvert side), my thinking style very much has qualities of both sensing and intuition, whereas I’m much more clearly on one side or the other in terms of being a thinker and a “perceiver”. I don’t yet have a good notation for this, but you could call me an ~~TP or an I~TP, where the tilde (~) indicates a median trait.
———
Just like there’s kinda tall people (6’ 1”) and very tall people (7’ 0”), there are also people who are only slightly extroverted, vs. very extroverted; there are the extreme tails, and the defined slopes. It’s valuable to be able to communicate whether a person is very much a certain way, or only slightly that way. Perhaps I’m not ~~TP, but rather [I]~TP or [I]~[T]P, where the brackets ([ ]) indicate mild levels of that trait, as opposed to a more noticeable and pronounced personality. There may be a better way to notate this, but I do feel it helps communicate about people’s personalities in a slightly more detailed way.
This is fair, but I think the more common objection to MB is that its dimensions are too correlated and thus measuring the same thing. The Big-5/OCEAN model is explicitly designed to not have this problem.
I don’t think “the same thing” is exactly right, since they are not perfectly correlated, but that is an objection