Offer an alternative hypothesis. “A fair fight”, as HPMoR puts it. To understand if it’s valid, you need to be able to imagine both a world in which it is and a world in which it isn’t and outline what the differences would be.
If my hypothesis was that people think in terms of the MBTI cognitive functions and different people prioritize different cognitive functions, what could my null/alternate hypotheses be?
Oh, there are many. One, MBTI supposes the functions are antagonistic in very specific ways, so null hypothesis is absence of those antagonistic pairings even if the functions themselves are as it says. Two, each cutting out of a function is a subhypothesis of clustering the thingspace (in this case, cognitionspace), and the null hypothesis is that it doesn’t cut at reality’s joints.
Hypothesis: Cognitive functions are antagonistic as predicted by the MBTI.
Null hypothesis: Cognitive functions are not antagonistic.
So, let’s say we made an experiment and made the subjects do something that required extroverted feeling and then after we made them use introverted thinking. We could test if that is harder for people than other combinations of cognitive functions.
So,
Hypothesis: People will have a harder time using a cognitive functions when they have just used the antagonistic cognitive function.
Null Hypothesis: People will not have a harder time using a cognitive functions when they have just used the antagonistic cognitive function.
Well, that at least is an experiment one could set up. Time of reaction should probably be a reasonably-appropriate measure for “harder” (perhaps error rate, too, but on many tasks error rate is trivially low). But this requires to determine how “using a function” is detected; you’d need, at the very least, “clear cases” for each function.
I think the biggest issue that the MBTI faces is that the test is so inaccurate that it puts people off the whole theory. Also with data, we could not only convince ourselves of the existing theory but we would be testing to see does it hold up in practice and maybe we could even subdivide or combine parts that right now are separate.
If I wanted to determine the validity of the MBTI, what do you think would be the best way to go about it?
Offer an alternative hypothesis. “A fair fight”, as HPMoR puts it. To understand if it’s valid, you need to be able to imagine both a world in which it is and a world in which it isn’t and outline what the differences would be.
If my hypothesis was that people think in terms of the MBTI cognitive functions and different people prioritize different cognitive functions, what could my null/alternate hypotheses be?
Oh, there are many. One, MBTI supposes the functions are antagonistic in very specific ways, so null hypothesis is absence of those antagonistic pairings even if the functions themselves are as it says. Two, each cutting out of a function is a subhypothesis of clustering the thingspace (in this case, cognitionspace), and the null hypothesis is that it doesn’t cut at reality’s joints.
So,
Hypothesis: Cognitive functions are antagonistic as predicted by the MBTI.
Null hypothesis: Cognitive functions are not antagonistic.
So, let’s say we made an experiment and made the subjects do something that required extroverted feeling and then after we made them use introverted thinking. We could test if that is harder for people than other combinations of cognitive functions.
So,
Hypothesis: People will have a harder time using a cognitive functions when they have just used the antagonistic cognitive function.
Null Hypothesis: People will not have a harder time using a cognitive functions when they have just used the antagonistic cognitive function.
However, just in case, you only covered my first suggestion, not both.
Well, that at least is an experiment one could set up. Time of reaction should probably be a reasonably-appropriate measure for “harder” (perhaps error rate, too, but on many tasks error rate is trivially low). But this requires to determine how “using a function” is detected; you’d need, at the very least, “clear cases” for each function.
I think the biggest issue that the MBTI faces is that the test is so inaccurate that it puts people off the whole theory. Also with data, we could not only convince ourselves of the existing theory but we would be testing to see does it hold up in practice and maybe we could even subdivide or combine parts that right now are separate.
I think what is needed is data. That will be what really convinces people.
Are you aiming to convince or to actually check whether it holds?