In defence of MBTI (sort of...)

Yesterday, in his online blog at the Guardian, Dean Burnett launched an attack on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator.

Whilst I don't think the MBTI is above criticism, it seems to me that his post conflates the abuse of the MBTI, questions about the underpinning Jungian theory, and the MBTI's own validity, into one messy, anecdotal, misinformed mess.

He gets off on the wrong foot straight away, referring to it as a test throughout the piece.  It is not a test, but an indicator (the clue is in the name). He goes on to say that it 'isn't recognised as being scientifically valid' but gives no data or source to support that assertion - an interesting approach to science writing.

He makes much of the fact that it 'is largely ignored by the field of psychology,' again an unsupported assertion; however looking at some of the critical articles to which he links, I think he means it isn't used in clinical psychology - which is scarcely surprising as it isn't a clinical tool.

And so it goes on.  He retails lots of anecdotal evidence, most of which demonstrates misunderstanding and abuse of the tool, and makes rather large leaps of logic along the way.

He is particularly incensed by the binary choices offered, but misunderstands what the tool is doing: nowhere does he explore the notion of preference (ie that one might be left-handed or right-handed, but certainly value and use boh hands) instead saying ' in the category of extrovert v introvert, you're either one or the other; there is no middle ground.' That is simply to misunderstand and misrepresent the tool.

I think it would have been more sensible to have addressed three questions:

1 What is this tool trying to do, and how well does it do it?
2 Is that a sensible or useful thing to be doing?
3 What problems are there with abuse/misunderstanding of the tool?

On that basis, I think MBTI has a pretty clean bill of health on 1; I think 2 -  how much one accepts the Jungian underpinning of MBTI -  is debatable: but he deliberately side-steps this issue.  And his article provides ample evidence, with regard to 3, that the tool is much misunderstood and misused.  He (rightly) points out that it is an absurd way to recruit people - but he fails to point out that when one is trained in MBTI it is made clear that it should not be used for recruitment.  

I do share his frustration with the evangelical zeal, and uncritical true-believer faith, of some MBTI practitioners; but with regard to that, MBTI isn't where I'd start.  Try NLP, with its 'master-practitioners', its pseudo-philosophy, and its largely unproven and extravagant claims (though again, I am not saying there is no value in all the NLP stuff: much of it is lifted from skilled psychologists - but there's an awful lot of bunkum stirred into the mix!)

All in all, a poor piece of journalism, that looks to have been based on a superficial understanding supplemented by reading a few websites and getting some angry readers' comments about MBTI.

For myself, although I am not a fan of Jungian psychology, I find it a useful tool, principally for enabling reflection and discussion about some interesting aspects of ways in which we differ from each other.

I always present it as a hypothesis that should not be swallowed whole: indeed I normally explain my relationship to it by relating the story of Niels Bohr and his good-luck horseshoe: 'of course I don't believe in it, but I'm told it works, even if you don't believe in it...'