Typing from Afar
A comment was made by “old school mbti’er” on my “Political Types” post that caused me some contemplation. I’ll take each part of the comment in turn and supply my thoughts in reply.
Reliance on the Instrument
IMO for someone who claims to work with type, you do a disservice to MBTI by trying to type people you do not know and who have not taken the instrument.
I agree wholeheartedly about the pitfalls of typing people “from afar” — I should have emphasized that more strongly when I first wrote this post. You’ll notice that I now include such a disclaimer: “As you read this article, please remember what is presented here are my views — my hypotheses. We cannot ‘type’ someone else, but we can observe patterns of behavior — and type is a pattern.”
To expand upon my last sentence, all we can ever do, as observers, is note behavior patterns and see what type characteristics they seem to align with. Such observation is always going to be subject to confounding factors, such as the expression of a “contextual self,” an “adapted self,” environmental influences, and observer error. Hence my insistence that such typing of others can, at best, only be a hypothesis.
The last part of the above quote, “…and who have not taken the instrument.” deserves some special attention. The MBTI, by itself, is not an accurate determinant of psychological type preference. The MBTI manual claims an accuracy no greater than 70%, meaning that at least one of the 4 letters may be wrong. Isabel Briggs Myers herself said that “no pen and paper test can determine your true type.”
It is for these reasons that the Association for Psychological Type and the Myers Briggs Foundation insist that the instrument never be used alone; that type professionals must always do live feedback with clients and allow them to determine their own type by self-selection. So the implication that people about whose type I speculate should first take the instrument is not supported by the developer of the MBTI, the publisher of the MBTI, the foundation that owns the MBTI, nor the professional body for MBTI practitioners. In fact, during the qualifying program I attended, I was told that if I could not type someone *without* using a pencil-and-paper test, then I shouldn’t be administering that test.
Reverse Engineering
In addition, working ‘backwards’ from someone’s political beliefs to their type is ridiculous, because it assumes type determines belief. What you have done makes MBTI equivalent to horoscoping people.
At no time do I reference “political beliefs” in support of my hypotheses — again, I was very careful to state “…these types of ethos do not accurately reflect the actual psychological types of the candidates themselves, and it is a mistake to type the candidates solely based on the flavor of their campaigns.” I don’t recall mentioning any “political beliefs” whatsoever, and my memory is that I assiduously avoided any such mention.
The MBTI is not the Model
I have worked with MBTI for 20 years (although I rarely use it now and have not kept up on the new marketing versions) and have known many people of similar type who have completely different political views.
Many people have “worked with the MBTI” for decades without ever delving into C.G. Jung’s Theory of Psychological Types – the background theory upon which it is based. Isabel Briggs Myers wanted her instrument to be used as a means of indicating which of Jung’s cognitive processes might be preferred. This is why she called it an “indicator.” Myers wrote, “The purpose of the MBTI is to make the theory of psychological types by C.G. Jung practical and useful.”
Jung himself said that his theory was about identifying processes, not people. In other words, I absolutely agree with the observation “…people of similar type … have completely different political views.” All of the cognitive processes are “content-free,” meaning they are simply ways our psyche gathers information and makes decisions — nothing more. The views, opinions, beliefs, and values held by individuals are not determined by the cognitive processes they prefer.
Multiple Models
When “typing from afar,” all one can do is make note of the cognitive processes that seem to be favored, and speculate on the whole type pattern that might manifest these preferences. Even then, all we can claim with any certainty is that the subject being observed is behaving like such-and-such a type — we cannot, in any conscience, say they are that type.
By cross-referencing other models of psychological type with Jung’s, it‘s possible to come up with a pretty good hypothesis as to someone’s best-fit type. Admittedly, of course, nothing beats getting a client into a live workshop, where true type preferences can be determined by virtue of interacting with others and self-selecting based on presentation, discussion, and experiential exercises.
In Conclusion
Typing from afar is merely a speculative pastime, and should never be taken seriously. At its worst, such activities can be used to apply bias and stereotype to public figures, leading to misunderstandings and making a mockery of the whole concept of psychological type.
On the other hand, by discussing our observations and linking them to hypotheses grounded in various models and using them to “mine” for richer information to base our type speculations on, this can serve as a starting point to neutrally share ideas with one another and improve our discernment and psychological type literacy. Furthermore, my wish is that by engaging in this as an intellectual exercise, people will see how useful type can be in their own lives when the models are applied properly.
Finally, “old school mbti’er,” I want to acknowledge your dedication to, and enthusiasm for type theory. I’m always gratified to engage with someone who brings the perspective of experience to such discussions.
For others reading this message, if you’re not already MBTI Certified, I’d encourage you to consider doing so, and visit the Myers Briggs Foundation to find out more.
I coach people to identify and develop their natural personality strengths in order to maximize their potential.
March 28th, 2009 at 7:58 am
This is a really interesting blog post. I personally don’t entirely agree that people should not be typed from afar. I’ve heard it said that people should always type themselves ultimately. Exactly why is possibly an interesting question that should be debated.
I am not MBTI certified (though I wouldn’t mind becoming so). I got really interested in personality typing a few years ago after reading Jung’s Psychological Types and then finding out about the MBTI model. There’s been some criticism around that MBTI is not valid because it have never been scientifically tested. This got me interested in whether or not the criticism is true so I have gotten interested in pulling the theory apart myself to find out how true or untrue it is. Jung, like Einstein, seemed to be pretty keen on not taking for granted he had any theory right (and I admire him for that) so I don’t think he would be objecting to people taking a real interest in his work and trying to determine the truth about it or not.
I set out originally to show how MBTI is untrue (basically because I really like it and I figured that was the best way to force myself to be impartial). So far however, I have found more evidence for it’s validity than anything much against it. I’ve started to formulate my own way of recognizing the different functions in other people and what order they seem to prefer them in. My method has nothing to do with any written material I’ve seen elsewhere so it is a more independent. I’ve just been observing how people behave and realised that there certain patterns and similarities with different types. Interestingly I looked at that page you posted a link for about personalities having different aspects and it basically says what I had concluded for myself via a different route (i.e. personality at any point being a combination of genes + habits + the specific moment.)
I worked in market research for a number of years and that involves gathering demographic information about people. The thing I learned from this is that if you ask people a series of the same questions they always naturally begin to form into groups of similar behaviours and patterns emerge. So someone might complain to me that they could never be put in a category because they are completely individual but all I would need to do is look at a few of their answers off the survey to estimate how they may have answered the rest of it and could guess pretty accurately. I think this shows that people are more predictable than they like to believe. So here is an interesting thing. People who answered our surveys wouldn’t have been that good at putting themselves necessarily into any of the categories (or tags) that we had created, but we, as researchers who saw the survey results frequently didn’t have so much trouble.
So my point is that sometimes I think maybe people who type themselves (and there is a lot of that on the internet) without understanding MBTI theory can get their type completely wrong. A good example is when people say they are borderline INTJ/INTP assuming the J and P are a continuum when in fact the function order for those types are very different. It seems more logical to me that people who are “typing” people professionally in some way (whether MBTI or something else like research) are likely to have sometimes a better feel for what type someone actually is through repeated experience and that shouldn’t be discounted. Also, in typing people from afar I think it depends on your motivation how successful you are and what the implications are. In my case I am scientifically interested which means I am opposed to becoming biased as a result of typing people because that would not be impartial. I think if you are observing people in order to test out the typing theory there is a huge amount you can learn about both people and the validity of MBTI.
Anyway, I love your blog and I am going to keep reading it. I especially liked your INFJ vs INTJ video because I’m INTJ and I was laughing so much at your husband talking about organizing and planning everything because I am just the same! Hilarious.
July 1st, 2009 at 11:01 pm
I found Morgan’s comments as interesting as the blog itself. There’s so much that gets my ENFP-ness (so to speak) going in both.
I’ll just focus on one comment by Morgan: “So my point is that sometimes I think maybe people who type themselves (and there is a lot of that on the internet) without understanding MBTI theory can get their type completely wrong. A good example is when people say they are borderline INTJ/INTP assuming the J and P are a continuum when in fact the function order for those types are very different.” Given that the functional order differs between, say, INTJ and INTP (and no one told me a thing about this when I took the MBTI until I encountered The Personality Page online last year), that makes what one testgiver told me, and what I’ve heard others say who’ve taken the MBTI, a fallacy — doesn’t it? It may be hard for some who take the MBTI to decide between introversion and extraversion, but I wonder if that problem isn’t more due to the construction of the MBTI itself.
According to the MBTI versions, supposedly, I was a borderline introvert earlier in life, and grew more introverted with age, yet still INTJ. Wrong on both counts! When allowed to be who I really am at the core, I’m a wholehearted ENFP who’s had to take on INTJ roles (and who sometimes “flips” to INFJ under stress). In my case not one, but three letters were wrong. Not the MBTI’s fault, really, but it shows how severely one’s “core type” can be distorted beyond recognition and how the MBTI can miss it when taken without the kind of feedback people like Vicky Jo give.