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.

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.