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Don't Waste Your Money on Myers-Briggs. And Maslow's Hierarcy of Needs is Untested

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator "personality" test is not worth the money it costs.

I could link to numerous articles on why Myers-Briggs is unscientific.  Here is one from Joseph Stromberg and Estelle Caswell on Vox.  The various criticisms make a few key points:

  1. There is very little scientific evidence (i.e., peer-reviewed blind studies) to support it.
  2. Karl Jung, on who's work the MBTI is based, acknowledged that his theories were not scientific
  3. It leads people to assume that our personality traits are binary -- you are either an Extrovert or an Introvert.
  4. It reduces complex human personality to four dimensions.  Take 10 minutes and I'll wager that you can come up with other dimensions. How about Carol Dwerk's work on the Fixed Mindset vs. the Learning Mindset?  What about Resilience?  Spiritual beliefs?
  5. It is self-reported.  Many people deceive themselves of what their behaviour is really like.
  6. I have personally taken the MBTI assessment multiple times and have come out with different results over the years (ok, not very different, but still)
Someone once called Myers-Briggs "astrology for people with college degrees."

I guess my real problem with MBTI is how seriously some people take it.  Shortly after you meet them, they tell you "I'm an ENTF" as if it sums them up (to me it sums up that they are naive).  Worse, many organisations use it in HR DECISIONS. 

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While we're at it, let's talk about "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs."  As with Myers-Briggs, it may provide some interesting insights, but, as Maslow himself (who was indeed a genius) acknowledged, it lacks proof -- he proposed it as a theory worthy of further examination.  Here's a useful critique. I worked with someone who had studied under Maslow, and they reiterated the point that almost no experiments had been conducted that validated it -- in fact, it's an interesting case of how difficult it is to construct an experiment that would prove that the Hierarchy of Needs is valid.  I was in a training session recently in which one of my fellow participants constantly referred to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.  I kept my mouth shut, until I found a quiet moment to encourage them to look into the critiques of the Hierarchy.  No disparagement of Maslow meant here, just the degree to which his theories have been misused by others.

One of Sherlock Holmes' greatest talents was to question the "obvious fact."  Make sure that the theories that you have adopted are well-proven.

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