Curious to know the opinions of any psych professionals here in the subreddit
Yeah. True psychologists laugh at this.
It's not intellectual to dismiss it as "pop psychology" just because you're too lazy to read Jung.
Jung's functions are not scientifically validated. Hence, neither is MBTI.
No one disputing that, Sherlock. It's the bandwagoning to hate MBTI as "pop psychology" without actually understanding its Jungian framework first which is not a sign of intelligence either. Read that again slowly.
Who says I'm hating it?
MBTI is not Jung though
EXACTLY
yes it is
You're not wrong. But psychology itself is not a science. To be a science, it'd need to be falsifiable. Something that is objectively provable. And you can't do that with psychology. Because I have no way of verifying any of my conclusions, because I can't see inside your head. I'll always be relying on you to interpret what's in there for me. If this happened in any other science, it would be rejected by peer review since it could not be independently replicated.
To be clear, I do think psychology is a real thing, and that it is useful. But it's not actual science.
this is a laughable understanding of psychology. psychology is a pre-science —- there are absolutely ways to disprove or prove certain theories e.g., think academia & stuff like meta analysis.
“looking inside your head” is called inference and is a centuries old, outdated method of studying psychology.
the only reason why its not a science is because there is too much disparity in the methods as research and different treatments. there will be psychologists who will be looking at it through a cognitive perspective, others through social learning, biological (e.g., neurotransmitters), freudian, humanistic etc etc.
there are also many factors to account for, thus its difficult to come to conclusions about the full influence of factors (think the nature versus nurture debate).
the only reason why its not a science is because there is too much disparity in the methods as research and different treatments.
So you concur that it's not a science.
There is plenty of science within psychology. Big Five is scientifically validated, and Big Five traits have been consistently linked to all sorts of things. There's nothing unscientific about it: there's a set of traits, which are observable and measurable using a standardized metric, and these traits have reliably been found to correlate with certain outcomes. Not to mention clinical psychology has a strong scientific foundation.
MBTI is not scientific because, as of yet, there's no testing instrument for it that meets scientific standards. Given that the underlying theory is unfalsifiable and anyone who takes MBTI/Jungian typology seriously will tell you traits explicitly do not determine type, it's likely there never will be.
There is plenty of science within psychology.
Being systematic and using big words is not enough to make something science IMO.
Big Five is scientifically validated
"Validated" is not the same thing as "proven". In the same way that correlation is not causation. Like typology, it is just codifying observable patterns. But the data used for those patterns is based on subjective determination. It's not objective. Not everyone agrees on it.
Contrast with the speed of light, which can be objectively measured and tested. Everyone's results will agree, because it is not relying on human interpretation.
It is still useful. It's still real. But it's not science.
Being systematic and using big words is not enough to make something science IMO.
The Science Council defines science as follows:
Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.
They then give a list of what scientific methodology includes:
Objective observation: Measurement and data (possibly although not necessarily using mathematics as a tool)
Evidence
Experiment and/or observation as benchmarks for testing hypotheses
Induction: reasoning to establish general rules or conclusions drawn from facts or examples
Repetition
Critical analysis
Verification and testing: critical exposure to scrutiny, peer review and assessment
Any reputable psychological research includes all these things.
I mean obviously some aspects are.... cognitive psychology (the study of the mechanisms of the mind as they relate to perception and biology) is a science. Evolutionary psychology (the study of evolved psychological traits as they relate to evolutionary biology and cultural development) is a science. Neuropsychology (psychology as it relates to and arises from the structures of the brain and nervous system) is a science.
The only reason people say psychology isn't a science is because, being that it relates to Humans and society, it has applications that are subjective. Counseling and clinical psychology isn't a science. Therapy isn't a science. Marketing psychology isn't a science.
But to say that all of Psychology (the entirety of the study of anything relating to mental states, perception, behavior, etc) isn't a science, is completely misinformed and ignorant.
And this is coming from a dude who works in an electrochemistry lab and is currently a student in the fields of both applied psychology and biology. I'm not like a clinical psych major who is offended that someone disrespected my field haha. But I'd highly advise you to look into the more technical interdisciplinary fields of psychology
It is. But thats fine, not everything has to be academic to be helpful
This. Absolutely.
Exactly. And MBTI has helped me in so many areas as well as science.
It’s pop psychology, but it’s still very fun/interesting to indulge in it. Plus I relate a lot to one specific personality type, so it helps me a lot more than it would for someone stuck between multiple types.
They say that because it is.
AsuraPsych is the only typologist I know with a real foot in the world of psychotherapy, though his is still a graduate student, rather than a practicing psychotherapist.
Also Harry over on “Cognitive Personality Theory.”
But yeah, these are the only two that I know of who are a grad student and a masters student. I also find it amusing that they are an INTJ and an INFJ considering that Jung himself was most likely an IN(T) / INFJ. Both are good channels. They are some of the extremely few I consider to be “reliable YouTube sources.”
There’s also Dr Dario Nardi. He’s the only one who has attempted to do more empirical testing about MBTI / cognitive functions and psychological types.
Point is, there just aren’t a lot of good and trustworthy sources for this stuff besides Jung’s own incredibly dense books, and even those are mostly qualitative and anecdotal.
That’s cuz technically it is (pop psychology,) and even I can tell you that as a lowly and inconsistent student of behavioral science.
There are just too many things that MBTI cannot account for, (stuff related to genes, background, upbringing, and a million other factors that are far more important factors in forming “an individual’s personality,”) and neither Isabel Meyers nor her mother were actual psychologists.
There are a few interested YouTubers who are at least grad and masters students of psychology, and one anthropologist, Dr Dario Nardi, with a particular interest interest in “psychological types.” He has done some preliminary testing, but this is all still very far away from making it “credible and legitimate.”
It’s fun, and it can be helpful if you learn it well enough! But it’s definitely not “proven.”
you know that saying "it takes a village..."? i trust that more than mbti when it comes to people's personalities, though mbti is fun, cultural background and environment is still a huge factor that shapes a person. also our personalities literally tweaks a bit everytime when we're with different kinds of people in different situations. you might be mistyping this person as bubbly extrovert hanging out with friends when they're actually much more introverted back home. sometimes you will never know some people's true selves.
Exactly.
Exactly! There is overwhelmingly way too much evidence in support of these other factors we have just mentioned! (Genes, Sociocultural Background, Socioeconomic status, upbringing, education, and etc……….)
MBTI is cool and if you look at it from a more Neurocognitive perspective it can add some interesting insights. But on its own, it’s definitely “pop psychology.”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26554264
Meta-analysis (albeit of only 3 studies that met their criteria out of 221 possible) that shows it has positive reliability. In other studies, astrology is found to have little to no reliability by comparison.
It appears the reputation that MBTI is pseudoscience has prevented it from getting much research because it is automatically just assumed to be pseudoscience from the get go. From what I have read, the MBTI is more reliable for those who land on the extremes of the factors.
What’s funny is Costa and Mccrae (the creators of the preferred Big Five) wrote a paper on how to translate MBTI research to Big Five because they recognized the value of prior research that had been done with MBTI and the reliability of the instrument itself (though disagreeing with the theoretical basis for it and the lack of a spectrum for each letter).
Right. It assumes everyone is one thing or the other, lots of people are in the middle.
If you treat it as a dichotomized big five minus neuroticism it ain’t half bad. And it deals with combinations of traits, which big five rarely does.
It is, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.
The only thing psychologists are taught about the MBTI is that it is inferior to the Big Five and was not created by professional psychologists (though given the Freudian misconceptions of psychology in the 1910s, this was probably a good thing for MBTI). The fact that its results overlap so much with the Big Five show that it managed, at worst, to be an extremely prescient attempt to measure personality that was later partially validated by the Big Five itself. The Big Five’s creators were much more restrained in their criticism of the MBTI—they recognized it had value and reliability but thought it was inferior to their own model.
Psychologists dismissing the MBTI and their confusion over its enduring popularity (compared with the lack of interest in similar Big Five-based personality tests) reminds me of the old Applejacks commercials where confused parents ask why kids like the cereal even though it doesn’t taste like apples. They’re incorrectly assuming that the things that are valuable to them in a personality test (being predictive of behavior, ability to identify outliers of pathological significance outside of the normal baseline of behavior, ability to externally verify measures in a research setting, etc.) are the same things the lay public values in a personality test. The Big Five measures external behavior—most people cluster near the center of each trait because the expectations for behavior are the same for everyone, those who fall outside of that cluster potentially have something that needs to be treated. Big Five was derived from lexical analysis—collecting the words describing personality in language and distilling them into a few big categories—so it strongly skews towards outward signs of personality that could be recognized and described by people (behavior). As a result, the Big Five tends to tell people things about themselves and others that are obvious—someone who reports being extremely messy and frequently late for work is told they have “low conscientiousness,” but this was already very apparent to the person and their coworkers. In order to attract and keep users, Big Five based tests have to try to create MBTI-style insights about personality to be relevant (16p is the most egregious of these).
By contrast, MBTI is designed to measure cognition that’s upstream of behavior. If Big Five measures how you act, MBTI measures how you think (primarily through your information gathering and decision making preferences). This is what’s really interesting to the average lay person (it helps explain why you are interested in certain things, think differently than others, and how you get along with different personalities), but it’s difficult to independently verify and of limited value to the psychologist. Jung arrived at the underlying ideas after lengthy psychoanalysis sessions with patients to understand their internal motivations and cognitive processes, which revealed differences in thinking not easily observed by external behavior.
So lots of people will concede that MBTI isn’t scientific (or call it meaningless, astrology, pseudoscience, etc.) but then say they still find it valuable. They’re basically acknowledging that, despite the bad press in recent years, it seems to be accurate to their own experience and gives insights that are valuable in a way that more well regarded tests can’t.
Oh noez, life is not science!!1! The humanity!
Anyway, my life is better since I figured out that an INTJ shouldn't treat an ESFJ like they're an INTJ.
Love your slight sarcasm+big picture approach. 👍🏻 I agree. It may be pop psy but it's helped me a lot to know myself better and understand people around me--family members, exes who I thought were total axxhxxxx, colleagues who I thought lazy and incompetent, etc.
TY
Small families and public education made us into idiots psychologically -- we are supposed to spend our childhood and youth exposed to sane, productive adults of all types, but we're artificially kept around idiots our own age and encouraged to behave as if we're all extroverted sensing judging types.
And then we have no idea how to approach a potential partner and we're actually full of garbage _pop_ psychology ("all women are X/hypergamous/greedy/divorce rapists" etc). Of course nobody has an interest in teaching us a halfway functional system that we can try in real life.
I'm grateful for all the stuff I am learning here. <3
lol, exactly my point!!
Well yea.., it doesn't mean any bad. I mean after you realize the existence of INFPs, you have to be a total idiot to invalidate MBTI.
LMAO
it is, I like it but ppl are not lying when they say it's zodiac 2
ayo keep in mind that western astrology is not the same as the very complex ancient practice that has existed in the east for centuries
I agree and I don't like it either, but I have an unhealthy addiction to it like it's crack or something.
But I will say that if it's okay for psychologists to group people together based on reported symptoms (pathology), then surely it's not completely wild to group people together based on reported personality traits.
it’s so addictive forreal i’m so brainwashed i type everybody i meet compulsively 😭😭
Too real. I just want it to stop so I can free up my mind for more important and constructive things, like saving the world!
Jungian Functions are basically Chakras, that Hindu Yoga practitioners have known since yhousands of years
1)Ni is third eye 2)Ne is throat chakra 3)Fe is hear chakra,,,,, Te is a reflective chakra 4) Se is Solar Plexus 5)Fi is Sacral chakra,,,,, Ti is the Reflective chakra 6)Si us Root chakra
Freudians lineage just hate the Jungian lineage, this is solid Propoganda, Don't take opinions of FREUDIAN psychologist on Jungian Psychologists
i suspect that your therapist means mbti, which is popularized by 16personalities. not everyone, even experts, is aware that mbti is deeper than simple dichotomies. but still this is essentially pop psychology. although, imo, mbti has great potential
K, but it’s fun though
Your therapist is right lol
They are right; MBTI is not accepted by modern science. The only typology accepted by science is a Big 5.
I have read research about it in the past, and the consensus was clear; the functions make sense, but the tests are not reliable, and they don't show valuable results.
Not a professional. Your therapist is right.
At the end of the day, all of this is bunk chickenshit, little better than astrology.
They’re not wrong, but that doesn’t mean it’s without value
As long as it wasn’t said in a negative context. All people have against MBTI really is that the tests are trash but once accurately typed it’s completely valid to a deep extent.
And I say psychiatry isn't a real science.
It is. It’s not scientifically backed or validated. There are some consistencies but it’s basically one or two steps above astrology in terms of being accurate. It’s just fun
I wouldn't say it's only one or two steps above astrology. It's based on the ways we percieve everything around us. It's very much simplified since you can't describe every single way of thinking and feeling with 16 categories. Astrology, on the other hand, is making connection where there's none (between stars and personality traits) and is just making random guesses. While neither is science, they have nothing in common either. I could never understand why people often make comparison between the two.
Yeah people like to say that, but provide zero explanation of their reasoning. At the very least, introversion/extroversion is real; some get drained by socializing others get energized. That alone is enough to put it above astrology in terms of it being more/less valid. Granted it is self-reporting but a lot of psychology in general is. how can we prove one’s inner, subjective experience?
To be clear, I did write in my comment that it is definitely above astrology in terms of accuracy/reliability. Just not by a lot, because it is not a peer-reviewed science nor should it be treated as such. You’re right that introversion/extroversion is real. Those traits are part of the Big 5 personality test, which is a scientifically backed and validated test with a large amount of peer-reviewed research to back it up.
Obviously I’m as into MBTI as anyone else here, but treating it like an exact science would be inaccurate bordering on irresponsible.
Your therapist probably doesn’t understand the history and theory, model, and methodology behind the MBTI. Which would make sense why they call it pop psychology. Psychology is the study of the soul. If you want a hard science psychology isn’t it. Neuroscience or neurobiology is your best bet. If you want a tool to gain new concepts to better understand how people operate MBTI is helpful as it gives you the keys to unlocking a lot of insights about preferences, emotions, and habits.
For more MBTI facts check this out. It’s best not to adopt the beliefs of those who haven’t done their homework. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/factoids-re-mbtir-instrument-16-types-dario-nardi/
I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Neuroscience is indeed a more "hard science" than psychology, especially social psychology.
Regardless, MBTI shows a very interesting diversity of personalities. It can help you understand, for example, why some people are more go-with-the-flow while others are hardcore planners... yet there's nothing wrong with either style. It helps you see that there are different ways to be, and they're all valid and can all healthy (and unhealthy). It fosters diversity and acceptance in that way.
It is, it definitely is used to lure the masses into something that gives people a label they can toss around as part of their identity. Psychology relies on scientifically validated tests. Most people are just taking an internet quiz and embracing the four letters that result rather than thinking about functions. The thing is that it's remained "pop" psychology for some time, maybe we need to develop standardized testing methods if people are that interested in it, validate those methods and the results.
Therapy is pop psychology.
Yes he is right. The predictive value, retake reliability and definitions of functions of MBTI are all pretty bad compared to other psychometric tests. If you really want something scientific and accurate you should take a big five assessment.
i’d consider casual 16p mbti pop psychology and i’d consider “proper” mbti a categorization system rather than any sort of psychology. it’s better used to describe people the same way you describe some people as “often overthinkers” and others as “usually spontaneous”.
Ironically enough psychology mfs are the worst people to even bring up MBTI to
Psychologic therapy is in most cases not scientifically proven to work. So the MBTI kinda finds in most psychological instruments and tools. I’ve studied psychology for fun and to my surprise most of the research backing treatments is just backed by questionnaires and such - the lowest quality data to use in science. As a beta with a masters degree quite funny to hear people say ‘I’m a therapist and I claim something that is not scientifically proven is useless while using most of my therapeutic tools that haven’t been proven scientifically anyway’. Cherry picking, right?
I had to learn not everything around psychology is possible to proof in a way a beta scientist would have to do.
Two tips for those in doubt & confusion:
Dario Nardi on MBTI using brain scans to measure the different mbti types:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MGfhQTbcqmA
Psychology Today on Myers Briggs:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/my-brothers-keeper/202002/in-defense-the-myers-briggs
Myers Briggs on validation:
https://www.myersbriggs.org/research-and-library/scientific-validity-reliability/?bhcp=1
your therapist is not correct
It’s because it can’t be chemically measured and the cognitive functions Jung theorized aren’t entirely black and white. I think that’s what makes it important tho honestly. Not everything in our brains is black and white and scientifically measurable, and reducing the human brain and condition to concrete “science” while ignoring the philosophical intersection so the mental health industry can keep you paying for their services and prescriptions seems silly to me. Typology shouldn’t be written off without a valid reason. Not everything can be explained with “official psychology.” There’s too much variability in the general population and too little knowledge about the things we cannot externally observe.
Therapist here. Though not scientifically validated, it's clear in dealing with people that everyone is operating with a different cognitive model and different functions, and these functions group themselves together. We can use a variety of models to understand them (MBTI, Enneagram, etc). The combinations aren't infinite
IMHO the biggest problem with it is people are unable to figure out their own type for many complicated reasons. I see this all the time so I sometimes will have my clients do the MBTI with the recognition that they are going to get it wrong. Laughably wrong. In fact they will frequently come up with their opposite type. It seems in part it's that people don't understand themselves and have a narrative about who they are that is just wrong. They misjudge where they fall in personality characteristics. They also often don't fully understand what some things look like.
MBTI is certainly very useful and real, but it cannot be as broad and effective as clinical psychology. Please do not deceive yourself by thinking it is psychology. Mbti is not pseudoscience but it is not real science either which may make it popular science
Very few of them have actually learned enough about it to understand how it works. They have the same surface-level understanding of it that most new people do.
If you had spent a small fortune getting a degree in psychology, how eager would you be to learn about a system that does not require a degree but still helps people in similar ways? They don't like it for the same reason writers and artists don't like Ai right now. There are fully educated psychologists that embrace typology. They are just a small minority.
Some tests have greater reliability and validity than others. The MBTI has issues with both R and V, and some clinicians love to sneer at it. It’s not a searchlight, it’s a wobbly flashlight. If you are OK with that (and I am), then make use of it. I have benefited from the instrument and I have seen others benefit from it.
it is perceived as "pop psychology" because of the community.
most people don't even bother to deep dive into this field and come mainly for the results and memes, which make the whole MBTI thing unserious, especially when every person thinks they know anything about that creates false content (such as memes and "educational" videos) based only on their opinion.
Naming it is like placing a value. I assume the Therapist is either an ENTP (Fi Trickster) that talks about trauma or the Therapist is an ENTJ projecting Fi. I think ENTP most likely. Based on your question, the optimistic character, I assume ENFP.
Who cares what a rapist thinks
Not a professional here, but it is. MBTI isn't scientifically validated.