In defense of the MBTI

If I wanted to determine the validity of the MBTI, what do you think would be the best way to go about it?

I would argue that most of what we experience inside our minds is either a thought, a feeling, a sensation or an intuition. And at certain times, your brain is taking in thoughts, feelings, sensations or intuitions so that would be an extroverted version, and at other times, your brain is giving out thoughts, feelings, sensations or intuitions so that would be an introverted thinking. Generally, a feeling is a conclusion, a thought is a hypothesis, a sensation is just interpreted sensory data and an intuition is a complex set of concepts.

Would you say there is anything that is either ambiguous between these categories or not included in the categories which is important for cognition? Of course, there are things like auditory processing and language processing and all the other areas of the brain that contribute but when I talk about cognition, I just mean like conscious cognition not things that happen outside of your awareness.

Ultimately, the best argument I can provide for the theory is not that I have strong empirical evidence but just that the model helps predict things about the world. It is just a thing that people do: thinking or feeling, and introverted or extroverted.

I would be interested to know your thoughts.

For that full discussion, you can see this market on Manifold. Basically, we came to the conclusion that they were real things with real meanings but people were unsure of the attributes' usefulness.

My point is that the Big Five tries to describe traits where the MBTI tries to describe cognition which is more complicated. I'm not saying that the MBTI is all correct, in fact most of it is pretty badly tested. I think the best approach is to take it one step at a time and test each observation. For example, I think listening to other people's thoughts and coming up with own thoughts are things that everybody does. It should stand to reason that some people prefer to do one and some people prefer to do the other, even if it is a fuzzy line. The same goes for the other MBTI traits in various ways. See also this comment to get an idea of my position.

I was thinking about it and I think that the characteristics themselves have validity but not as a sharp line. Like let's take for example one characteristic (J/P). According to them, Js act first to get things done faster expecting the details to iron themselves out while Ps first figure out what the best plan of attack is so they don't waste time doing things unproductively. I think you could test this through an experiment. What if you gave people a task to complete and then you saw how much time they spent planning and how much time they spent doing the task (maybe you could just measure the delay in starting the task from experiment start for consistency and easy data)? If you repeated this experiment across multiple different tasks and kinds of tasks (to confidence in that kind of task), you could classify people into J/P based on how much their delay is in starting tasks on average, and obviously there would be some people in between. And I think you could do the same for the other letters and you would get similar results though maybe you'd have to think of a more elaborate experiment. I'm not sure about aLboP's claim that everyone fits into one box or the other. Anyway, their claim that they could figure those things out based on someone's face intrigued me so that's why I decided to order their typing package. I am curious whether it is just total bs or not, but I think that at least the characteristics are real things with real definitions. I haven't through all the letters though so feel free to disagree with me.

I think you'd be hard pressed to disagree that these things could be measured empirically. As for other empirical evidence, there were studies that found that when people were using their dominant cognitive function, their EEG scans lit up more compared to other things.

My point is not that MBTI is the correct model, just that this science should be investigated further, while right now it is frequently ostracized as empirically inferior to the Big Five. I think both have their own uses. If we find another model that fits better, great! I'd be all for it.

Hi Caerulea, thanks for your good questions. I will try my best to answer your questions here.

Your opening paragraph explains neatly the three intentions you have for this text:

1. Why we should look beyond the Big Five for information on cognition.
2. Comment on why you stick to MBTI contrary to what people believe.
3. Describe the real reason, which is related to the reality of cognition.

What I am wondering reading the first paragraph is: Why did you choose to 'defend' MBTI this particular way? If you could explain this, I believe some interesting connections would surface. And also maybe give a written answer to why you chose the title. 

1. Why we should look beyond the Big Five for information on cognition.

I wrote this post in response to someone who said that the MBTI was inferior to the Big Five because it was less scientific. I just wanted to explain why we had to broaden our horizons a bit and have an honest look at the differences between the MBTI and the Big Five, and what we could expect to get out of both. I think that if the field of psychology would broaden their horizons a bit, we could make a lot of progress on the science of cognition. There an infinite number of different theories of cognition that could be proposed. I just think that by explaining some issues with the Big Five, I could encourage people to take a look at new theories. Just asking 200 questions of a human and finding correlations is pretty clearly not going to result in not going to result in the be all and end all of psychology. Maybe if you trained a neural network on the answers to those questions, looking at the weights might give us more insight, but just looking for simple correlations is clearly going to result in a very shallow understanding of the brain. More advanced aliens than us wouldn't be impressed if they saw that our understanding of cognition was limited to some researcher asking a bunch of random questions and finding a few factors that could predict how people would answer the questions to a limited degree.

2. Comment on why you stick to MBTI contrary to what people believe.

This point leads straight from point one which is that the Big Five really isn't that great. Given that, I am completely open to exploring any theory of cognition I come across. There could always be more theories to explore but the MBTI is by far the most promising theory I have come across. I find that if you can find multiple people of the same MBTI type, you can notice a lot of similarities. That seems to me like strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that it is a good model. If you want to try this experiment for yourself, you can go to CS Joseph's list here or you can try with A Little Bit of Personality's list here (scroll to the bottom of the article). They both have their own theories for subtypes as well to give a more comprehensive picture, CS Joseph has Octagram and A Little Bit of Personality has subtypes (you have to create a free account to view). So, when you combine that the Big Five isn't that good of a theory with the anecdotal evidence that the MBTI is better than the Big Five when you compare people with the same traits in both, it makes sense to conclude that the MBTI is the better theory.

3. Describe the real reason, which is related to the reality of cognition.

Here I explain that the real reason I believe the MBTI might be worth taking a look at is because if you open-mindedly explore what the brain does, the MBTI just at an obvious level seems much closer to describing what it does than the Big Five. While the Big Five will describe that the reason you decided to go to a new restaurant was because you were high in openness and low in neuroticism, the MBTI can describe you being told about the restaurant activating through your extraverted sensing and you assessing whether you would enjoy it through introverted sensing (looking at similar past situations) and introverted intuition (imagining the likely course of events that would play out if you decided to go there). That is by any account a much more in depth view of cognition than can be provided through the Big Five. This simple classification of cognitive functions seems to have quite a lot of validity in terms of how people actually think - I would not take that lightly.

What I am wondering reading the first paragraph is: Why did you choose to 'defend' MBTI this particular way? If you could explain this, I believe some interesting connections would surface.

First, I described the issue with the current model (the Big Five).

If you want to propose a new model, you have to first show where the current model is flawed.

Second, I described what anecdotal evidence I had to support my model (the MBTI).

If you want to propose people research something, you'll have better luck if you first show some anecdotal evidence to suggest your hypothesis is correct.

Third, I described why this matters (because understanding cognition is the holy grail of psychology).

If you want to propose people research something, you'll have better luck if you explain why the research matters in a broader sense. For this point, we could imagine how I could talk about the importance to managers in professional settings and to people's personal relationships to be able to understand their and others' cognition accurately.

And also maybe give a written answer to why you chose the title.

I believe the original title was something like "An Open-Minded Exploration of the Nature of Cognition" but I changed it to "In Defense of the MBTI" to more accurately represent the thesis of my post that the field of psychology should look into these MBTI-adjacent theories further. For that, I realized I needed to defend the MBTI especially given how bad the MBTI test itself is. Basically, I felt like a bunch of corner cutting by MBTI theorists had led people in the field of psychology to write it off entirely and that the MBTI needed to be defended so that it wasn't equated with the work of all these corner cutters (including the Myers-Briggs company itself) which are commonly associated with the MBTI.

The second feedback I have is with regard to the last paragraph. Where you urge more psychology research on the area, as well as inform us about sites relevant to the field of "MBTI-adjacent theories". Here I am wondering what the direct link between your title, your intention and writing this paragraph is.

Unfortuantely, I haven't yet seen a scientific exploration of all the things posited in these MBTI-adjacent theories but I think it is pretty clear that the field of psychology needs to start taking this seriously, looking into the nature of cognition, not just looking at what people answer to simple questions on tests because of the flaws of that method. There are a lot more to these theories than I have covered in this post. Some good resources to learn more about these theories are CS Joseph's YouTube channel and alittlebitofpersonality.com.

This last paragraph relates to my intention with writing this post which was as a call to action for these theories to be studied through experimental methods and to be developed further so we can develop models for describing cognition ever more accurately. Since I felt like the MBTI is a good starting point for understanding cognition, I thought that by defending the MBTI here on LessWrong, this would be studied further and psychology would be able to develop its understanding of the brain rapidly. I watched a video a while back on paradigms (sadly it seems it is gone) but it is where the paradigm shifts where science is able to make progress and people are consistently unwilling to change paradigm but that is where what I would call real science happens. I gave links to these MBTI-adjacent theories so people could take a look for themselves.

However, the overall feeling I get from reading your post, isn't that it is a post with a specific goal, using one particular method, but a post using several simultaneously. It is an expression of the direction of your own thoughts, beliefs and ideas; a meta-overview of your reasoning behind your support for an improvement of the MBTI. Moreover, it is like a meta-dialogue with imagined opponents in the Big Five vs MBTI debate. Thirdly, it is exploratory and open-ended with regard to cognition and MBTI. So it has a lot going on at the same time.
Which brings me to my next point, acknowledgment.

I tried my best to write the post without an agenda other than finding what cognition is really about, trying to see reality as it really is at the essence of science. I would say this is only secondary to another tennet of science which is broadening your horizons beyond what is already the consensus and being willing to look beyond the Overton window for things beyond what people think could possibly be true.

I could have said I think this theory is true and that one isn't, but really I have no idea. That's why I decided it was better to write this post to explain the direction I took in trying to understand cognition, and from there, others could benefit and hopefully me too. The MBTI vs Big Five debate was a reflection of my reasoning as to which one was a better starting point for understanding cognition.

Even though you could say your post needs sharpening and precision, the way I see it, it is more important to acknowledge it as an expression of your versatility in understanding and your ability to juggle different things simultaneously.

I would say my post could do with sharpening but it's not really within my ability set to be able to do that sharpening myself. I wrote the post mostly to provide information to others who are better at that so that they could study cognition further. I definitely juggled a lot in this post and I think it's important for science to move forward that we have people who can explore lots of different theories and see which ones make more sense, and also the people who study the theories more in depth to find the nitty gritty issues and can refine them all into a more comprehensive theory. (In the MBTI theory as I understand it, the first group would be the Te users and the second group would be the Ti users.) Both are necessary for science to move forward.

You have already discovered things I wasn't aware of, and I believe that if you continue, your contribution will undoubtedly be even more substantial.

I think a lot of that is just having a commitment to trying to see things as they really are. As I mentioned in another comment, I had the affirmation: "I do not limit my horizons". This was vital and I believe the attitude to explore things instead of limiting where you will explore is vital. Anyway, thank you for you comment as it gives me the inspiration to continue working on this and myself in general in terms of keeping a horizon-not-limiting attitude.

I also believe that many of your paragraphs are seeds that can sprout into interesting texts, if given the attention.

If you have any ideas, let me know.

And finally, some of my thoughts:
"CS Joseph theorizes that the cognitive functions are something like 100 rpm - 75 rpm - 50 rpm - 25 rpm - 20 rpm - 15 rpm - 10 rpm - 5 rpm"

I looked at the video, and this is a continuation of the original thoughts of Jung, as far as I know. From 'Hero' through 'Demon'  
 https://www.careerplanner.com/8CognitiveFunctions/Cognitive-Functions-Simply-Explained.cfm (I'm not familiar with this site, or endorse it, it just had a nice overview to show all the personality types as well as all their functions.)

In my own experience, when I experiment with developing functions directly, I can affirm both Jung- and Joseph's claims to a certain degree. There is an underlying dynamic between all the functions, and they are not operating at the same speed. And I also agree with CS Joseph in that these limitations aren't necessarily bad, they open up for human relationships and collaboration, to complement each other.

Yeah, CS Joseph extends the original theories of Jung as well as those of others who were expanding on Jung's theories. It is definitely an interesting question if you could, let's say, get 35 rpm of each function or you could get this spiral pattern of 100 rpm all the way down to 5 rpm, which would be better? Of course, I'm not really sure if that would be possible because of economies of scale within a cognitive function in the brain, but if that is a good model, it is rather interesting that evolution chose that over having 35 rpm of each, and I can definitely see the advantage, especially when you consider that humans are social animals so they can complement each other.

I could say more, but to keep it withing the bounds of your text, I'll stop here.

Don't limit your horizons or mine for that matter.

I hope this comment is useful to you in some way, and welcome you, as a senior newbie, to the site. :)

I appreciate that you took the effort to write it and it definitely gives me more inspiration to work on this. As I said, if you have ideas for elaborations on this, let me know.

Kindly, one Z followed by five more

This framing isn't meaningful, nor useful.  All 3 of those are ambiguous.

The point of any of this is to better predict human behavior, and better describe variation in behavior between people.  That's the value pitch that society might plausibly get, from taxonomizing personality tendencies.  These should be updated based on actual data, and whatever makes them more predictive.  Not just speculation.

So for example, when HEXACO began distinguishing Honesty-Humility from Agreeableness, that wasn't done because someone speculated that they thought a 6th trait made sense to them.  Including more languages in the lexical studies resulted in a 6th factor emerging from the factor analysis.  So it's a more representative depiction of the clusterings, than Big Five.

Also, e.g. H-H is more predictive of workplace deviance than the old Big Five Agreeableness trait was.  That's an example of why anyone might plausibly care about adding that 6th category.  Differentiating Disagreeableness from Dark Triad might plausibly be useful, and anyone who thinks that's useful can now use HEXACO.  Progress.

Your suggestion that we can use MBTI to "improve" Big Five is funny to people familiar with the literature.  Sticking to MBTI is going WAY back to something much more crude, and much less supported by data.  It's like saying you're going to improve 21st century agriculture with an ox and a plow.

Similarly, your proposed change to Big Five is highly unlikely to improve it.  E.g.:

So, for example, for our question about whether people naturally think in terms of what other people think about something or think in terms of how they think about things, we would have that be the extroverted thinking vs the introverted thinking cognitive function (or Te/Ti for short).

You have little reason to think this is even a good description of personality clustering.  But the behaviors are probably captured by some parts of Extroversion and Agreeableness.

I think you should just go learn about the modern personality psychology field, it's not helpful to spend time pitching improvements if you're using a framework that's 80 years behind.  We talked about this on Manifold and I think you're kind of spinning in circles, you don't need to do this -- just go learn the superior stuff and don't look back.