(Disclaimer - this is a really long facebook post I once made during an arguement and it is kind of a work in progress right now. I just want to get some of the ideas out there. This is basically a summary of my objections to the Big 5 and an alternative Dynamic Systems Theory model)
This is an article I reference just to show an example of the common criticisms of MBTI
Ok - Here is what I
think. First, from what I understand all
the studies that have been used to check the validity of Meyers Briggs do not
use the theory correctly. As JT Cove
points out the author of this article does not use the theory even remotely correctly. All the Academic discussions I have seen on
this do the same thing. They ignore the
role of cognitive functions and instead use the simplistic idea that MBTI
models personality as what I can best describe as a Cartesian, 4-dimensional
“pseudo-binary” space. When you use this
line of thinking (which is incorrect) you guess that for E-I, S-N, F-T, and J-P
you should see bi-modal distributions in the data. This is not what I understand you see in the
data though. The data always comes out
unimodal with a mean in the middle. The
problem is though that the MBTI theory does not model personality in Cartesian
sense at all. The mathematical framework
that I currently think best matches Jungian theory is something more like a
Markov chain or a probabilistic graphical network, where the states in the
model are the cognitive functions. If
nothing else I think some kind of dynamic system model is much more appropriate
to model human personality. Actually one
of the main strengths of MBTI over the big 5 in my opinion is that it does take
into account that all people have thinking and feeling, etc, etc. They are just used in different preference
orders (sort of). The author in the
article totally misses this. Big 5 just
places people on a static point on a continuum.
To the best of my knowledge no psychologist in academia has ever tried
to fit any kind of dynamic system model to personality outside of perhaps some
work with infants. Dario Nardi at UCLA
has also mentioned dynamic systems models, but I can find no peer-reviewed
papers of his. If humans are better
modeled like dynamic systems I really do not know what the resulting
distributions in a Cartesian representation these types of models would give on
the questionnaires used to check the validity of psychological tests. Hard to say if it should come out bi-modal or
uni-modal. I could actually use some
hand-wavy central-limit theorem argument to explain the fact that the data does
keep coming out unimodal. Personality is
a pretty complicated and this hunch is not totally unreasonable but I really
have no idea. It would need to be
studied more deeply. This leads me to my
criticisms of big 5.
First, we need to take a step back and look at what big 5
actually is. Big 5 is really a data-driven,
static, 5 dimensional Cartesian model of human personality. From what I can tell psychology researchers
basically took a bunch of surveys and performed factor analysis on them and got
out 5 main factors and said that is a good way to model human personality. Now the fact that it is purely data driven
means there was never any theory really used to guide the investigation other
than perhaps the implicit idea that humans can be broken into independent factors. This means in some ways it is arguable whether or not it is even “scientific”
because there really is no hypothesis or model you are trying to test
against. It is more like a modified form
of an observation. This criticism is common
and I think the big 5 article on Wikipedia also mention it. My main question though is, why in the world
does anyone think a static, Cartesian model is a good way to capture human
personality? What about humans is
static? Why did they do this? I will give my theory. Basically psychology is often considered a
“soft” science and as a result I think the academic field sort of has an
"inferiority complex." In order to
maintain credibility they seem to try to tie everything to data as much as
possible. This is reasonable enough, but
I see at least one problem in the implementation. Psychology education appears to have chosen
statistical factor analysis as its weapon of choice for data analysis. They focus on using statistical factor
analysis for pretty much everything.
Problem is that in doing this they are making the assumption that
everything can be modeled in a static Cartesian space. This is kind of ridiculous. Many important phenomena are much better
described using other types of models.
Dynamic system models for instance (This is my current preference for
modeling humans). I am pretty sure
Psychology researchers do not have the same kind of mathematical maturity that
an engineer or computer-science researcher has.
My background was full of dynamic system models and techniques do exist
to fit data to them. I think psychology
is in a mode where they really like factor analysis and either are not aware of
other types of models, or they just do not want to bother with them. I feel like they are kind of caught in a case
of “When your only tool is a hammer the whole world becomes a bunch of nails.”
One quick mention on the tests. I do not think the current survey-based tests
are very good. They are not really
repeatable or reliable. I am currently
exploring the possibility of using different types of tests to measure
personality. I am wondering for instance
if tracking the kinds of moves people make in playing certain kinds of games
might provide a better measure. Fe might be measurable by looking at how much
vital signs in a person change when exposed to certain images. I am also curious if for instance S and N
people might remember details from scenes differently. This might be a measurable difference. I think better testing techniques need to be
developed before progress can be made.
I believe my thoughts
on this could actually be used to build much more life-like machines. I think many algorithms you see in computer
science map to cognitive functions. For
instance, search algorithms seem sort of like Ne. Design of experiment is like Se. Simulations are like Ni. Pattern recognition is like Si. POMDPs seem a lot like Te. Hierarchical deep learning and PCA are sort
of like aspects of Ti. Neural networks
seem somewhat similar to Fe (You can make fast decisions on complicated data
but you really do not know how you did it).
Fe is in some ways like using your own system as an analog computer to
calculate results about external events.
I think you could make a machine with current algorithms and arranging
their use according to some kind of dynamic system model such as a Markov
Chain. I have seen some cutting edge personality
engineering work for robotics, and in my opinion it is pretty crude. Engineering researchers are blindly adopting
big 5 as well, and I think it is to their detriment. Engineering is not constrained as science is
to concepts such as searching for “truth.”
It just has to work. I think I
can make a better human-like machine using MBTI theory. I am laying down theoretical framework for
this in my spare time.
At the end of the day MBTI is just a model like anything
else. The pertinent question is how
useful is it. I know however that a
person is going to have a hard time convincing me that there is no such
phenomena as the “INTJ” or “Fe.” I think
if nothing else Jung was really onto something.
May not be perfect but something is there worth taking a look at. A dynamics systems approach may be the paradigm shift the personality research field needs to advance.
