1. MBTI Week 3

2. Task  Form groups of 4-5 people  Share with your groupmates what you have found  Compare differences and similarities  Then we discuss as a class and evaluate the MBTI

3. What is it?  Based on Jung’s theory of personality  Four bipolar personality:  Extraversion-introversion  Sensing-intuition  Thinking-feeling  Judgmenet-perception

4. Features  Several versions, but the standard is the 126-item test  Translated into many languages  Unequivocally positive. – who wants to hear they are neurotic? Yet, we know some people are emotionally unstable. So why is that not in MBTI?  Currently popular for career guidance and personnel selection  Detailed scoring available  In US: $20 million a year (charges $15-40 per assessment)  $1700 to be a certified administrator  More than 10,000 companies, 2,500 colleges and universities and 200 government agencies in the United States use the test.  Extended to dating market  What is the market in India like?

5. Reasonable points  Person-job fit is important  But does the fit happen before or after taking on the job?  Do you love someone because of who he is, or who he will be?

6. Problems  Scale scores close to cutoff frequently lead to classification instability (sometimes you’re E, sometimes you’re I)  Poor incremental usage (vocational interest test is sounder, and the MBTI hardly adds much)  The assumption that a person can only be of one type is problematic  Situation influences behaviors  Why 16 types? Why 4 factors? Why not 5 or 3 factors?

7. Problems  Is ETSJ really different from ITSJ?  Statistical structure  If MBTI is a typology, the underlying statistical structure should be bimodal, not normally distributed.  Test-retest reliability is questionable  50% of the people who take the test twice (within a 5-week interval) end up with a different profile  Factor structure of raw data is unstable

8. Problems  No evidence of predictive validity (not surprising, see below)  Misused in personnel selection  16 combinations of types – but how many types of jobs are there? Within each job, how many functions does one do?  ESFP better salesperson than INTJ – but what do salespersons do? They don’t only just sell, they also need to strategize, do admin, follow-up on customers’ orders, etc.  So on what basis of a salesperson’s job scope does ESFP predict? There are more job scores than typologies!  Personality typologies are inherently problematic.