Daily Archives: November 20, 2008

Myers Briggs types & frequencies

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The multiple silly personality tests build on the Myers-Briggs test, which is copyright. The Myers-Briggs foundation kindly has this data on it’s website.

Now the foundation includes this comment:

“Ethical use also means an honest presentation of the MBTI practitioner’s training and expertise, of research results, and of authorship and ownership of the MBTI assessment tool and other materials.

Ethical guidelines are also meant to prevent the abuse of type. Abuse includes using type to assess people’s abilities and using type to pressure people toward certain behaviors”

It’s clear that the computer tests do not adhere (well most of them don’t) to acknowledging who owns the ideas. The second paragraph is more important. You should not ask or pressure people on the basis of these tests…

  1. The web versions are not a proper MBTI. They cannot be, for copyright reasons. They therefore have not been validated or had their psychometric properties measured.
  2. The MBTI may not be valid. This is not a criticism of Myers or Briggs: in the same way, the DSM-IV (current diagnostic system) is probably not valid. We do not the knowledge to get beyond description to validity.
  3. I’m uncertain as to if there is “healthy” personality. I’m more comfortable talking about distress, resilience and adjustment.

The web tests are for fun only… and as the foundation say, the temptatinon to use in any other way should be avoided

Silly tests; typealyzer

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You can check your personality by your blog. The analysis indicates that the author of http://pukeko.net.nz/blog is of the type:

INTP – The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

Whale oil put the standard through this and came  up with the same result. Since most psychometricians say the INTP group is fairly rare and I test (see previous silly tests) as INTJ most of the time, this is just fun.
Looking at local right wingers…
Whale oil   ESTP  “The doers”
Kiwiblog ESTJ “The guardians”
The prickly expatriate ISTP “the mechanics”.
Now if the aforementioned want to ping those on their link lists, they will find (cam, please take note) that personality types are scattered from the right wing to the left… but to be fair, let’s avoid multi-authoured sites.