On today's episode of Let's Ruin Something You Thought Was Fun and Interesting, we examine the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI. Doubtless you've seen these four-letter acronyms flying around, and perhaps you've even taken a version of the test to find out all about yourself. Is it really, useful, though? For anything? Well, yes and no. Mostly no.
The MBTI was developed by a mother-daughter team, Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, over several decades in the early twentieth century. It was originally the brainchild of Katherine Briggs, who was inspired to build on and refine the "psychological types" theory of famous psychologist Carl Jung. The pair's tireless efforts culminated in the introduction of a formal version of the MBTI test in 1962.
The method behind the four-letter type indicators is largely an extension of Jung's theory of introversion vs. extroversion and how that distinction manifests itself in personality preferences. It splits an individual's personality into four dichotomies: Introvert-Extrovert, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling, and Judging-Perceiving. The theory supposes that everyone displays a dominant preference in each dichotomy, indicated by one's corresponding four-letter score: ENTJ, ISFP, ESTP, et cetera.
The MBTI has enjoyed uninterrupted success and popularity for decades, mostly because it's a fun test to take, and people love being able to label themselves as something. (Buzzfeed is subsisting almost entirely on this idea.) We humans insist on forcing discontinuity onto our categorically continuous reality, so the idea that every individual can be classified as one of 16 personality types is fantastically appealing. Modern versions of the test even have a heroic-sounding label for each type, like "The Showman" (ESFP) and "The Confidant" (INFJ). (Click here to see which superhero you are!) One wonders how popular the test would be if it labeled people by their stereotypical negative character traits instead, like "The Insufferable Elitist" (INTJ) and "The Oblivious Materialist" (ESTP). Actually, has anybody done that? Let's do that.
Not so excited to add "ENTJ" to your dating profile anymore, are you?
As fun as the MBTI is, there are serious and numerous problems with it. The two women who developed it, for all their enthusiasm and tireless effort, were not psychologists. Neither of them had any formal training in psychology or in any science whatsoever, so the development of the test was patently unscientific. Even though the test has been administered for decades, many psychologists continually question the validity of the MBTI, and for good reasons.
First of all, the test relies on the honest input of the test-taker. Anyone not answering the questions honestly for whatever reason will obtain an "inaccurate" result. Secondly, there's no way to argue with anyone's result, because the test is unfalsifiable. It's impossible to demonstrate that someone isn't an ENFP, for example. Anyone who takes the test is free to agree or disagree with the result, and nobody could possibly argue.
Another reason that experts openly question the validity of the test is its alarmingly high rate of test-retest unreliability. People who take the test and then take it again several weeks later have a significant chance of getting a different score. This is because the test relies heavily on arbitrarily-defined dichotomies, pushing people to one side of the spectrum or another, when most of us are somewhere in the middle. Someone who displays an even mix of introversion and extroversion in different situations is likely to receive different results on retests. For example, two individuals who have nearly identical personalities could receive polar opposite MBTI scores if each one skews just slightly to the ETSJ (totally extroverted) or INFP (totally introverted) side of the line, indicating falsely that these people couldn't be more different.
This is the problem with a test predicated on dichotomies in general: there is no such thing as an introvert or an extrovert. Statistical models of all four indicators consistently demonstrate that the general population fits a bell curve between the two extremes, not a bi-modal (the opposite of a bell curve) distribution. Only a small percentage of people are mainly extroverted or mainly introverted; the majority of people fall in between somewhere, and the MBTI is blind to this reality. Nobody is an INTJ, or an ENFP, or an ISTP. These people do not exist. Every individual is a different mix of EI, SN, TF, JP, and nearly nobody skews heavily to one side of each of those.
There is also no significant data showing that these MBTI scores correlate with vocational performance. The official exam even openly states that the test only measures preferences, not aptitude, so even though one personality type might prefer a certain vocation, there is no guarantee of success or competence in practice. (This is probably why the official test also explicitly states that the MBTI should not be used to screen job applicants.) There is also no significant correlation between MBTI and industry: every vocational field has a more-or-less random sampling of MBTI types. Most actors are not ESTPs, for example, nor are most CEOs ENTJs.
So, what does your MBTI say about you? Well, certainly nothing that you didn't already know about yourself. The test really only needs to be four questions long:
Are you more extroverted or introverted? (I/E)
Do you primarily gather information via your senses or your intuition? (S/N)
Do you make decisions more by thinking or feeling? (T/F)
Which is more important to you, #2 above or #3? (P/J)
If you find some or all of these questions difficult to answer definitively, congratulations! You're a normal person who can't be easily classified by the MBTI. If you have a clear preference in each, then you can easily identify your "type," and most likely so can anybody who's known you for longer than 10 minutes.
The only thing that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator result shows definitively is... that you've taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. Any conclusions drawn beyond that should be taken with a football stadium full of salt.
For all the virtues of social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, one unfortunate drawback is that we're all now painfully aware of how bafflingly ignorant and stupid the opinions of most of our friends are. We've all got that one friend who can't seem to shut up about how GMOs are evil, or President Obama is a Muslim/Socialist/Kenyan, or global warming is a myth, or 9/11 was organized and carried out by the Bush Administration, or vaccinations cause more harm than good, or whatever the hot-button issues du jour happen to be.
Now more than ever, everyone could use a healthy dose of skepticism in order to filter out the bullshit that bombards us incessantly. First, a few words about skepticism - what it is, why it's useful, and how it can improve critical thinking skills.
As many words that end in ism, skepticism comes from Greek. The verbσκέπτομαι means to look at or consider carefully, and inspired an ancient philosophical school of thinkers who called themselves "skeptics." In the modern sense, skepticism simply means questioning assertions and withholding judgment until evidence is considered. When should you be skeptical? Well, certainly in some situations more than others. If your friend Bob calls you and says "apples are 50 cents off per pound at the grocery store this week," you probably needn't seek out confirmation of this from other sources. If, on the other hand, Bob calls and says "there's a magical tree giving away apples in front of the grocery store," some skepticism is reasonably warranted. The amount of skepticism shown towards a claim should be inversely proportional to how likely the claim is to be true, based on your knowledge and experience. The less believable a claim seems to be, the more you should be skeptical about it. So, how can you form well-reasoned, well-informed opinions that don't suck? By following these rules: 1.Be a sieve, not a bucket. Or, as the saying goes, be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brain falls out. Be open to new ideas, but not universally accepting of them. Keep your bullshit detector switched on at all times. 2. Be willing to be wrong. Good skeptics should be open to new information, even if it contradicts long-held beliefs. I cannot stress this enough: if you're unwilling to consider that you're wrong about something, you have no hope of discovering the truth. "When an honest man is mistaken, he either ceases to be mistaken, or he ceases to be honest." 3. Be aware of common pitfalls of reasoning, and know your logical fallacies so you can spot them. Our brains aren't actually wired perfectly for critical thinking; we have an overactive tendency to find patterns, and we are frequent victims of our own confirmation bias.
4. Don't fight above your weight class. Admit when you simply don't know enough about an issue to have a strong opinion about it. Not everyone can be an expert on everything, and if you don't know, just say so.
5. Question the sources. Not all information is created equal. Not all scientific studies are equally valid. Just because something is published or reported doesn't mean that it's accurate. Some scientific journals have better reputations than others. It can be extremely difficult to wade through scientific studies and decide what is credible and what is questionable, but it's an exercise well worth the effort.
With these things in mind, let's take a look at some typical areas of discussion in which people frequently have poorly-reasoned, irrational, or ignorant opinions.
Issues Involving Complicated Science
See point number 4 above. There are some things in this world which are simply best left to the experts to debate, so if you're not an expert, be aware of your limitations in understanding. A perfect example of this is climate change. Unless you're a climate scientist, I'm not interested in your opinion on the issue, because you have nothing of value to contribute to the discussion. If you disagree with the majority of climate scientists, and you're not a climate scientist, chances are good that you have a biased or uninformed opinion on the matter. Chances are not good that you have somehow understood something that thousands of experts have not. Highly Polarizing Issues
Some issues tend to polarize opinions heavily, with few people remaining neutral. In situations like these, especially if the issue is a complicated one, polarized opinions are generally based on one-sided information and confirmation bias. A perfect example of such an issue is the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as "Obamacare." Opinions on this piece of legislation tend to be polarized along political party lines, and several polls have shown that the general public (the same people who are eager to tell you how much they love or hate the law) has absolutely no idea what it says or does. (See The Onion for a sadly accurate portrayal) This is because the act is 906 pages long, and so the public is at the mercy of news outlets to paraphrase and interpret it. As with most complicated issues, the truth lies somewhere in the middle of the two extremes.
Issues About Food And Medicine
Issues that have a possible direct effect on our personal health are treacherous because they evoke an emotional response. Our hearts are for circulating blood, not for thinking, and an issue that stirs up emotions might also obfuscate our critical thinking faculties. A perfect example of this is GMO food and the lightning rod Monsanto Corporation. People are susceptible to one-sided or blatantly false information about GM technology or about companies like Monsanto because the stakes are so high - our well-being could be negatively affected. In fact, this has become such an oft-cited bad argument that the fallacy has taken the name argumentum ad Monsantum. Basically the failure in logic here is associating an evil corporation with an evil product. It does not follow that GMO food is bad simply because you think Monsanto is bad. It may still turn out to be true that GMO food is bad, but bias-free evidence must be put forward to prove it. In cases like this, the only rational course of action is to follow the science and the findings of regulatory organizations. See point number 5 above.
The anti-vaccination movement is similarly misled by emotion, especially because the issue frequently gravitates towards the health of children. On this issue, see point 5 above and the section below on opposing scientific consensus.
Conspiracy Theories
There's a reason that you never hear of a conspiracy theory actually being validated and becoming the new mainstream explanation for an event. Conspiracy theories are the product of a comprehensive failure of reasoning, a worst-case-scenario of irresponsible cognition. The most salient example of this sort of nonsense at present is the 9/11 Truth movement, proponents of which claim that the terrorist attacks were orchestrated by the government, and that basically every finding of the official investigation is wrong. To give an extremely abbreviated list of what's wrong with these sorts of arguments: people who think this way are obviously tainted by strong biases, are unwilling to evaluate evidence fairly, assume the conclusion of their argument and insert it as a premise, and live in a highly-protected echo chamber in which they only communicate with other people who agree with them. Conspiracy theories aren't actually theories at all; a theory is a set of testable propositions which can be used to explain certain phenomena. Conspiracy theories don't explain anything - they simply point out what they deem to be unanswered questions in the accepted theory and then wildly posit alternatives based on no evidence. This is a perfect example of what happens when your bullshit filter fails, and your brain falls out of your excessively-open mind.
Contrary to Consensus
While it's fun to be a contrarian, there are risks when standing on the wrong side of the majority. It depends who that majority is, however; an appeal to majority opinion to support an argument is a logical fallacy (ad populum), while an appeal to scientific consensus can be a strong justification for one's position.It's certainly true that scientific consensus can be wrong, but the comforting thing about science is that it is adaptable to new information and open to change.
The wonderful thing about truth is that, by necessity, it breeds consensus over time. If something is demonstrably true, eventually there will be no choice but to accept it. Thus popular misconceptions about the natural world have been eradicated over time with the discovery of new information. We now realize that the Earth isn't flat, and it isn't the center of our solar system, let alone the universe. It would be ridiculous to hold a contradictory position on these matters today, because the truth is undeniable.
Still, there are other such issues of overwhelming scientific consensus today about which some people obstinately hold contradictory views. The term manufactroversy has been coined to describe these beliefs, as they pretend that a controversy exists when in fact there is none. Darwinian evolution by natural selection, for example, is overwhelmingly supported by evidence and accepted by scientists as fact (as made hilariously manifest by Project Steve), as is man-made climate change, and the efficacy, safety, and necessity of vaccinations to prevent communicable disease. There is no controversy whatsoever in the scientific community about any of these matters, and one disagrees with these assertions only at one's own peril. To refer again to point number 4 above - if you really feel like you can justify your opinion when you disagree with overwhelming scientific consensus, you should run to the nearest scientific journal and publish your innovative competing theory. If truth is on your side, and you can demonstrate it empirically, then science will have no choice but to agree with you. Science loves to be proven wrong, and that's why it can be trusted above any other method of finding the truth.
Conclusion
It is incredibly difficult to approach all questions with an unbiased and open mind. It's even more difficult sometimes to separate the good information from the bad in order to discover the truth about anything. To adopt a skeptical approach to evaluating claims means not to make a judgment before careful analysis of the best available evidence. It's too easy to agree with our friends on complicated questions or look to our favorite news outlet to tell us how to feel about controversial issues. Thinking for yourself is hard work, but being a skeptic is the best way to be sure that your opinions don't suck.
I was a faithful Christian for the first 20 or so years of my life. I mean a fully indoctrinated, Bible-thumping, Jesus-loving, nightly-praying, church-going believer of The Word. I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, went to church regularly (even after I was old enough to stay home if I wanted), and even played bass in the praise band during my church's hip contemporary service. I know what it's like to be a believer, I know how most Christians acquire the beliefs that they hold, and, most importantly, I know what it's like to live in a world where those beliefs are constantly being called into question, or as Christians might say, tested.
I got the idea for this blog entry from watching a YouTube video made by a British fellow who goes by TheraminTrees. This video is actually the second in a series about his transition from faith-based beliefs to atheism, and his explanation in this second part is simply a perfect illustration of the effects of having beliefs that are inconsistent with our life experiences.
The phenomenon I'd like to talk about is one that is inherent in any faith-based belief system, and one that every Christian (and Muslim, and Jew) experiences and has to find creative ways to deal with. That phenomenon is something I'll call cognitive dissonance.
That sounds like a fancy phrase, but it simply comes down to this: we all have a set of beliefs, values, and assumptions about the world in which we live, many of which we acquire directly from our parents during our formative years as children. We all also live in a world which is constantly bombarding us with sensory data and experiences. We try to interpret all of these experiences through the lens of our beliefs. Sometimes the two are easily compatible, and there is congruence - our beliefs and our actual experiences coincide harmoniously. Sometimes our beliefs and experiences, however, seem to be at odds with each other, and this produces a problem, which I'm calling cognitive dissonance. Picture it this way:
As you can see, when our beliefs about the world and experiences of the world coincide, there is congruence. When they don't, there is dissonance. Congruence makes us feel comfortable and confident in our beliefs; dissonance makes us feel uncomfortable and uneasy about them.
I'll recount an example when I can clearly recall experiencing this sort of cognitive dissonance. When I was in high school, I took an elective course in Philosophy. One day we were talking about the origins of life on Earth. The various theories were laid out, most specifically creationism/intelligent design and evolution. (The theory of evolution does not actually seek to explain the origin of the first life form, a phenomenon known as abiogenesis, but let's just pretend like we're dealing with apples to apples here.) As a Christian, my belief was that God had something to do with the creation of life on Earth. In the theory of evolution, there is no mention of God whatsoever; the theory works without any such supposition. Looking at the evidence for evolution, however, produced a problem for me: the explanatory power of the theory was overwhelming and undeniable. I simply could not reject the theory outright, even though it did not align with my beliefs. This troubled me greatly, until I heard about a third option, namely special creation. This hybrid theory states that evolution occurred, but God intervened at several key points in order to ensure its success. I immediately latched onto this theory and, for a period of time, accepted this as my belief for the explanation of life on Earth.
In order to correct the dissonance between my belief and my experience, I needed to distort the theory. There was no compelling evidential reason for me to insert God. I was beginning with the assumption that God simply had to be in there somewhere, and so I distorted my beliefs until I could square them with my experiences. This is one way that believers can reconcile dissonance and try to make their beliefs and experiences congruent. The problem is that, just as in my example, this process invariably produces garbled nonsense. In the end, my conclusion was an incoherent bastardization of two different theories, but crucially, it alleviated my cognitive dissonance about the matter at the time.
A more salient example that many Christians are facing right now is the issue of homosexuality. Among younger people especially, this seems to be extremely important - I know people who have decided to attend different churches based solely on this one issue. In this case, the cognitive dissonance arises between the Christian belief that homosexuality is a sin and the increasing acceptance of homosexuality by our culture. Many people who have close friends or family members who are gay find it difficult to condemn these people to hell for eternity as vile sinners.
There is a serious lack of congruence here between belief and experience, and there are many ways in which believers try to force a reconciliation. All attempts to do this require either distortion of belief or denial of experience. The believer has to convince himself that the scriptures must be interpreted in a different way; the translations are wrong, the verses apocryphal, the cultures incomparable, et cetera. The believer desperately wants to find a way to harmonize his sensibilities with his preconceived beliefs, and it is particularly difficult on this issue.
Christianity has some very serious dissonance built into it from the onset, in the form of obvious contradictions. Two examples that come to mind easily are the Garden of Eden story and the entire concept of prayer. Any amount of serious critical thought about these two things will reveal some serious cognitive dissonance, as I will attempt to illustrate.
The Garden of Eden story in Genesis is ridiculous for many reasons, but even if we dismiss it as entirely metaphorical and not descriptive of any actual event, it still has bigger problems. (Mind you, there's no textual justification for dismissing it as a metaphor - the Bible never suggests that the story is anything but literal truth.) We all know the story: God creates Adam and Eve and two magical trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. God tells Adam not to eat from the tree of knowledge. A wily snake slithers up and tells Eve that God is lying, so she eats from the forbidden tree and gives some to Adam too, so they've both made a mess of it. Yadda yadda yadda, original sin.
The contradiction comes in God's reaction to this incident. By his very nature, God is said to be omniscient. He knows all that ever was, is, and will be. If that is the case, then God should never be surprised or react with any emotion to anything that ever happens, because he already knows exactly what will happen. This makes it absurd that God would ever be angry for anything that anyone ever does or doesn't do. If God is omniscient, then he knew that Adam and Eve would eat from the forbidden tree and be cursed forever. This story is supposed to explain original sin, but it actually implicates God as the originator of sin. God knew what would happen; he set Adam up to fail. The God we read about in the Bible does not react as if he is omniscient. The believer must try to square this massive inconsistency of experience with his beliefs in order to produce congruence.
Prayer is another head-scratcher of a contradiction. This is perhaps the most resonant source of cognitive dissonance among believers, because everyone has experienced a so-called "unanswered prayer." The process by which believers reconcile this troubling experience with their belief is by invoking "God's will." If anything happens, it is because God willed it to happen, and if we cannot understand the reasons, this is simply because we cannot understand God. Invoking "God's will" is a tacit admission that God does not listen to or answer prayers. He's going to do whatever he wants to do anyway, whether you pray about it or not. And remember, since he's omniscient, he already knows what you want. There's nothing you can tell him that he doesn't already know, including the fact that you don't want your grandmother to die from cancer. Praying is one of the most futile, contradictory, arrogant, misguided acts imaginable, and believers all but admit this themselves. One can make giant leaps towards congruence of belief and experience by simply disavowing the idea of a God who answers prayers; by our very experiences we know this to be simply false. Prolonging this clash between reality and unfounded belief only invites unnecessary suffering on oneself.
The problem with faith-based belief is that it demands that we reject our experiences. Instead, people are raised to believe completely arbitrary and unsupported claims like God is perfectly good. We have to dismiss our own experiences, which tell us that any God who offers eternal punishment for a transgression is unjust and cannot be good. No crime, however severe, could ever possibly justify an eternal punishment. One can only reconcile those conflicting statements by distrusting and rejecting one's own intuition. This is profoundly unhealthy behavior.
In the video above, TheraminTrees talks about atheism as a congruence. When you don't begin with a set of beliefs which you did not arrive at through evaluation of your experiences, congruence occurs naturally and much more frequently. There is no struggle to contort your experiences into a rigid predetermined framework. Atheism is not a rejection of God, it is an admission that there is no evidence for God. This is the only logical framework that promotes harmony between belief and experience. Believing things on no evidence, and rejecting evidence which does not fit with beliefs, is a recipe for constant struggle to reconcile belief with the real world, and for the believer, it must be exhausting.
If you believe things on faith, ask yourself why you have these beliefs. You will discover that you don't actually have faith in Christ. You've never met Christ. You have faith in other people who have never met Christ but have told you about Christ. You have faith in The Bible, which was written by people, none of whom knew Christ. This is no way to form beliefs about the world, as it leads to dissonance. Base your beliefs on your experiences, and you'll be stunned how quickly everything falls into harmony and makes sense. I've found that it's much easier to sleep at night as an atheist than as a Christian.
