Who on Veeky Forums has actually studied Jungian typology and recognize that it actually has a lot of explanatory power for human behavior? I've been researching over the last few months and I've developed a lot of respect for the insight of Jung AND Isabel Meyers in how she applied it with MBTI.
They weren't completely right, and the testing isn't good, but they weren't wrong either. MBTI's 4 dimensions all correlate strongly with 4 out of the 5 dimensions of the Big Five, the gold standard for personality testing today. Big Five also came decades after MBTI and used a different methodology (based on the lexical hypothesis). That should tell us something. In particular, MBTI is certainly not "horoscopes for nerds." It's pressing on some very fundamental properties of human behavior. I don't understand why the psychology community pushes back against it rather than trying to refine it or draw from it.
saged and reported it's pseudoscience, as the actual research on its validity indicates.
Michael Howard
Its pseudoscience mate.
Lucas Williams
I'll ask again: Have either of you actually studied it?
It makes some very basic, uncontroversial claims about human cognition. In particular:
a) People vary in the extent to which their behavior is based on logic versus emotion.
b) People vary in the extent to which they absorb information concretely (what is) versus abstractly (what could be).
c) People vary in the extent to which they interact with the external environment.
d) People vary in their preference for organizing the world around them versus organizing the information in their head.
All the "types" basically come down to that. It's not "pseudoscience" as it's not even trying to be a science. It's taking the above a priori and looking at the behavior you would expect from individuals on the extremes of each continuum.
The validity and reliability of MBTI testing is distinct from the underlying claims. Besides, "actual research" on MBTI's validity is largely bullshit and clearly comes from a psychology establishment suffering from NIH.
MBTI testing isn't perfect, but when you look at the groups of people who have been typed in a particular way, clear patterns emerge. For instance, you find differences in employment preferences, sexuality, gender, intelligence, etc. based on type, and these are differences you would predict based on the postulates.
Robert Turner
>uncontroversial claims >a lot of explanatory power it's pseudoscience jim
Wyatt Bell
Which of those claims are controversial?
Anthony Ramirez
It's not a pseudoscience. It is a hueristic, it can be useful but it's actually shouldnt be taken for granted, the opposite really. There are many other concepts that are exactly the same in science yet are widely accepted, never denounced as pseudoscience and are assumed to represent actuality, a good example is the concept of "species"
Jordan Hernandez
taxonomy is trash stamp collecting
Thomas Russell
Good luck doing any kind of marcobiological research without taxonomy and systematics of some kind. It's necessary to understand things it just should not be naively assumed to be real, all the boundaries drawn are arbitrary yes, but this kind of symbolic abstraction is how we humans understand the world. Stop being a contarian feggit It's apparent that life is all one big thing, maybe all of reality is one big thing too I don't into QM but wholeness is intuitive to me so. Even if reality is a whole as I suggest then life is an actual system functioning separately as a part within the whole of reality, as I suggest.
Easton Jones
yeah good think i'm not trying to do marcobiological "research"
Jaxson Jenkins
No you are trying to be a contrarian gaywad on the internet. Nice try cybertroll, but you can take your bait hacx and shove it up your Ethernet port :^}
Connor Thompson
Yes, I am a graduate student in psychology (behavior analysis), MBTI is absolute garbage. Ill evaluate your claims.
>A No, this is garbage. People's behavior vary based on environmental and to a lesser extent, genetic factors. We don't need hypothetical constructs like logic/emotion to explain behavior.
>b
Absorbing information is a completely meaningless term; we don't actually need to assume that people "absorb" information to explain human behavior.
>C
This is also a meaningless term. People constantly interact with their environment regardless of if they are "introverts" or "extroverts" (we don't need to use either of these terms); one can simply look at how much time someone spends performing "social behaviors" (if you operationally define the term in a way where all parts are observable). There isn't a need to conclude that someone is introverted or extroverted because of this.
>d This is also meaningless, this is just (like the others) just a different in a certain type of behavior (thinking is a behavior), we don't need to draw conclusions about a person based off of this.
Self-report tests are an awful way to predict behavior, it assumes that people are accurately able to explain how they behave or what they will behave for (they can't). Personality isn't more than just attempts to summarize how people behavior and because of this, we should just focus on what causes certain types of behavior to occur instead of trying to quantify people as different personalities.
Christopher Hill
>a
I model human behavior according to the idea that humans make decisions based on what they believe to be true about the external world (Logic / Facts) and what they believe to be true about the internal state of themselves and others (Feeling / Empathy). What is important is that both of these spaces can't be assigned equal weight when making decisions. The fact that we're dealing with hypothetical constructs doesn't make them invalid. 99% of science and math consists of hypothetical constructs.
Environment and genetics aren't sufficient to explain human behavior. They don't tell you wants going on at the level of input / output. The Jungian model does. It is an abstraction of things that would be explained by neuroscience.
>b
The fact you can explain human behavior with a different model doesn't make another model invalid. You do realize that single truths have been reached in multiple ways, across disciplines?
"Absorbing information" is simply the process of taking in information and integrating it with information you already have. To do this concretely is to take the information as is. To do this abstractly is to modify it (within the context of previously-stored information).
William Morgan
>c
Introversion / extroversion in the Jungian sense isn't (directly) equivalent to how it is used today, everywhere else. It's possible for someone to be a Jungian extrovert who is socially introverted and vice versa.
Jungian Introversion / extroversion more so is a measure of the extent to which you direct your judgments internally verses externally. Sure, everyone "interacts" with the external world in some sense. This is about the fact that people differ in the extent to which they are concerned with internal stimuli as opposed to external stimuli.
The body of psychological knowledge is full of cases validating the Jungian introversion / extroversion dichotomy. A good example is ADHD. Broadly, you can divide ADHD into primarily inattentive and primarily hyperactive. At the extremes, the former is being impulsive with respect to internal stimuli (which makes it difficult to pay attention and has you going from thought to thought), while the latter is impulsive with respect to external stimuli (which makes it difficult to pay attention and has you going from action to action).
>d
Here's the thing: Philosophically, all our actions are about arranging space and/or time in some manner. So when I say "organizing information," I'm not using it in a limited matter. I am saying that in the (abstract) sense that it is literally all that we do.
So a thinker who extroverts their thinking is concerned with ordering the world around them. A thinker who introverts their thinking is concerned with organizing the information in their head. You cannot do both of these at the same time. They are mutually exclusive actions, and people vary in the extent at which they do them.
Literally the first two results on google for "mbti validity"
Anthony Adams
>Self-report tests are an awful way to predict behavior, it assumes that people are accurately able to explain how they behave or what they will behave for (they can't). Personality isn't more than just attempts to summarize how people behavior and because of this, we should just focus on what causes certain types of behavior to occur instead of trying to quantify people as different personalities.
People don't need to be able to accurately describe their behavior for self-report tests to be useful. The inaccuracies that people have with respect to their behavior are themselves a part of their behavior and thus offer another way to identify personality. That's why you have validity scales and widely-used assessments like the MMPI are so useful.
We can focus on what causes behavior AND classify behavior. Saying we should do one or the other is like saying we should do physics but not geology.
Owen Collins
not them, but really it boils down to lack of application, which is funny because in practice psychology is pick your poison and force it down your patients throat, hoping they take faith in some arbitrary philosophy, then recording the results while you reinforce that philosophy
It makes no sense to group people into dichotomies when said dichotomies don't exist on test results "MBTI" and similar online tests are literally just money printing machines that have a "feel good" description for each of their "types" about how great they are I'm not sure why you would want to respect it It's not directly a horoscope since the results replicates what you feed into it, and the Forer effect helps a lot too
Michael Ortiz
>You cannot do both of these at the same time. They are mutually exclusive actions Why would that be the case?
Carson Carter
>Jung fuck off
Jordan Murphy
The dichotomies are simplifications. They are the ends of a continuum. Dichotomizing things is just what humans do. It's like complaining about how "hot" and "cold" don't actually exist because temperature is continuous.
MBTI tests aren't about making people feel good, but it certainly doesn't try to make them feel bad about being a particular type. Considering MBTI doesn't purport to measure disorder, it would be BS if it did.
I value MBTI because I respect the ideas behind it and it's the best Jungian typology tool I know of. (For anyone aware of it, Socionics is trash.)
Gabriel Peterson
You can only direct your attention to one goal at any one time. Directing your attention in opposing directions (inward towards the mind and outward towards the environment) is a contradiction.
Brayden Fisher
>It's like complaining about how "hot" and "cold" don't actually exist because temperature is continuous. Do scientists who want to be taken seriously use exact temperatures or "hot vs cold"? >MBTI tests aren't about making people feel good Read the type descriptions, they are overly positive (because realistic descriptions would make some people sad/angry who then would spread that the test is shit, which would result in less profit) >For anyone aware of it, Socionics is trash. Funny, since it's closer to the Jungian approach than MBTI
William Martin
>a
We need to distinguish between hypothetical constructs and intervening variables. Most of science uses intervening variables; these are constructs where all of their parts can be defined by observable phenomena (gravity is a good example, we can quantify all components of gravity even if gravity itself is not a physically observable entity).
Many concepts in psychology are hypothetical constructs, which are just non observable entities that can't be defined by entirely observable phenomena (this would be the entirety of the MBTI). The problem with entities like these is that they lead to circular reasoning when trying to explain behavior.
How do you know that this person is introverted, he doesn't spend much time around people. Why doesn't he spend much time around people? Because he is introverted. You could try to say that "he doesn't spend time with people for *X environmental reason*" but then you would have no reason to actually use introversion. Its just an unnecessary assumption at that point.
>b
Because you want to have the least number of assumptions possible when using a model. Assumptions increase the chances that your model is inaccurate, so given two competing theories that can both explain behavior, you take the one with less assumptions.
Jung's model adds a number of unnecessary assumptions when it comes to explaining behavior. Absorbing information is an example of this; we don't need to assume anything you said regarding absorption to explain how behavior works. Let me show you.
A: Person puts on coat to avoid the cold weather outside, as doing so in the past has allowed him to avoid the cold. B: Person puts saw that it was cold outside, so he thought that he should put his coat on in so that he wouldn't get cold as he remembered being cold without a coat outside before, so he decided to put his coat on.
Explanation B has far more assumptions despite explaining the same behavior.
William Cruz
>c The differences between the modern interpretation and the jungian one aren't relevant, as both have the same problems.
The problem with Jungian introversion/extroversion is that there is still no reason not to just look at the behaviors someone performs over trying to figure out how people think differently (this doesn't actually explain any behavior). We would still say that an "introverted" person behaves in "x" way and an "extroverted" person behaves in "y" way. We are still ultimately looking for behavior and one could get the same information by just observing how often someone spends times doing things with other people without the mentalistic assumptions.
A lot of problems with Jung/Freud is the fact that their "examples" of working are just cherry picking a few niche situations where they can explain behavior and ignoring this problem, we don't gain anything from explaining ADHD in this way over just explaining the behavioral components of it (we could actually try to reduce problem behavior this way as well).
>d Like the others, there is no point in differentiating between the two over just looking at their behavior. Think of it this way, how do you tell the difference between someone thinking "extrovertedly" over someone thinking "introvertedly" besides relying on them telling you.
Hunter Hall
>Read the type descriptions, they are overly positive (because realistic descriptions would make some people sad/angry who then would spread that the test is shit,
Aaron Long
Classifying behavior into personality offers no benefits and only creates a number of problems when people try to use personality to explain behavior; this is part of the reason why inaccuracies don't really seem to affect self-report personality.
In contrast, when you use a test alone to determine behavior meant to be changed, this creates problems and while a test can try to control for this, it doesn't change the fact that a person can still answer inaccurately without lying.
Ryder Young
I obviously meant type descriptions that were written by the people who sell tests/"guides". Your meme picture is irrelevant
Personality is a spectrum It makes no sense to define a finite amount of "types" when the people in them vary wildly
Jaxon Brown
Their categories seem arbitrarily polarizing and disproportionately preferable in certain directions. I can buy introversion / extraversion as a dichotomy people can be categorized off of with questionnaires that you could answer honestly without thinking a given set of answers is particularly positive or negative. But thinking / feeling sounds pretty retarded to me. Who would identify with answers to questions that make you sound like you're irrational / not in the habit of basing your decisions on actual thought? Even if you assume lots of people do operate that way, I can't imagine these people would think of themselves in that way. You tend to believe you're smart and rational regardless of if you actually are, and I don't think you could write a questionnaire that would pick up on that distinction between self-perception and reality. If you really wanted to figure out how good people were at that sort of thing, you'd need to do something more like a performance based exam, and at that point it would no longer be thinking vs. feeling so much as a spectrum of performance based scores.
Ethan Hill
The names for the categories are not chosen very well. T vs F is actually about agreeableness N vs is about high/low openness to experience/intellect J vs P about high/low conscientiousness
Ryder Bell
>a) People vary in the extent to which their behavior is based on logic versus emotion. Does this imply that most of the behaviour is mostly decided by one of the two 'components'? Because, at least this is how I feel, it greatly depends on a concrete situation, what it calls for.
Carter Long
> Who would identify with answers to questions that make you sound like you're irrational / not in the habit of basing your decisions on actual thought?
I understand your disbelief, but I think you would be surprised. A lot of people are even proud of acting acording to their insintcs and emotions. How exaclty they are proud of it I don't quite understand, but I met many people like this.
Keep in mind that a lot of other such tests we commonly use are like this - psychometrics are not science, they are psychology.
If you want a true measure of anything like this, it has to be neurological rather than psychological. Something less apt to be affected by what a person ate or what video game they played that day.
Owen Long
>But thinking / feeling sounds pretty retarded to me. It does to you, and several of the questions from the questionnaire would seem to have obvious answers to you because of that. Anyone can think of an example where feeling is more important than thinking, but what you assume is better in general is based on what context you assume.
Christian Edwards
>that fucking video Absolute brainlet
Joshua Barnes
>Who on Veeky Forums has actually studied Jungian typology Probably not many, since it isn't science.
Ian Cook
Scientists use subjective terms like "very hot" all the time. You seem to thinks scientists are mathematicians.
There is the official MBTI test and there are the many unofficial MBTI tests online. The type descriptions will vary based on the test. There is nothing about MBTI itself that is inherently positive. At its core, MBTI just classifies behavior. You're focusing on something irrelevant.
Your point is also weakened by the fact that MBTI primarily generates money from companies using it as an employee-assessment tool, not individuals who want to know their OWN type.
ITT: Sciencers thinking hard science has any ability to quantify personality.
Empirical psychology is bullshit. The big 5 is just as good as any other arbitrary personality test, including Jung's.
Logan Sanchez
>empircal psychology What about the parts of psychology that actually rely on observing behavior of physiology without any mentalistic nonsense?
Anthony Brooks
The apparent difficulty of classification because of ambiguity in the reasoning behind people's thought processes doesn't invalidate the system of classification altogether. It doesn't mean it doesn't meaningfully describe divisions between people on a general level.
Frameworks aren't measured by the number of assumptions. They're measured by how well they explain the phenomena they're explaining. You want the least number of assumptions *necessary*. Not the least number of assumptions.
Bentley Roberts
Your example misses the point and I didn't see an increase in assumption there, just an increase in words. The Jungian way to go about your example is to recognize that there are opposing reasons why someone would conclude that it is cold outside. On one hand, that person could have actually experienced the physical sensation of being cold as a result of the weather. On the other hand, the person could be using information to indirectly deduce that it will be cold (eg a weather report). It's cognitivism vs. behaviorism, rationalism vs. empiricism. This isn't about hypothetical constructs. It's about fully describing the contexts under which humans conclude information is true. The (very reasonable) assumption is that people vary in the value they place on using one context over the other.
Knowing why people make the decisions they do is necessary to actually understand behavior. When you classify people purely according to behavior, you are limiting your ability to predict behavior because the usefulness of your data is restricted to very specific contexts. When you are able to make the general claim that people can be divided according to whether they prefer to think deductively (logic) versus inductively (proof), you are able to explain far more than just why someone puts on a coat during cold weather.In the case of ADHD, by recognizing the fact that ADHD can be distinguished by whether or not someone is impulsive towards internal stimuli or external stimuli you are able to better meet treatment needs. While hyperactive ADHD is generally more responsive to stimulant medication alone, often it is the case that inattentive ADHD is co-morbid with other issues like depression and requires a slightly different approach to treatment.
Hunter Hughes
>Classifying behavior into personality offers no benefits Classifying atoms into objects offers no benefits.
Adam Moore
This is your own bias speaking out. 60% of people who take MBTI (75% of women and 43% of men) are classified as feelers.
You need to speak with more women. Most women (including intelligent women) do not spend their time thinking about how rational their actions are. This doesn't mean they can't reason, but it's subordinate to feelings for them. Reason is a tool women use to rationalize their feelings.
Deep down they know this, which is why they go bonkers when you tell them how irrational they're being.
Henry Lewis
>implying behavior is more than the sum of its parts >implying personality isn't arbitrary >implying personality is tangible like real objects No user.
Josiah Torres
>no increase in assumptions You are missing the assumption in B that an idea has to go inside of a persons head and the second assumption that that person has to choose to do something. Assumption A does not have either of these assumptions, yet explains the same behavior. >Jungian explanation Both of those ways can be explained behaviorally without the need for mentalism.
The sensation explanation can be explained by defining cold as a difference between body temperature and the temperature in the external environment and a great enough difference between these; then someone will behave in a way to escape or avoid such conditions.
The weather channel explanation can be explained through modeling and rule governed behavior. A person won't avoid the cold just by hearing "20 degrees F" unless a contingency between that and cold temperatures have been established. This can be done in several ways, someone first has to establish that being cold means being in the conditioned describe (someone might be shivering and an adult might say, you are cold to establish this contingency between the word cold and low temperatures) and can teach the behaviors needed for someone to avoid such conditions (this is done at a young age usually). Then you can establish a contingency between that word and numbers, saying that 20 degrees F is cold, and then the person will be able to behave in a way to avoid the cold.
We don't need any explanations regarding a person "deducing" that its cold or any other explanation that implies that thoughts control behavior, that is what I was talking about with the extra assumption. We don't need to assume that people will "vary in the value they place on using a context," when we can simply explain that someone might would be more likely to use a weather channel if they have A. able to perform the other behaviors required to use it, B. have been exposed to the contingency of a weather channel before, C. have access to a weather channel.
Joshua Campbell
Physical "objects" and the concept of personality are both constructed.
An "object" is our brain generating a class of particles based on spatial properties. (eg distance, light absorption)
"Personality" is our brain generating a subclass of the "human" class of objects based on the way a human object interacts with other objects.
Gabriel Watson
>knowing why people... And this can be discovered through the careful observation of the environment, we do not need to assume that something inside the person is controlling behavior. >classify people as purely behavior Except we don't only look at the behavior. We also look at the environment (and to a lesser extent, genetics). We look to see what happened before the behavior occurred and what consequences occurred after the behavior; with this, you can accurately predict behavior. >thinking Except you can't actually explain the differences between how someone thinks, because it is impossible to verify outside of inferring its existence from behavior and at that point and at that point, you should just focus on studying the behaviors "associated" with different types of thinking. >impulsive First you have to define what this means. >internal stimuli or external stimuli You don't actually need to assume anything about internal stimuli, you can instead attempt to create a list of problem behaviors (such as not looking towards a teacher during a class) and attempt to either decrease/increase those behaviors depending on whether they are detrimental/beneficial.
There is also the pharmacological solution, but this is still consistent with behavioral explanations, as you can simply record what changes in behavior occur after someone ingests medication (does it increase "academic" behavior, does it decrease "problem" behavior?)
Alexander Roberts
PSEUDO SCIENCE S E U D O
S C I E N C E
Gavin Diaz
Except one is consistently observable, if you ask two people to describe a cube, you should get consistent responses.
In contrast, if you ask someone to describe someone's personality, you will get vastly different responses because personality is just a construct to describe behavior. Someone might behave differently around one group of people compared to another, so two different people may (and probably will) say two different things about a person's "personality."
Behavior in contrast can be defined and measured consistently if proper steps are taken.
Benjamin Cooper
What you're describing is irrelevant. There are always spatial-temporal gaps in knowledge. That doesn't change the fact that objects and patterns of behavior are abstractions based on temporal-spatial information.
Jordan Perez
>vastly different responses Descriptions of personality vary slightly, not vastly.
Jackson Allen
Then we should focus on minimizing on the number of abstractions that we make, in the same way that we cannot avoid making assumptions, but can strive to make as few assumptions as possible.
Isaiah Torres
Person A (Who only see's Tim on Veeky Forums) is asked to describe Tim versus Person B (that person's father), they are going to give two different responses.
Ian Barnes
>as few No, the ideal amount of assumptions is unknown. What we want to avoid is assuming things we have no context to understand in full detail.
Evan Smith
>Minimizing the number of abstractions On what basis? What determines the amount of permitted abstractions? You're arbitrarily saying that it is permitted to classify objects based on spatial similarity but not spatial-temporal similarity.
Michael Ramirez
No. We want to avoid making as many assumptions as possible because assumptions increase the likelihood that a theory/explanation is wrong. This concept is known as parsimony in science.
Isaac Wood
Someone who sees a tree will indeed have a different answer of the material properties of a tree vs. someone who say on a log once, yes. This is how science is supposed to work.
Isaac Rivera
And it's why theoretic physics is stagnant. We should have inferred the our models were not cosmologically accurate when we realized that it was physically possible for the universe to construct a region of spacetime where the equations would produce a division by zero. That's not "Ah, well, the model is incomplete," that's a total failure to model the entirety of the cosmos. Science doesn't stop asking questions after discovering an entire universe, it keeps asking them for the same reason it asked them before it realized how large the universe was: Because we want to *know.*
Oliver James
Except, this problem does not apply when you present the exact same object to both people. If I present a plant and asked both people to describe it, I would get similar responses (barring medical disorders like colorblindness). I can't present the same person to two different people and expect them to give me similar answers about their personality.
You can however present the same person and expect two different people to give you a similar account of their behavior (especially if you operationally define said behavior).
Justin Morales
>I can't present Then you're not in a position to make claims about the object-quality of personality as a concept. You have to be able to design an experiment that tests for your claims, not just throw your hands up because it seems intractable at first glance. On the very basic stage of design you have to understand that your "presentation" must necessarily include enough time and social stimulus for the participants to be able to get a bead on each others personalities. The fact that we even have a word for the phenomenon means it's probably something discrete enough to study.
Jayden Morgan
> On the very basic stage of design you have to understand that your "presentation" must necessarily include enough time and social stimulus for the participants to be able to get a bead on each others personalities
Now how do you actually determine what their real personality is? Do you use a personality test? If so, how do you know that the results would be indicative of whether or not the person is good at reading someones personality or if the personality test you used is bad. Do you use observable behavior? Then why not just measure the behavior instead of trying to turn it into constructs for personality?
A test like this would be impossible to conduct and get legitimate conclusions from.
>word May I remind you that we also have words for "chakras," "psychics," and other psuedoscientific nonsense. Having a word is a not a good indicator as to whether or not its accurate.
Eli Harris
>their real personality is? If you're positing that we need anything more than perceptions of personality then your mind is already processing it as something far more real than the appearance of a chair. Not only do we have the word "personality," but eons of mythic buildup and life experience, including inherited experience of societal customs, have presented us with notions of "true" character. The fact that we see such thought processes as would design this experiment replicated throughout history to the degree necessary to form *idiomatic* words to communicate them with (sorry, chakras are a discrete jargon, not a memetic phenomenon) is a strong indication that the concept is not an entirely nonce one.
But since I'm clinically a psychopath (primary psychopathy specifically), this is not my arena to participate in. The only reason we don't study personality beyond the handful of DSM diagnostic clusters we have is because empathic (neurotypical) individuals don't/can't stomach the idea that their assessment of others might be factually incorrect.
>accurate Never said anything about accuracy user.
Jayden Anderson
I forgot my quotation when I said "real personality, the point is that personality is arbitrary and that you cannot determine who is more correct when they describe someone's personality.
I would describe what you are saying as being exposed to our culture, which suggests that personality and the mind are both real entities and creates contingencies for people to think that; this is simply the culture propagating such a concept because it aided in the survival of that culture or an entity inside of that culture (I would argue that religious institutions are responsible for this, but that is another conversation).
Christopher White
>I would argue that religious institutions are responsible for this, but that is another conversation It need not be. Religion does not frighten me with its scale. Only with its outward tactics. Given pure discussion, it can pose no threat to me.
>you cannot determine who is more correct And you need not. Understanding why two different people would describe the same person in the same setting as having different personality traits is the effort of science. Just accepting that everyone has their own perspective and that personality is variable and non-continuous to all observers is the very absence of science that creates the culture our argument now converges on.
Dylan Thompson
>Just accepting that everyone has their own perspective and that personality is variable and non-continuous to all observers is the very absence of science that creates the culture our argument now converges on. If this were true, then personality would be considered completely unscientific and completely pointless, as no one is going to have a consistent measure on it (who says that one personality test is better than another if everyone rates personality differently).
>Understanding why two different people would describe the same person in the same setting as having different personality traits is the effort of science.
Even if we assume personality exists, then this would also demonstrate why personality is unscientific, as constructs where no one gives a consistent answer are discarded. There is a reason introspection was eliminated (because everyone kept giving different responses), it would be like suggesting we should try to understand why people who perform introspection get different results (all the answers are unscientific IE making the idea unfalsifiable).
> It need not be. Religion does not frighten me with its scale. Only with its outward tactics. Given pure discussion, it can pose no threat to me.
Well, its because religious control is extremely effective in controllings people's behavior and religion is reliant on the existence of souls/personality/free will in order to function, so they propogate those ideas using religious control in order to survive.
Justin Sullivan
>who says that one personality test is better than another Who does? I don't mean that rhetorically; who has ever made such a claim and on what scale and to what response? Indeed, that you feel that, immersed in the same cultural same as I, personality isn't a scientific idea, and cannot be one, and is likely as entirely non-material as chakras or what else, that you feel confident arguing that means that our surrounding cultural parameters are such that it can easily be the case that it's not, and my claim is true.
But the *idiomatic* implication of your iff-then clause is that many people consider personality to be more than that. Indeed, it could be that personality has as much reality as chakras, but that cultural evolution selected for it because it was "more intuitive" to people than the notion of chakras or a subtle body. In this sense your argument is right; merely having a word for something isn't necessarily evidence enough to justify studying it.
>constructs where no one gives a consistent answer are discarded. Certainly. I won't contest that. But without creating an experiment to test your "vastly different" hypothesis, we can as well chalk that up to culture not optimizing for clarity or epistemic value. In this sense, your anecdotal intuitions betray you: You as so accustomed to people seeing different things in each other that you can't seem to accept the notion that we might study such a thing in more controlled settings.
>reliant on the existence of souls/personality/free will Ahhhh I see where you're coming from. No, that's be legit reasoning, but religion is just not that predictive of culture. Religion merely latches onto preexisting memes, it can't origin a meme within itself.
Nicholas Nelson
>Who does? There is an entire branch of psychology dedicated to studying personality and several paradigms accept personality as a legitimate scientific entity. They have created countless personality tests like the OCEAN or MBTI which they claim is a scientific indicator of personality.
>test Its impossible to create a test for an unfalsifiable hypothesis, because even if you demonstrate your hypothesis, someone could just explain away the result using an unprovable excuse like "they had different results because that's how their own personalities see things."
Josiah Nguyen
>an entire branch of psychology Hmm. I guess I'll need to get a better understanding of why you don't consider it real enough to be worth studying then.
>test Well I don't have any interesting hypotheses about personality, so I was just referring to your prediction that people would give wildly different descriptions of the same person's personality. I think, if we actually designed an experiment to test it, we'd find that the differences in personality perceptions and reporting were negligible at best, or interesting in their semantic similarity at worst.
Daniel Morris
You didn't contradict the Jungian model. You just gave models explaining how processes in the Jungian model would work. The Jungian model doesn't (directly) explain behavior. It explains (but primarily classifies) behavioral differences. The Jungian model doesn't replace experimentation, it helps direct it. If you're assuming that in the Jungian model thoughts are assumed to dictate action, you are wrong and arguing against a strawman.
In between the stimulus and the action that follows there is a process that takes place. Since humans respond to the same stimuli differently, and because human behavior comes from the brain, it follows that differences in human behavior reflect differences in the processes that take place in the brain. The Jungian model uses a few postulates and logic to classify the possible processes and their interactions. The result of these processes is the "decision". The existence or nonexistence of free will is irrelevant.
You are confusing the conscious experience of thinking with thinking as a computation. The latter most certainly can be observed, and logically distinct modes of thinking can be proven. We don't need to observe the brain of every single person to claim that whatever function the brain uses to process information, it can be understood solely in terms of how the internal and external state of the system is computed. In other word, the total information the brain has about itself (internal) and the total information the brain has about its environment (external) is all the brain has access to, and that is computed. When we talk about Jungian introversion / extroversion, we are talking about what logically occurs within the brain from perception to action.
Evan Hughes
Ignoring the existence of internal stimuli makes no sense, and it will make for a very weak model for understanding human behavior generally. A model that treats the brain as a black box whose output is determined solely in terms of external (observable) inputs has no way, for instance, to account for mental disorders like schizophrenia and anxiety, nor can it account for dreams or forward-thinking.
Adrian Parker
Jungian MBTI is cool and all, but in 2017 I think we're entitled to something a bit more rigorous. Try it again with the Big-5 model.
Julian Bennett
>MBTI >science
Jacob Moore
Its because personality doesn't actually offer anything useful to explaining behavior and due to the subjectivity within it (all of the problems I mentioned still exist despite people trying to study it scientifically).
People give can give significantly different results when studying human behavior (a single type of behavior like a person flopping on the floor), whether they are poorly trained (not understanding the operational definition) or if they are just not looking at the person performing the behavior. Its why studies in behavior analysis require you to take inter observe agreement data.
Now, imagine that problem, except without giving either person a concrete behavioral definition of personality and instead having to figure out what behaviors are indicative of personality, it would be significantly harder even for trained people to do, let alone untrained ones.
Behaviorism doesn't treat the brain like a black box (black box implies that internal behavior cannot be studied at all and is based on methodological behaviorism (an outdated version of behaviorism), it considers thinking to be behavior and emotions to be the biproducts of behavior; both exist an can be studied, but they are much harder to study than internal behaviors. You would be right in saying that we don't believe that internal stimuli control behavior either.
We are able to account for mental disorders like anxiety quite easily by looking at behavioral symptoms (there is a reason why systematic desensitization is so commonly used for phobias, despite being entirely behavioral) and we do this by looking at avoidance behavior; someone with social anxiety for example will avoid situations that place them around other people and behavioral treatments for anxiety are meant to reduce how often they avoid people (doing this will also reduce the anxiety they feel, but notice how we only consider anxiety to be a bi-product of avoidance behavior rather than the cause of it).
Asher Hill
The model I give does not assume that the brain controls behavior (the brain may allow behavior to happen in the same way having hands allows for grabbing behavior to happen), but the brain (or your hand) isn't the reason why you perform grabbing behavior, rather its something in the environment.
When I suggest that something "inside" the person doesn't control their behavior, I am also including the brain in this as well as the "mind." The entire idea that the brain "computes" things to cause behavior is exactly what I meant when I was arguing against the idea of internal stimuli controlling behavior. The point of my explanation was to demonstrate how we do't actually need to assume anything about internal constructs (such as brain computation) to sufficiently explain behavior, meaning that such explanations are unneeded as they only give us unneeded assumptions about behavior.
Ryder Williams
You haven't proven the efficacy of your model, nor have you proven that behavior can be explained "sufficiently" by ignoring cognitive models--the models that are actually at the forefront of understanding human behavior and treating mental illness today.
Pointing out that something isn't a logical necessity isn't the same as proving it is superfluous. It is possible, and in fact the case, that different models bring different value based on your needs. Theoretical models are largely what direct empirical research. Regardless of what is logically possible, a purely empirical approach to the behavior of humans (or any complex system) is impractical.
The unnecessary assumption is actually that internal stimuli don't affect behavior, especially when the success of cognitive science is largely based on the claim they do. It is nonsense to try to understand a system purely in terms of input / output when you have the ability to break the system down and make *logical* predictions that generate conclusions that are further reaching. Why would we think we could understand schizophrenia purely in terms of external behavior, when it is defined largely by the activity of internal and external stimuli? It's like trying to understand diseases solely in terms of the outside symptoms, with all the ambiguity, while ignoring the fact that there are things going on at the biological level that could tell you far more efficiently whether you're dealing with the flu or ebola.
Parker Turner
>You haven't proven the efficacy of your model....
If I am able to control behavior without relying on cognitive models, that is a clear indicator that those models are unnecessary (the point of my coat example was to demonstrate exactly this).
Behavior analysis (the field using the model I described) is actually at the forefront of a lot of issues, such as treating developmental disabilities, drug addictions, any work with non-human animals and even certain mental illnesses such as anxiety disorders. The fact that behavioral models do a vastly better job at explaining animal behavior than cognitive models and that behavioral explanations used with animals are also applicable to humans should be a clear indicator that the behavioral models do a better job explaining how human behavior works than cognitive ones.
The field you are referring to is actually closer to cognitive behavioral psychology; which I would argue simply applies behavioral models to internal behavior (thoughts/emotions).
>Pointing out that something....
I'd argue the opposite; if you have two models that can explain a phenomena equally well, but one has less assumptions, I would take the model with less assumptions every time. You seem to be arguing however that the cognitive model explains phenomena better; which I would counter by asking for a behavioral phenomenon that cannot be explained using a behavioral model.
> Regardless of what is logically possible....
It already exists; I should note that this is a simplified explanation, but operant and respondent conditioning can sufficiently explain human behavior withoutu relying on mentalistic constructs.
>The unnecessary assumption is actually that internal stimuli don't affect behavior...
Assuming that unobservable internal constructs control behavior is a larger assumption than assuming that they don't, as you can actually demonstrate how changes to the external environment can produce changes in behavior...
(cont).
Connor Wilson
...even if we assume that internal stimuli can control behavior, we have effectively demonstrated that we do not need to use them in order to produce changes in behavior.
>input-output
You seem to be implying that we cannot create a model that predicts behavior without assuming internal constructs control behavior, this would be inaccurate. You can fully predict behavior by (very simplified explanation) looking at the antecedent events of a behavior and then determining what consequences occur after it (there is also respondent conditioning, but the point still stands).
>schizophrenia
Try to think for a moment how you would do this.
The answer would be rather than focusing on nonobservable internal stimuli, focus on the behavior that the individual does and does not perform. There are plenty of behavioral symptoms (negative/positive traits) that people with schizophrenia perform such as not performing hygiene related behavior, incoherent speaking patterns, etc.
But what about the "internal" symptoms like hallucinations and delusions? You can still measure these by observing external behavior, for example, if a hallucination causes a person to begin speaking when no one else is around or if a delusion causes someone to avoid using the bathroom; you don't actually need to assert that internal stimuli are controlling behavior (going back to my hand/brain example, an apt comparison would be to compare schizophrenia's effect on the brain in a similar way to how breaking bones in your hand may make it more difficult to perform grabbing behavior (based entirely on physiological reasons).
Now, I am not saying the solution to these symptoms would be entirely behavioral, it would also involve pharmacological solutions (drug effects can be explained through entirely behavioral means and there is even a field based on this assumption), but the point is to demonstrate why a cognitive model is unnecessary in explaining schizophrenia.
Levi Garcia
>big 5 >rigorous Funny
Connor Wood
>2017 >MBTI Saged and reported. This is a science board.
Landon Mitchell
According to laypeople.
Josiah Jackson
How is any of this related to Veeky Forums?
Joseph Cruz
JBP released his Big 5 test last week
Connor Kelly
Can we make this thread about real psychology instead? I just took Jordan Memesons personality test and got the following, where the number indicates percentile.
