MBTI at work

[cellio]

Not long ago someone at my company listed his Meyers-Briggs type on his wiki page. And then someone else did, and, well, once three people do it it's a movement, so while I was on vacation someone created a page listing people by type (when known).

Of 35 people currently listed, 8 are INTJs -- seven software developers (including one of my favorite colleagues) and a hard-core designer. Yeah, these are my people. :-) According to Wikipedia, INTJs are about 2% of the general (US) population.

Granted, most of these types are being obtained by test toys found on the internet, but I don't imagine that would bias the results in a particular way, especially as people are using different tests. A few people have had more real tests in the past.

(Next-biggest group is ISTJ at 6, but that's a big group in the general population so not surprising. Ours apparently took some flack for alphabetizing the names within each section of the page; it's an ISTJ thing to do, apparently. :-) )

I just noticed something odd in the groupings. There are 16 types, grouped into four groups: NT, NF, SJ, and SP. Given the first two, I expected the other two to be ST and SF, but they're not. (That is, the first two suggested the pattern of "middle letters dominate".) I wonder what that means. (The I/E dimension gets no primary grouping at all?)

Comments

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

I know a lot of people hold stock in MBTI. To me, it's generally the equivalent of astrology, or cold reading. I'm not Jungian by any stretch of the imagination (MBTI is directly from Jungian beliefs in typologies), and the general point that we look at the world and react to it in different ways is, shall we say, dramatically undermined by the attempt to pigeonhole everyone?

Fundamentally, there are two kinds of people: those who think everyone's alike, those who try to pigeonhole their fellow human beings, and those who mess with your notion of categories.

[starmalachite.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think it's a little more useful than you give it credit for. It's a heuristic, not a caliper, but it's given me insights into other people's thought processes that I might not have gotten otherwise -- or only after much frustration for both them and me.

For that matter, realizing just how rare my "type" is was actually rather liberating -- knowing that very few people are going to "get" me no matter what I do meant I could put the same effort into "getting" them instead.

You don't have to be a Jungian to consider MBTI a sometimes useful shorthand. Sure, it can be abused ("I'm sorry, we're only hiring ESTJs for sales positions"), but so can any psych tool.