It's a very good framing/storytelling device, but otherwise it has little going for it that Big Five doesn't do better and more reliably.
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Invalid for the sorts of things it's usually claimed to matter for (e.g. job choice, motivational structure...)
Big Five is different, I agree.
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Go ahead, find reliable behavioural correlates of MBTI types. It's extremely difficult, but if you can find something replicable I'll grant you that.
Most personality typologies suffer from this lack of clear relationship with behaviour, yet they make assertions about it...
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don’t conflate type theory as a whole with the MBTI, a psychometric test. the latter is only a doorstep to the former.
it’s nothing to do with behavior either, it deals with cognitive temperament/orientation directly
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Jung heavily criticized Freud’s theories as trying to essentially boil human behavior and personality down to affect alone, so his theory makes no comparable pretense
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big five is better behavior data collection, but pretty useless as an interpretive practical framework for individuals, because it insists on pulling apart the way different factors interact and treating traits as isolated
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Sorry, but there are at least 4 basic errors here.
Firstly, MBTI is not Jung's theory. Jung had his own theory. Briggs and her daughter are not Jung.
Secondly, MBTI claims to be do all of the things you listed. It doesn't get extra points for actually doing something else.
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Thirdly, there is no conflation. MBTI claims to be the same category of test as Big Five etc., and functionally it is. It just happens to be bad at it.
Fourth, I am not saying Big Five is great. I think it sucks. The problem is MBTI doesn't have anything it does better, really.
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the conflation I was referring to was between Jung and MBTI, but as you already stated, we’re on the same page about that. I would disagree that MBTI has less merit than big 5 though - traits do very little to cohesively model personality past a statistical/clinical context
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Big Five doesn't remotely model personality in a cohesive way, that is true.
The problem, though, is that MBTI models it worse and claims to know more. There is a discrepancy between the strength of the claims made and their provability. A big discrepancy.
One of the most common mistakes in psych is forming holistic theories on the basis of weak, incoherent findings.
Jung is great as a mystic and a pioneer moreso than a scientist. MBTI claims upfront to be science, then says "OK, maybe not *that* much science - but still valid!"
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If it drops the pretence, it gains some credence as a model for contextualizing group differences in personality, but then it is just that - a non-scientific model.
I like non-scientific models. I don't think they should go around making scientific claims they can't support.
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