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.
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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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do you think that personality is something that can or should be modeled scientifically? as in, primarily, can the scientific method even be applied to people in a meaningful way? it seems to just not cut it outside of material/physical observations.
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I think you're asking a question more fundamental to psychology than personality in particular.
I think the answer will be that it can be modeled scientifically, but we lack a lot of the scientific nous required. We find correlations and call them primary causes, heedlessly.
One of the most convincing suggestions I've seen is that there is a lacuna between physics and psychology, and new findings in one may do a lot to mend the other, but that's mostly conjecture - the point is we don't have any unifying theory in psychology, for anything.
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Considering there's ample evidence, though, that human consciousness & intelligence have much more depth than what neuroscientists can model at present, I think it's fair to say that psychology as it stands is a long way off. Missing big pieces.
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