Does Astrology And The Meyer-Briggs Test Correlate In Any Way?

The main problem is people misuse MBTI. MBTI types are interesting and the functions can help you analyze yourself but every single individual is unique so it doesn’t say all that much. People think that MBTI is supposed to completely represent them but it’s more of just like preferences. What do you tend to do most often. There are four types I might be but in reality there’s only one I tend to be and the others are only what I might look like.

Diving face first into the astrology rabbit hole I have come up on the other end having this exact same realization on the use and overall purpose Astrology/MBTI has in relation to defining oneself. It has shown my friends their weaknesses and instead of seeing these things as potholes needing to be filled, they’re immovable mountains of personality traits. I’ve even made the same mistake of letting these interpretations of consistencies in human behavior hold me back and has lead to more confusion than growth. These things have plenty of counterproductive effects as they do the intriguing ones. I still find astrology and spirituality fascinating, not self-defining, but glad to hear my thoughts put into words. Great article.

Alright, so as people have sorta mentioned in the comments there are some minor inaccuracies. But I haven’t seen many people actually talk about Jung’s Functions vs MBTI in a way that would make sense from an uninformed perspective. For context I am a massive skeptic that questions everything, but even I wouldn’t say MBTI is as bad as astrology. This is because – yes – the MBTI and 16p tests are trash and inaccurate for most people, but, that doesn’t mean good ways of evaluating these types don’t exist. They do. And they are reliably more accurate. Tests like those on Sakinorva are much more accurate because they utilize Jung’s functions, and even having knowledge of Jung’s functions on an expert level alone is enough to type someone. This is because Jung’s “Personality Types” have nothing to do with personality. It’s someone’s likely patterns of thought, which are observed by what they value in different contexts and state in statements/comments. These preferred thought patterns are relatively static in people’s lifetime and are quite observable. There are 8 cognitive functions that everyone utilizes, inevitably on this qualitative axis, people will use less of them and rely mostly on just a few. This is the basis of Jung’s ‘Personality Types’ and evaluating someone’s train of thought is enough to figure it out with the right know-how. As an example, if someone frequently leans on how they feel about a subject and uses subjective opinion as a keystone in their statements; you observe “Introverted Feeling”.

While I agree that MBTI is similar to astrology in the sense that it has no actual predictive power and just uses the Barnum effect to reel people in, I strongly disagree that you can say they’re the same thing. 1.) MBTI has roots in psychoanalysis while astrology has roots in religion (religions that a lot of people don’t believe in). 2.) MBTI categorizes people using tests while astrology categorizes people using time and date of birth. 3.) MBTI has “cognitive functions” (ooh, fancy) while astrology has animals and symbols. 4.) MBTI claims to be scientific while astrology claims to be spiritual. It’s these core differences that make MBTI not only seem more plausible than astrology, but also make it a teensy bit more accurate (although still unscientific).

The lack of nuance that MBTI proposes has a superficial pop psychology element to it. However, that doesn’t directly translate to Jung’s theory not being based on actually observations of existing psychological mechanisms that lead to a diversity of perspectives between individuals. These are observations that many people are making 100 years later, and using as a means of self development. These observations tell of the extremes of a personality, and we of course struggle to find the appropriate nuance of such observations, something you touched on at the end of the article. Recognizing that perspective, the issue that I take with your article is that you are reasoning abstractly without gathering concrete data to disprove the train of thought. Despite your education, there is an ultimate subjectivity of abstract reasoning that leads to the conclusions reached in the article. There is a style that has been seen time and again, where such abstractness seeks to prove or disprove the existence a framework other people are using. The question that should be asked is what is the utility of the framework, not if other people are wrong for believing in it. This belief that other people’s beliefs are irrational is a dangerous psychological mechanism. It distracts from these beliefs being formed out of utility rather than abstract logical thinking. It’s also pleasurable for others to see themselves as above or as having superior knowledge. This is one of the biggest reasons that we continue to discount the beliefs of our fellow man.

Every time I see someone debunking mbti they never mention the function stacks or build strong enough criticism against jungs hypothesis. They always focus on inconsistent results from the test because sure the questions and calculations are flawed, and people are inclined to be biased and inaccurate in their perceptions of themselves. The hypothesis of Jung and the function stacks that underly each type have way more solid ground to explain characteristics of people, even if it is a bit general. Nobody is a pure introvert or extrovert as jung stated, these are attitudes that should be attributed to perception and decision-making functions. I’m currently pursuing a degree in psychology and I have typed each member in my family and my circle of friends without any of them taking the test. I infer their types based on my understanding of the function stacks, and I’m pretty confident in how accurately I have explained personality to them. I just want to say I don’t think it’s fair to attack the test on this surface level while ignoring the function stacks, and mbti should not be grouped into the same category as horoscopes and astrology.

As everybody would theoretically be entitled to their own personality type, personality categorisation and typology can only be so accurate and thus be taken only so seriously. MBTI definitely isn’t as unsupported as astrology, but also shouldn’t be taken as the be-all end-all. I like MBTI and have found great accuracy in it – but only really for those who are more extreme in the qualities of extroversion, intuition etc – not really for myself however (indicating the Barnum effect wouldn’t really apply here). Personality testing can be a good starting point for identifying and describing characteristics about oneself where we may have struggled to find the correct words for someones particular mannerisms. While academics may not recognise it for its validity, MBTI is surely a decent foundation for understanding personalities and the self.

Please read till the end and then judge. The thing is that many people confuse 16 personalities with MBTI. The tests you are talking about in this article are from 16 personalities, not MBTI. (On the other hand the 16 personalities gave us the iconic personas 😁). I started to learn about MBTI few months ago, becouse a friend of mine told me more about it. Until that time I thought MBTI was the same as 16 personalities. The difference is that you can’t type someone by his answers. You have to use non-test metods like the observation. ITS ABOUT FINDING COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS. The MBTI also does not specifi who you are, it just tells how you percive and judge the internal and external world (action-reaction as Newton said). It doesn’t specifi your interests, your hobby, your opininions, etc. All the types can be gamers, the MBTI just tells how people react to the game. If they use more values or logic. If they prefer to use all of their senses or live in their minds. I agree with many things said in this article, like that it can’t define us, but still I couldn’t find valid proof that it doesn’t work. We should be critical to everything, that’s why i clicked this article, but on the other hand its NOT the MBTI and that’s why this article can be taken seriosely as an argument against MBTI. The author just talks about something else as many people on the internet (I was one of them few months ago). Still great work with the article, I like your way of critical thinking. You just have to do a better research in MBTI.

The funniest thing about MBTI is, it helps you to embrace yourself and lets you know there’re so many types of people out there. There’s always room for growth, nothing is ever not changing, so just remember you can be anything that you want to be. As an INFP i really enjoy MBTI and think it’s a wholesome way to know about other people ❤

I enjoy MBTI because it’s a stereotyping behaviours into boxes and jokes on stereotypes are generally quite hilarious. So jokes on MBTI types are really interesting. One difference I’d say between mbti and astrology is that MBTI atleast to me never seemed to be predictive it always like a descriptive analysis rather than a predictive model.

As a fellow philosopher I agree Mbti and psychoanalysis in general is more of a metaphysical issue than a scientific one and so the criticisms of the verifiability of the claims is valid if objectively verifiable data is all you care about. however I would like to point out a distinct difference in the application of the Forer effect between MBTI and Horoscopes To understand why the forer effect isn’t as big a deal for mbti as it is for horroscopes we first need to understand the real difference between subjective and objective claims and it is not simply a matter of opinion vs fact, as a matter of fact there can be subjective claims that are true and objective claims that are false and vise versa. you can have facts that are subjective and opinions that are objective in nature and vise versa. The real difference between subjective and objective is not “true or false” nor is it “opinion vs fact” it is wether the truth of a claim is based on the “subject or the object”. In other words if the truth of a claim is dependent upon the mental state or mental process of an individual to be true then it is subjective, but if its truth is dependent upon something external to any individual something independent of how any one or more people perceive it, then it is objective. For example if I said you were a pink and purple striped Giraffe that’s not a claim that’s true but we must ask ourselves why its not true? Is it dependent upon how we perceive it to be or is it dependent upon something outside of our perception?

I’m basically just repeating another dudes comment but jung typology is much more grounded than astrology. The problem lies in the mbti test and how people can interpret it. You can obviously look at someone (or yourself)and in a general sense come to a conclusion on wether or not they are introverted a judger or whatever, but obviously as well this is not a finite judge of their character and can change at any given moment. the fact is you can still be a primarily intuitive senser and knowing this can be beneficial, whether or not this is an aspect of yourself you would want to change or not. A more appropriate title would be “the problem with Myers briggs is people use it in the same way as astrology”. Probably wouldn’t have gotten as many views tho…. I hate that people would be quicker to discredit the whole than to just look at it from a more secular standpoint.

I did the test 7 times in a timespan of 5 years and I had the same personality every time. And when I read other personalitys traits, I don’t recognize myself nearly as much as I do when reading the traits of my own personality. I agree that people are taking it way to seriously but saying that mbti is like asking the stars if you will find I girlfriend next year is absolute nonsense. Mbti uses real personality traits in which people get categorized in. You can’t tell me that saying someone is introverted vs extroverted is the same as saying someone is a virgo vs taurus.

MBTI: entering your personality to get your personality type Astrology: entering your birthdate to get your personality You are more than your MBTI type. Do you really think you could fit everyone into 16 perfectly equal personalities? Absolutely not, and that’s not what MBTI is doing. Think about what categories are for. We’re making categories for personalities that aren’t someone’s whole personality to make thinking about their personality simpler. I can see how you are skeptical of MBTI based on its origins and that’s okay, but that doesn’t make it pseudoscience. The next part of my comment is counter-arguments for the sake of making me feel smart. “MBTI is not valid” (has little predictive power) It’s not supposed to. As I said, there’s more to you than your MBTI type. Not everyone is a walking stereotype, and that’s why, as an INTP, I’m not reading scientific books to help me find the cure to cancer. “MBTI is unreliable” (the tests give you different results) That’s not on MBTI, that’s on the test. “Forer/barnum effect” (results are very general) There’s limited descriptions you can give to someone just based on 4 letters that makes up 1 of 16 personality types, but that doesn’t make it the forer effect. Take the test and read what your opposite (All 4 letters swapped) type is like. You wouldn’t think it’s very accurate at all. “Big 5 is better” (uses spectrums not types) Just look at the results of your personality again. You can see that for each of the 4 letters, there is a spectrum.

The University of Queensland has published numerous studies debunking the MBTI. In spite of that, their hiring department still requires everyone who applies to take the MBTI test. Why? Because it’s generally a good guide for how most people will behave in most situations most of the time. A system doesn’t need to be perfectly accurate to be useful.

This is pretty fair. Pointing out the scientific flaws and the lack of back up to these claims is certainly something that many people need to hear about the MBTI. And even with that knowledge i believe this is by far not as unfounded as astrology, or the political compass. My point is the following: We use objective tools to set up, proof and make objective claims about the world. How come we also assume thats efficient with subjective topics? How come we want objective tools for SUBJECTIVE experiences such as personality? What makes us think its as useful here as it is there? Im telling you what, nothing. We just assume thats the case because science and objectivity brought us where we are now. We should really be careful about that, because we actually have little evidence thats useful. And the next, and probably more important one is this: The MBTI wasnt made to make objective statements about a person. It was made to make a statement about a persons personality FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVE. What that means is that your own personality is X lets say. Now because we are human we cant see X, we can only see X – Y. What i mean by that is that we cant observe everything thats there, but just what our mind and body allow us to. You know the gorilla costume basketball study right? Thats that. So to summ it up, if we wanted to make a claim what X is, your would be right, but thats not what it does, it only shows X-Y. Or in words, it shows a personality through the lense of our subjective experience.

Agreed with everything you said! I was into MBTI ever since 2020 when I took a personality test, and then learned about the cognitive functions, but then I noticed how “”restrictive”” this personality placement is. It puts you into a box and, especially if you tend to be inclined to neuroticism and anxiety like me, can make you think that your core self(if the self is even a thing), that your core self can never change and that you are stuck the way you are forever. That “you”” can never actually change, you are your type and that’s it. Also, the Fhorer effect is very real in this kind of thing. It shows how pure intellectual especulation without searching for verifiable proof and test can be a danger to psychology and any field that considers itself to be scientific, especially when we deal with human behavior. (Of course when we talk about philosophy we can’t ask for rigorous scientific method to be used, since philosophy, and mathematics for example, are abstract at its core). For example, of the Fhorer effect, one day I thought I was a high Te user because of descriptions, but also a high Ti user at the same time.

Considering the context of the history of psychology, behavioralism was the closest discipline there was to hard, ONLY evidence based science. The shortcoming of it was not incorporating the inner thoughts of people, which was what Freud’s psychoanalytic psychology was all about (which was admittedly not very hard evidence based discipline).

Interesting how you use a rainy day and a sunny day as an example to generate different MBTI results. Because astrology is tied to the seasons (less sun, more sun; less food, more food) which is how astrology derives meaning from the signs. In the case of our identities shifting with time: Is a tree still a seed? Can a seed stay a seed? Can a tree grow without a seed? I think it’s silly to assume we know the answer to any of these questions unless we’re the tree experiencing it

I liked the article, but I would argue that just because you can work on things like becoming less introverted doesn’t mean that you’re not an introvert. It will always be a struggle for you and a muscle that will atrophy without constant exercise. That’s what astrology is about. It’s space weather. You can see your general proclivities, and thereby have a heads up and be better equipped to handle them and work on them. But you’re right that astrology and MBTI can be self-limiting just like the doctor telling you you have ADD.

Astrology is the hypothesis that significant human cycles occur aligned with the almanac, and that certain kinds of parents tend to reproduce with certain almanac-aligned stimuli and considerations, and that correlations between parents and these stimuli, correlates with certain trends in their offspring and their annual birth phase. The movements and positions of celestial objects are a proxy for a clock by which they tracked the almanac, and broad trends in human mating and offspring. Jungian archetypes hypothesizes that all people have limited cognitive resources that need to cover a set range of cognitive tasks; and that the allocation/specialization of these cognitive resources at the top level is between input or output (observing or deciding), and the relationships between data points in either case is ultimately the consideration of parts as the parts of a group, or as the parts of an individual (extroversion or introversion). MBTI is then the further hypothesis that some of these cognitive functions are more sophisticated than their synergistic counterparts, and thus we lean into them more and they become more mature, while the offsetting cognitive functions will be subordinate.

This is about the tests, but the cognitive functions are more accurate. The functions just talk about the natural cognitive preferences of how we likely judge and perceive the world. Someone who uses the function Ti or Introverted Thinking strongly, for example, will often view the world through what makes sense or is logical to them, and break things down analytically. This doesn’t dictate opinions or how they will behave. It talks about how they might see the world and the ways that people make decisions. Now, let’s look at an iNtuition function, say Ni. Using this doesn’t mean that you will act like this or be like that. It just shows that you look at the world through a lense of wanting to look deeper that what is seen or wanting to be prepared for the future. It won’t change, because it’s how you naturally respond to and judge the world, not how you will act or what you will do in a predictive sense.

The problem is you talk about characteristics. Personality is not a trait, it’s tendency proven over time. Nobody is “stuck with characteristics”, agreed. But we’re pretty much addicted to our tendencies of thought and behavior, and the whole point of typology should be to enable us to see through that and fight our inner traumas and mental addictions (which a lot of people get right, but mainstream shalowness and popularity has induced people to use it like astrology and organizations to profit on pushing it forward to people who don’t really want to use it to improve) I recommend you look “objective personality system” up on YouTube. Those guys have done a pretty amazing job being clear about the whole biased usage of personality and created a more elaborate, trial and error system that has some scientific methodology involved. And though they profit on it, they don’t necessarily wanna push it into people, they identify more as researchers than authors of a complete system, and they actually make it very clear that it’s not trustable as any sort of therapy or professional advice, but merely their opinion on what they are very consistently observing. I personally believe that code they managed to crack is extremely powerful and could revolutionize the field of psychology and even neurology and other medical practices, once paper-proven and after the long humility exercise from the scientific community in accepting what that means for themselves in their own lives (traumas, addictions, biases.

what’s wrong with being self-taught? i was a self-taught programmer, i had no issues breezing through my courses and had answers to questions professors had a difficult time or didnt even know. have you heard of ramanujan? the best mathematician who ever lived? he was self-taught in mathematics and invented math that leap frogged the world of mathematics centuries into the future. even today, people are still studying his works trying to understand it. they continue to the work he created for computer science. being self-taught allows one to take a different approach to things allowing the person to see connections and arrive at a better understanding of nature. this was why ramanujan was my mathmatician of all time. he had answers to solutions no one had because he was dialed into nature like nobody else was.

I’ve never seen a person take MBTI “overly seriously” or limit themselves by it. It’s just bundle of very basic mind biographies that a lot of times hit the mark in 80-90% of one’s traits and people use it to tell a little bit about themselves without going on a ramble. How would self-limiting with it even look like? “Sorry, I’m ENFJ, can’t do anything about that trait you don’t like”?

I’ve heard a bunch of words, but im honestly still waiting for the concrete reasons as to why the MBTI is verifaiably false other than an appeal to lack of official backing. There are plenty of things in the world which are very true that have little to no official support in the mainstream of society. Astrology is absolutely bonkers, but ive seen people being typed by MBTI professionals over and over correctly with pretty much 100% accuracy which wouldn’t be the case if there was no formula under it all. It would be random guessing … like astrology

I first took the MBTI test 2.5 years ago and about a month ago i took it the last time. I took it about 6 times throughout this time. Every single time it said i am the same type INFP-T. So i dont think it gives you different results based on if its a rainy or a sunny day. It gave me the exact same result six times in a row over the span of 2 years

honestly i took big 5 personality test 4 times from from 4 different websites on the same day and got 4 different results.i really doubt its accuracy on the contrary i took MBTI test 3 times from 3 different website on 3 different days and got same result everytime that i am an ISTJ and when i looked at the description of the behaviour and weaknesses of ISTJ it completely fits me.same way my mom took it and she got ESFP and ber description of her behaviour and weaknesses completely fits her.we are polar opposite and do not fit each other’s MBTI personality type.if forer effect was applicable to MBTI then we should see us fitting in each other’s personality but it is impossible to see it.the level of accuracy in MBTI test that i saw was spot on.we might not 100% depend on it to define our personality but we cannot completely discredit it either.it has at least some level of accuracy on predicting person’s behaviour and preferences in my personal experience.

LONG READ AHEAD (tldr at the end): ( 1:32 ) that is not how MBTI works; that’s the 16personalities version of it. you misunderstood Jung’s concept of functions. Jung stated that there were two things people did with information: gathering it (Perceiving) and using it to make decisions (Judging). the perceiving functions are iNtuition, which corresponds to abstract thinking and pattern recognition, and Sensing, which corresponds to physical sensations and actions. the Judging functions are Thinking, which corresponds to reasoning and structure, and Feeling, which corresponds to identity and empathy. Jung also said that these functions could either operate on the Introverted world of beliefs, morals, ideas and thoughts; or the Extroverted world of people, actions, tools and objects. all of this actually leaves us with EIGHT functions; one introverted and extroverted variant for iNtuition, Sensing, Thinking and Feeling, which are commonly denoted by the function’s initial (except for iNtuition, which uses N) in uppercase and a lowercase letter to signal introversion or extroversion (so Fi, for example, would be Introverted Feeling). i’m not going to go too in depth about the functions themselves to not make this more of a wall of text than it already is, but feel free to learn more about them by literally just googling “mbti functions”. the names of the types are actually not used to indicate the dominant aspects of a personality as if they were axes, instead, they are used to showcase a structure (you could describe it as a sort of hierarchy) that explains how each of the functions is present in someone and how they relate to each other.

Idk, it probably is bullshit, but when I first took it and read up on INTP, it was chilling how accurate it was. Later, I moved school to somewhere where I wasn’t bullied and got a lot more confident, and when I took the test again I got ENTP. Seems mostly accurate to me, there are some places where I don’t fit exactly, but that’s to be expected.

Big surprise, Jungian types and functions have no predictive power because they’ve never been properly used to make the right types of predictions one would try to predict in empirical models. The descriptive and explanatory power is strong enough you don’t explicitly need to do it to realize Jung pointed out something ostensibly true. You might as well put the entirety of psychology in the same conceptual universe as astrology at this point; I mean for example, where’s the evidence that extraversion in the big 5 model even exists? The mere fact that this article is primarily debunking MBTI rather than Jung’s hypothesis which is at the core simply demonstrates that you don’t really understand it. Yes, MBTI archetypes are mostly irrelevant and untrue, but they’re rooted in Jung and thus if you want to try to debunk his hypothesis you should be attacking that. But the point is, because we know that Jung was correct in some capacity it thus means automatically that MBTI HAS to be at the very least partially true and that it is fine to be used in a very basic sense. Astrology isn’t rooted in anything true whatsoever, so clearly these fields should not be compared unless the point is that the individual in question is either confused or wants to present their dislike for a system which is disingenuous if you’re a serious philosopher or scientist.

I completely agree with all of this, maybe save for The Self being an illusion, but what I don’t understand is why people don’t see modern Psychology as a more convoluted iteration of the old kind. People look at the general continence of others, ask generalized questions, and get assigned a flavor of maladaptivity as a label by someone who only sees those others in one single context. As someone who dissociates a lot I’ve come to see just how shambled together the psychological diagnostic process is first-hand. I go into a psychiatrist office, enter as “psychiatrist office me” where I think everything’s fine and if something’s up I’ll hear you out, and then I walk out as “just finished a psych appointment me” and immediately recall all the important stuff I totally should have mentioned. If Psychiatry were in any way objective it wouldn’t require witness testimony because there’s ridiculous proof that witness testimony is some of the worst evidence to use in a court case. (The fallibility of memory in judicial processes: lessons from the past and their modern consequences, 2015), (Semantic integration of verbal information into a visual memory, 1978) & (RE-EVALUATING THE CREDIBILITY OF EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY: THE MISINFORMATION EFFECT AND THE OVERCRITICAL JUROR, 2018) So it’s basically Phrenology with general continence and generalized answers to |psych|ic cold calls instead of head shape. It’s essentially the state religion and practitioners get ordained by college education.

I wad already skeptical of it, but what kept me taking a little more seriously than I should have taken it was some lines that felt calling me out, that i didn’t and don’t think people have in common with me, like it said in my test that “people with my personality type embrace terms like nerd and bookworm”, which is kinda true. It had some very accurate parts, but most of it made me skeptical. I also got to reading about other personality types, because I thought I wasn’t really giving accurate answers, that’s why it didn’t give me completely accurate results, and as I read the others, I could relate my experiences to most of them to some level that was higher than 50%, that also made me skeptical. So yeah, thanks for confirming my skepticism.

Let me first note I prefer the HEXACO/OCEAN model, lest anyone assume that I am an acolyte of the MBTI. These are just some concerns I have with your arguments. 00:00 I don’t think you gave a definition of personality once in this article. If you’re going to discuss a thing, first define the thing. Per the APA personality is “the enduring configuration of characteristics and behavior that comprises an individual’s unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns.” 00:58 people at the edge of a new scientific field are almost never educated in that field; this was particularly true in the first fifty years of psychology as an identified field distinct from medicine. 2:37 yes, and psychology in practice (that is, the art of helping people with non-physical suffering) is largely philosophical to this day. Yes, there is great value in CBT/DBT and other more scientific modes, but philosophy undergirds everything, and vast amounts of “scientific” psychological literature is edge-tinkering abstraction which never makes it to the chair session. Both science and philosophy are necessary but insufficient conditions for the practical application of psychology. It also requires intuition and empathy, which cannot be taught. 4:05 oh dude, that’s the entire field. If you want to really dig into the unethical shenanigans in psychology, check out the replication crisis, the behavior of Fritz Perls or hell, Carl Rogers.

The only valid points I hear in this article are 1) how MBTI has limited types, only 16 of them, and they cannot describe every person accurately. Which is true. but to be honest even Big 5 tries to generalise human emotions/behaviour to a degree. and obviously the more types there are the more accurate the generalisation is going to be. In that case that isn’t just a point that should be used to argue against MBTI 2) Any “psychology tests” should be taken with a grain of salt. Personality tests should describe the current you and possible assists in understanding the self, not prescribing behaviour and limiting the development of the self. Descriptions of MBTI types can use the Forer effect to make people believe that it is accurate and flattering, but it doesn’t quite explain why people assigned to the same type seem to display more relatable behaviour. I agree that we shouldn’t take MBTI too seriously, but I also think it was a bad idea to say that MBTI and astrology are essentially the same.

The biggest problem I could see in this article is how you perceive facts. Human mind is not open enough to respect/accept the things/phenomena we don’t understand. Be open-minded, maybe it is just not fact yet. Who knows. I used to make conclusions solely based on facts, now I think I am very open-minded but still consider astrology is……. for entertainment purposes only.

How could there be confirmation bias? When me and my parents and friends read our reports we saw alot of things that we didn’t like about ourselves, which I have now coke to accept, whereas before I was repressing those feelings because I thought I was insane. Bear in mind this whole time I had no clue what MBTI or personality types even were, but when I opened the test it was like reading an open book about myself, all of these feelings and thoughts I had accumulated over the years weren’t because I was lazy or crazy, it’s because I was an INTP, I have now learned to adapt myself to my environment according to how my personality functions, you should really give it a good go, don’t give into all the scientific jargon, psychology is still a fresh concept and we are yet to find out more about the way out minds work.

I understand why you think it’s not reliable but I always get the same results. Every single time. Every person who I’ve asked to take the test more than once with months in between got the same results each time. So I’d say that personality is a set of behaviors that we define ourselves by consistently choosing. Personality is a choice. A choice that most people usually choose to stick with. It’s probably the deepest preference since it’s internal not external. Take this for example: some babies cry a lot. Some don’t. Some are scared of everything and others are indifferent to most things. Some people are curious. Some are playful. We all know it’s not nurture and you believe it’s not nature. I propose that it’s choice. It’s mountains if behavioral choices we made so many times since birth. We’re so comfortable with our bundle that they’re not just things we do but who we are. Mbti is criticized for making people feel good about themselves as though people don’t choose their personality to feel good about themselves. It’s only useless in prediction because that’s not what it’s made for. It’s made to simplify how people relate to one another. It’s not a model for prediction but definition. You can’t judge the 5 factor and MBTI the same way since they serve different purposes. As for astrology, I don’t know much about it but I think it’s even worse for prediction and terrible at defining personality. I think people use it when they can’t trust their own judgement and it mostly works for them.

Nice article. I understand your will to be rationnal about it. Astrologie has absolutely no link with any kind of scientific abjectivity. MBTI is just a test to define personnality type and then it gives a list of caracteristics about it. Usefull for orientation purpose, and a nice social way to reconsider oneself. Especially nice and easy about the littarature around it. But their goal is to sell their test to the big companies, that’s what they got to sell. As long as it sells and people are interested in it, Youtubers may have clics on it, it will have a kind of buzz around it and some people are searching for all that gooey. Indeed the real thing is called Depth psychology. The Ego which is the personnality type given by the MBTI test (not even usefull) is only 1 side of the 4 sides of the mind. The real matter is the relation between those 16 cognitive fonctions underneath. The point is no one never take a look in that main core. Even if there lies the real interest in Personnality types. If you take a look at the whole thing, it makes perfect sens when describing the nature of people. That knowledge is very dynamic espacially compared with the big 5. From this point you may start to think about all the nurturing thing on the top.

I’m not a big proponent of either, but the span of time that astrology was taken very seriously by very intelligent people, such that they found it useful enough to keep around, makes me think that the archetypes are too quickly discarded and have some value. I think saying either is completely useless is overreaching.

*Can be astrology depending on what they choose to do with the information. MBTI is a descriptive measurement of one’s behavior. It’s only as true as the person taking it thinks it is provided they are honest with themselves hence the reason why the MBTI test can never be a predictive measurement. Astrology isn’t a descriptive measurement from the start like MBTI is, instead, it’s prescriptive. The axiom of your article title “MBTI is Basically Astrology” is a completely faulty because the base you are starting with, isn’t comparable at all. They are opposites by the nature of their functions.

They are not equally wrong or wrong in the exact same way. Mbti can be used as a quick way to say, I’m an introvert and I value logic. I’m INTP which is more accurate than some other result that someone has that indicates that they are an extrovert. Mbti can make predictions. You can predict how people answered the questions to their tests. One must be careful to not make decisions based on mbti for sure, blah blah blah. I’m not making the claim that it’s perfect, I’m making the claim that it’s completely different than astrology and it can make predictions and you can predict what type a person will be based on the answers they give. You can’t predict someone’s zodiac sign and there is absolutely no rationality to it. I can tell someone I’m an INTP and they will understand more about me. I am introverted and value cold logic over emotion.

“Arguments against mbti” -proceeds to state that a bunch of groups in the academia say it doesn’t work (them saying so makes it true, they have no self interest or bias and are, obviously, omniscient) -says that a lot of studies on mbti are biased to it because of who funded/conducted them (WOW apparently studies are always funded by someone, who has their own bias and interest) -psychoanalysis bad because academia said so (the ideas of Carl Jung are irrelevant, because modern science is, obviously, able to understand human mind because it’s science)

I really don’t see the connection of the two. Something that the article somehow omits. Astrology= Based on your birthday, and alignment of planets etc. More on mysticism, not science. MBTI= Based on your biases on how to gather information and solve problems on your daily life. I don’t see how these things are just equivalant to one another.