I’ll check - She doesn’t have email, but I’ll be seeing her tomorrow evening.
IIRC, it is hard to do ‘control’ studies on anything that is self-assessed. How would you identify a control group? Have people take it who don’t know who they are? Or controlling for perception of outcome by telling people the wrong type and seeing if they agree with it?
More to the point, many people find it useful. I’m sure some people get bad test results (my friend indicated that once you KNOW M-B, testing becomes inaccurate, because you are more prone to fudging answers toward the type you’d LIKE to be).
It reminds me to a significant degree of ‘getting your colors done’ - IF the results are reasonably accurate, yes, you will be able to identify colors that don’t conflict with your natural coloring. But that doesn’t mean you necessarily look like crap in other colors, nor that everyone with the same color ‘season’ will look as good in the same colors as you do. is it based on scientific evidence? Sure - visual perception/color theory has been around for HOW LONG? If you contrast certain colors, the ‘apparent’ hue of one or the other color may shift. Yellow next to orange ‘appears’ to be a different color than yellow next to white, even though ‘technically’ the color yellow is identical. The color of your teeth near something orange will look different than the color of your teeth near somthing purple, etc. USEFUL, but you live by far more than JUST what type you are, JUST what color season you are.
M-B is based on observational typing. Is it accurate? I would say ‘reasonably’ based on my EXPERIENCES only. Far more accurate than any other kind of typing I’ve encountered (some of my honors psych classes explored all SORTS of typing…). Should it be the FOUNDATION of how you deal with anyone, work or otherwise? Should you rely on that exclusively? Definitely not.
There are a lot of other factors that are relevant to how people relate. Still, I’ve only seen it used to enhance someone’s understanding of others. It provides a set of terms that are defined in very specific ways, so are less open to interpretation on an individual basis. That means that my manager, who finds one of my co-workers REALLY annoying, can apply the terms of M-B to this woman, and grasp that 1) the trait that annoys her is the opposite of her own (and therefore is probably not ‘bad’ just way different from how she does things), and 2) there is value to the trait that seems so annoying. Since management and assessment for promotion is usually HIGHLY subjective, it is a real advantage to have what would be otherwise annoying traits valued without judgement (or at least with LESS judgement!). This is why M-B (and a bazillion other methods) are used for analyzing personality types and traits in the workplace. In a very fuzzy world (management) it makes things a bit more objective. When management becomes perfectly scientific, I am going home. I like things to be reasonably balanced - neither a strict accounting of number of words written, nor a popularity contest.
Ofuscarist, I will ask to see if there are any controlled studies. I doubt it. However, JUST because they may not exist does not mean it doesn’t work. Most of medical science has (up to the last few decades) been discovered by observation and trial and error. Yes, there’s some utter garbage that resulted, but there are also a LOT of accurate things. The lack of a controlled trial does not NECESSARILY nullify the accuracy of the results. It just suggests we proceed with caution. I suggest you store it in the ‘theory’ rather than ‘fact’ box, along with everything else non-biomedical in psychology.
