I’m an INFP myself. I’ve heard that ESTJ is the primary personality type in the United States, which doesn’t surprise me because I find that I have very little in common with most people here in terms of my values and interests.
INTJ here. Sometimes dubbed Masterminds or Architects.
Less sociable.
Better working alone.
Will assume leadership if no one else will.
Pragmatic.
Logical.
Yeah, that fits me pretty well.
We’ve had polls on this before, but search isn’t revealing them for some odd reason.
INFP and the MBTI is not complete crap, but misused most of the time. It (should have) fuck-all to do with employment.
ISTJ, ISFJ, and ESFJ are just as common as ESTJ if not more common.
The good thing about the Meyer-Briggs test is that if you do it again chances are you will be an ESTJ.
I Something Something P
Strong introverted tendencies. Moderately towards perceiving. The others … pick any combination of the two since I’ve pretty close to the middle on both.
INTJ and I think I always score that way, but I just tried it again.
ISTP, apparently.
I’ve not done this test before, I never bothered as I’ve never really liked to be pigeonholed that neatly, but having read about it I have to say it does sum me up quite well.
I took the test once and managed to get 3 reports as I did a 3 way tie for the results. No idea now what they were but it seemed meaningless at the time.
I took this once as part of a workplace exercise and thought “What a pile of shit!”
I still think that way. Useless fucking crap.
ETA: It’s astrology, one level removed.
If that article were titled “Why the Myers-Briggs test is relatively useless” it would present an interesting debatable position. In fact, the title doesn’t match the content and leads me to treat the article and title as so much frothing-at-the-mouth.
Look, you ask the testee “Are you an introvert or an extrovert?” indirectly, with the question phrased various ways; at the end of the test you tell him whether he’s an introvert or an extrovert! You may be telling him what he already knows; and, whether he knew it or not, it may have little useful predictive power. But how is that comparable to astrology?
One complaint the article makes is that the four tested attributes are not bimodal: most people may be roughly halfway in between introvert and extrovert. And test results are usually given to represent that. For example, I score consistently as INTP but the P is weak: I’m almost an INTJ.
INTJ is relatively uncommon overall, but very common here at SDMB. So the test does have some predictive value: It reflects the likelihood a person will become a Doper … or at least a Doper who takes the Myers-Briggs test and reveals his result! 
One prediction some Myers-Briggs fans make is that opposites attract in intiimate relationships. This seemed to work in my case. After problems with INT women, I married an ESF … and we’re coming up on our Silver Anniversary.
INTP here. I have an academic background in psychometrics and I have taken the Myers-Briggs multiple time since I was a child. The results always came back the same. People think they are being clever when they say that psychological tests are like astrology but that isn’t true at all. Tests ranging from the Meyers-Briggs to IQ tests aren’t just made up by people on a whim. They are carefully design to differentiate people based on statistical analyses. The math behind them is extremely complex and sophisticated. The only room for debate is what they are actually measuring and how that translates into real world results.
The Meyers-Briggs is a very old test but its venerability speaks well to its current day relevance even though it is probably far from perfect. In my case, my INTP rating accurately predicted my career path even though it didn’t exist when the test was originally written.
As septimus notes, certain personality types according the Meyers-Briggs are vastly over represented on the SDMB especially INTP and INTJ which are rather rare in the general population. If it was just a crap shoot, you wouldn’t see such clustering.
Extroverts outnumber introverts in the real world (much to my disgust) but you will find that most people here have a Meyers-Brigg type that starts with an ‘I’.
And the results are OF COURSE useless if the only reason you know your type is because you did an online test you learned about by following a Facebook post. Unless you have taken it from a legitimate source (which HR might not be), its reliability and validity are questionable. The MBTI is * relatively* good here. You might get ESFJ one time and ESFP another, but it shouldn’t completely change. The results IIRC tell you how strongly you score on each (my IN is stable, the F and especially P is not as strong)
This is a terrible argument. I hope there is no need to explain why.
Bottom line: there is little if any substantive scientific legitimacy to the test and ratings.
I think you do need to explain exactly why. It gets very tiring trying to explain to people in a paragraph or two what psychometrics is all about because there is a whole lot of general ignorance and confusion about it. Do you truly understand psychometrics and the sophisticated statistics behind the tests or are you just throwing out an opinion? The field certainly has its issues to work on but it is very mathematically based and theoretical.
Real bottom line: We know that tests like this are measuring something that differentiates individuals because those results meet every qualification of a scientific test. We can argue what those results translate into real world results just like doctors can have different opinions about various health test numbers but that doesn’t mean that the test themselves are just spewing out random results.
I never claimed that the Meyers-Briggs was perfect but it isn’t a horoscope either. Psychologists have taken lots of samples of the various personality types and correlated them with various outcomes and behaviors. Many of the correlations are extremely strong even for the rare personality types. As noted, we have way too many INTP and INTJ results here to be the result of chance. Reading about my own INTP results, it accurately predicted everything and, unlike a horoscope, much of it was unambiguously negative.
The theoretical and statistical foundation of psychometric research is extremely strong. If research psychologists can combine that with the power of technology on a very large scale to refine the predictive models, you will see some impressive results in the upcoming years. Everyone likes to think of themselves as completely unique but that isn’t really true as we all know when we look outward to others. There are a finite number of general ‘types’. The goal of such tests is to figure out a way statistically to differentiate between the types at the desired level of granularity.
I took the test 20 years ago, and came out an INTJ.
Took it again now, 20 years later; still an INTJ.
Intj, though the t wavers.
INFJ-T The Advocate.
Always searching for authenticity. Yep, that’s me.
I had not ever heard of this test before. So I took the test INTJ-A The Architect
For a woman, less than .8% of the population are INTJ. That’s interesting and does explain why I don’t really relate to anybody.
I know the feeling.
Do you have a link to the version you took? I’ve done the myers-briggs and variants a few times over the years and I usually come out as INTJ though the ‘N’ is weak and occassionally shades over into ‘S’.
I also did a team-building work day last year which was based around a variant of the myers-brigg framework. It was an embarrassing, awkward and annoying day but actually quite interesting in places.
At one point the person running the day had us all stand in a line and move forward or backwards depending on whether we agreed or disagreed with various statements, one series of which went along the lines of for example, “If you are a manager dealing with an interpersonal dispute at work do you come to a decision based on (a) an impartial analysis of the facts or (b) how you feel about each person in question.”
I was amazed when most people, including the actual managers, mostly selected the (b) options, and it really explained a lot.
Why I hate working in an office environment mostly.