The Myers-Briggs Assessment
The Myers-Briggs assessment is a very limited approach to understanding someone’s personality. While I was answering the questions, it took me a while to think about exactly where I stood with the question, to help me do that I contextualized the question to my life. I faced another challenge with that though, was that I realized that I reacted to the same question differently in different situations. For example, when making a decision, I wouldn’t use emotion over reason all the time, it would depend on what the decision is about. Also, the person I am right in this moment might not be the person I am in a year, or a week, or even tomorrow morning. People frequently change based on experiences, emotions, and other ways of knowing which influence their lives in that moment. This is one crucial element not considered in this test. The person I describe in the test might not even be who I really am but the person I’d like to be, especially if this test is done for a job people would want to present themselves in the best way possible. Therefore, there are multiple biases which aren’t taken into account with this assessment.
Having said that, there are benefits to this test as well. It does give a general overview of the person, and if the tester could take all the biases in account when analyzing the results, stay one step ahead of the variables and control them, reliable results could be obtained. Another way is to do them overtime, such as once in a week for a few months and see which outcome is most repetitive. It is good when considering giving someone a job to get an overview of them, but again, the biases and other variables need to be controlled.
The results of the questionnaire were pretty accurate though. For the most part I would categorize myself as this personality they pointed out, but to an extent I thought it was too extreme, I feel like all people are a mix of these personalities throughout their lives rather than being one extreme of it.
Some contexts in which this type of questionnaire could used is in job dealings as mentioned earlier, but also on a marriage website through which people find the right person fir themselves. This could have a lot of negative implications as the person could again be lying about their true self and people might end up being emotionally hurt.