In Defense (?) of Categorical Thinking
My strange addiction: asking people for their Myers Briggs
I have a terrible compulsion (and it truly is a compulsion - I can’t stop myself from giving into it despite my certainty that it causes me to look extremely vapid) to ask everyone I talk to what their Myers Briggs is, which is only a modicum better than asking what their zodiac sign is (I love to do that, too), or actually maybe it’s worse. Because at least we’ve been conditioned to expect an astrological bent from women, and at least in some circumstances it can be passed off as charming. Like a girl in a smoky seventies bar. Fun and flirty. A little wink and nudge, I tell myself.
But no, in my heart of hearts I believe that Myers Briggs is certainly better to ask after than astrology, not only because I believe astrology is of the OCCULT (!!!), but because the Myers Briggs type is based on the results of a survey, and I believe in the power of statistics, psychometrics, and the idea that human behavior is measurable and ready to be packed up and categorized into quantifiable zones complete with shaded out 95% confidence intervals, as long as the proper disclaimer about sample sizes, biases, random error, variance, outliers, effect size and statistical power is mutually understood.
Only the problem is it is NOT mutually understood!
I forget, at these New York parties, surrounded by legal minds and literary stars and women with high verbal IQ, that I bring to the table a dozen-odd years of statistical thinking, and that in spite of the concurrent dozen-odd years of self-narrativization that only by the grace of God did I graduate with a degree in statistics, it holds true that a dozen-odd years of doing anything continually will form a little wrinkle in your brain, and that wrinkle will get deeper over time, even if it isn’t as deep as the weather-beaten wizened-up raisin brains of the statistics PhDs you work with day after day, year after year.
Ok Audrey no need to be humble - you’re a big brain stats genius. What does that have to do with Myers Briggs? Don’t tell me you’re going to defend it on a scientific basis!
All this to say I have no qualms about the pseudo-scientific hand-wavey Myers Briggs test. Statistics is much more amenable to vibes-based thinking than people assume, and with enough awareness of the limits of categorical models and survey biases, you can cultivate a hearty resilience towards criticisms of these kinds of personality tests. Indeed, I enjoy it very much as a party trick (more like a social crutch Audrey), as a way to get people to start talking about themselves, and yes, as a shortcut to getting to know people, or at least as a shortcut for smoothly communicating with them. I’ve found (broadly speaking) that NTJs will push me, NTPs will debate me, NFPs will cut to the chase, NFJs have to be seduced, SFJs have to be cajoled, STJs don’t like to be interrupted and SPs just want to do things. I barely need to ask for type these days, I just do out of boredom, to confirm my intuition and the judgments I’ve already formed. Of course I got along best with him, he’s an INTJ. Of course I accidentally offended her, she’s an ESFJ.
And so, I go to these parties. I get a little bored. I feel myself looking for a conversational lull. And then I say:
“Have you ever taken the Myers Briggs?” (idiot! stop asking that!)
While many people have and will readily tell me their result, more people have not and are more than happy to tell me why they scoff at it. My inability to refute the common refusals has bothered me for a long time. First of all, I am always starting off in a bad position, having already revealed myself as a midwit for virtue of liking Myers Briggs. Second of all, I am easily cowed by pushback on nearly anything I say, especially if it’s on the merit of science, and doubly so if it’s done at a party.
Here, for the first time, I will try to defend myself:
You know that test is not scientific at all. Aren’t you a statistician? Don’t you know that? The only truly scientific personality test is the Big Five
Not scientific? Well of course not. It’s a party trick. Also, the Big Five isn’t as fun. It isn’t as popular. They don’t make you take it in your MBA classes and workplace HR seminars. It doesn’t have a downstream system of sixteen well-defined personality types, motivating the inner narcissist to finish the test and see where the sorting hat placed them on the four forced-binary tendencies. As they say in my line of work, the best survey is one which is completed!
I can’t be categorized and I resent your attempt to try. I’m introverted at a party and I’m extroverted at home. My behavior is entirely context dependent. How boring to obligate all people to fit into little boxes. Plus the tests are so silly. They’re all different. The questions are biased and make no sense half the time. How can I choose between introversion and extroversion?
No one fits any category perfectly, since categories are by nature generalizations based on the behavior of many individuals. But we all have tendencies, and those tendencies show up over time and then you can say: well 90% of the time, Audrey tends to get uncomfortable when there’s an awkward silence in the conversation, and 95% of the time she gets uncomfortable she tends to talk to fill the space. Sometimes she doesn’t do that, but most of the time she does. With this tendency in mind, even the crudest test could pick up on the fact that most of the time, Audrey shows signs of extroversion.
Anyway, everyone categorizes everything all the time (RIP Kahneman). Sometimes the categories are wrong, but they help us understand the world a little better. As we learn more, we refine our models and try again. What’s wrong with acknowledging it? It bothers me very little that human behavior is able to be sorted, binned, and broadly defined, so long as there’s data backing up the process. I know very well that the scientific way to measure human behavior is to precisely control conditions, sample appropriately, conduct the right analyses and replicate the results over time and across circumstances, as the Big Five has done. That we can do this has nothing to do with the soul, with intelligence, with the immutable qualities of identity, with the complexities of the individual, with human value or any of the other countless things that really matter.
So what if you acknowledge it? People aren’t machines. It’s disrespectful to their humanity and individuality to take a shortcut to knowing them.
This is the question that gives me pause.
Of course a label is never a substitute for true friendship, the honor of earned intimacy. And of course any categorization of human behavior is problematic since it may lead to the view that individuals are the categories they identify with. It is true that I tend to befriend people with whom I share certain tendencies, but I tell myself this all would have happened regardless, and finding an imperfect vocabulary that matches the patterns I already brush up against is more satisfying than having no vocabulary at all. And that it’s just a bit of frivolity at a party.
It’s getting old though. It feels more like a juvenile social crutch, a holdover from days when I knew less about human nature than I do now. Days when I needed more certainty from my social world, needed icebreakers in place of connection. People become mellower as I age, the character traits that were too obvious to ignore in my youth are receding and years are beginning to reveal complexity I need new words for. I rail against effective accelerationists who view honesty as a shortcut to emotional intelligence and writers who seem to view the same trait as a shortcut to absolution. How is my own compulsion any different? Why waste time with party tricks confirming my prejudices when I can instead put myself to the side when I learn about others? Find a better way to relate, do things the hard way?
I’ll keep trying to hold back from asking but forgive me if I do. I’m an ENFP.
i’ve always dismissed mbti types as the equivalent of (oft-mocked) old buzzfeed “what loaf of bread are you” type shit but also it’s been delicious to take the quiz every couple of years, convinced that i have changed dramatically but seeing enfp every time. and enneagram 4, and maxxed out on agreeableness and neuroticism lol
It is kind of a party trick, but it's also just fun to get really good at guessing something. Figuring out people's MBTI types is rewarding just like any pattern-matching guessing game.
It's like guessing someone's accent or playing that online game where you figure out your location in Google Maps (I'm in the middle of a cornfield surrounded by jeeps... Nebraska?). There's no perfect algorithm really, just a bunch of little heuristics and a healthy dose of intuition. MBTI is not wholly statistically random -- there are some correlations it's mapping onto, and guessing MBTI is a game of holistically noticing lots of them!