If there's one thing that really yanks my piss-chain, it's the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test. If you're one of the several dozen people remaining who haven't been subjected to the MBTI, here's how it works. One day, some psychologists realized that unless they showed some practical social application of their so-called "science", the public would eventually clue in to the fact that the entire field is a big sham. Perhaps, they theorized, an angry populace might even rise up and revoke (violently, if necessary) their tenures! It was crunch time down in the dusty halls of charlatania, and the psychologists needed a winning formula to placate the boorish and illiterate public.
"Okay," one desperate psychologist said to the group, blowing little bits of scone from his gray-streaked beard, "try this on for size. We take the vast and fascinating range of human personality, the profound depths of the psych, and boil it down to four variables."
The other psychologists looked at him as if he'd just inadvertently switched the fourth and fifth Piagetian stages of human development. It would never work.
"Listen", the first psychologist continued, "it's all in the marketing. We'll convince personnel managers around the country that this test is a useful tool for helping employees understand each other. Their scores on the four bivariates will place them in one on sixteen subgroups. I see a day when professionals around the country take the test and share their encapsulated personality type with their coworkers in the name of encouraging respect for different working styles!"
"No, never!" burst out another psychologist. "No one will want to have their personality pigeon-holed like that. It's like asking to be stereotyped! It tells everyone around you to interpret your complex thoughts and actions based on the results of a simplistic paper-and-pencil test!"
"They'll eat it up," said a third psychologist, as the magnitude of the idea began to become clear to him, "because this test will promise them want they so frantically desire: to be understood. People endure miserable relationships, worship an indifferent diety, and wear t-shirts with silly slogans, all in desperate hopes that somewhere, somehow, someone will understand them. We can deliver it in twenty minutes around a conference room table. If it shaves a few conceptual corners on the way, who cares? It will make a nice ice-breaker."
Based on this concept, the psychologists designed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The MBTI has four bivariates: Introversion/Extroversion, iNtuition/Sensing, Thinking/Feeling, Perception/Judging. Each trait defines one end of a linear scale; for example, your score will fall somewhere between Thinking and Feeling, rather than rating high on both traits. You can't, like some people I know, think and feel deeply, or think in some situations and feel in others, or you end up in the muddy space dead-center between the extremes, unclassifiable. This will cause no end to the consternation of co-workers, who were eager for an scientific explanation of why you're so fucked-up, and why (other than the obvious reason that you or they are morons) they have so much trouble dealing with you.
Following the psychologists' announcement, the MBTI became all the rage in workplaces and other dysfunctional environments in search of a quick fix. And that's why, in our modern day and age, my office is considering having everyone take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, and having us share our results with everyone else. Using the results of the test, I can henceforth base all my interpersonal interactions on that fact that I'm an ENFP and Cheryl is an INFJ. A perfectly harmless substitution for dealing with the complex reality of coping with the innumerable variables which affect every individual's thoughts and feelings.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is not just a harmless ice-breaker, but a shoddy piece of pseudo-humanist pop-psych. It claims the lofty goal of helping us understand each other, yet panders to our weakness for easy explanations and stereotypes. It jams otherwise-fascinating personalities into narrow slots, and tells us we don't have to try any harder than that to learn what we need to know from each other. It amazes me that, in a time when we struggle to dismantle our stereotypes of those around us, we willingly endorse yet another facile and simplistic dismissal of our own diversity. I won't allow my coworkers or anyone else to get at my brain with this blunt and clumsy instrument.