The Racist Undertones and Casteist Implications of MBTI
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, is often used to adjudicate characteristic traits in a prospective employee, or to recruit resources for a project. Borne of infantile classical psychology hypotheses of the likes of Carl Jung and Rorschach (not to be confused with Alan Moore’s brilliant character from Watchmen), the critiques of which — from the perspective of modern cognitive sciences — exist aplenty, few dwell upon the disastrous consequences of its racist undertones as a means of filtration, or segregation, if ever it gets adopted into the mainstream.
I’m a staunch believer in the dynamism of human nature, rejecting evaluations that typify people into fixed molds. Cognitive behavior is a spectra phenomenon that can never be divorced from its contextual underpinnings. Based on some subjective experiences, humans can easily be fooled, rather conditioned, into believing that the behavioral responses they elicit are in response to a predisposed characteristic trait that defines their personality. Given new stimuli, a behavioral response can easily be altered.
Behavioral response is contextual in nature — it is not cast in stone.
What intrigues me the most is why people, some fairly intelligent ones, get smitten by it. Recently, I was enraged while reviewing the contingency backfills for resources in a project’s critical path analysis plan — the team lead had indicated the desired MBTI classes for the backfill resources. At another instance, a good friend — whom I highly regard for her intellect — exuberantly asked me of my MBTI classification, which I found akin to asking me of my Zodiac sign. The analogy is not out of place. A belief in Zodiac predictions is not radically different from a belief in the MBTI classifications.
Read any Zodiac prediction and you can always seek some semblance to the events in your life, assuming it to be true. Ditto for MBTI.
The “assumed accuracy” of MBTI
But why do people get so enamored by MBTI? Perhaps because the results mimic their assessment of themselves (one’s behavioral traits), driving them to be in awe of an “assumed accuracy” of the MBTI analysis. I’ve asked many friends and colleagues who swear by it for this very reason, the perceived accuracy. It’s a simple case of confirmation bias — the MBTI type just conforms to their beliefs, their conclusions from their self-assessment.
Let’s analyze this “assumed accuracy” through an example. At a restaurant, you are asked to fill a simple form:
- One of the questions asks you to select (from radio buttons, let’s assume) your preferred frappe shake. The options are Chocolate, Strawberry, or Pineapple. You select Chocolate.
- Another question asks you to select your preferred cake-based dessert. The options are Chocolate Chip, Vanilla, or Tutti-frutti. You select Chocolate Chip.
- Then, a few months down the line, they offer you a massive discount with an all-that-you-can-eat, “surprise” ice cream for dessert. The surprise flavor turns out to be chocolate, and you go gaga over the accuracy of the restaurant’s predictive analytics, on how they caught the pulse of your taste buds.
Well, I’m sorry to break it to you, based on the responses to that form, you just laid it out on a platter for them to evaluate how you’d prefer chocolate ice cream. Of course, one could have a stronger preference for butterscotch ice cream, as I do, but guessing that you’d at least not dislike chocolate ice cream, given how you prefer a chocolate frappe as well as a chocolate-chip cake, is a conclusion that is not hard to arrive at. It’s almost akin to reverse-priming the machine to predict that chocolate ice cream would not be an out-of-whack choice for you.
The MBTI questionnaire may not appear to be as simple as the literal selection of one’s gustatory preferences, but it’s the same thing. You yourself lay it out on a platter for the system to evaluate, allowing it to hand out your self-assessment back to you! It doesn’t seem that apparent as the semantics of the questions may trick you into not discerning them with scrutiny. It’s like a magic trick.
And I haven’t even touched upon other critical aspects, such as:
- MBTI’s foundational biases that presuppose the truth in a recursive, logical fallacy of circular reasoning — that if you chose behavior X, you are type Y. But this X leading to Y has no grounding to begin with,* it’s just a flimsy and anecdotal opinion-based association.
- Also, most questions of MBTI-derived tests include the error of calibration or instrumentation. Binary options may not be problematic (from the perspective of calibration).** However, marking on a range of answers, e.g., on a scale from 1 to 10, is full of inaccuracies. How would you distinguish a 7 from an 8? A range of non-binary text options, too, constitutes similar ambiguities.
Just because the questionnaire list is extensive, and the aggregation of the results resorts to some statistical methods, it does not make MBTI any different from the frivolous Facebook games that associate your personality with that of celebrities, driving engagement for Facebook via silly shares on people’s timelines. Many people undertake an MBTI evaluation for purely recreational purposes, just like indulging in Zodiac predictions, which may seem benign and harmless, but often end up in creating some deep-seated biases.
The only reason some L&D (learning and development) companies root for it, defending it tooth and nail, is the revenue it fetches them — the very raison d’etre — which runs into millions.
Slippery-slope or erring on the side of caution
It’s high time that MBTI evaluations, in the corporate world, got laid to rest six-feet under. Especially, given the casteist implications of MBTI categorization — casteism being a subset of racism. But am I starting on a slippery-slope argument, as pointed out by my good friend? Well, no! I’m just erring on the side of caution. We just need to look at the discriminatory Hindu varna system, or the caste system, that segregates and classifies people based on their birth, assuming predisposed qualities while ignoring acquired skills and interests. The Indian society is still reeling under this regressive system, which now further perpetuates through affirmative action. While it is easy to dismiss the varna system as regressive and discriminatory, the pseudo-psychology and statistical methods of MBTI make it seem a bit exotic, though it holds the same potential if it ever snowballs into corporate-wide acceptance.
Imagine how ugly it’d get if a company advertised that it only wants Brahmins, or Shudras, for a certain vacancy. If MBTI gets used in the same vein, it’d be no different.
In a nutshell, if you’re an HR recruiter, or a program manager filling in on your project’s resources, stick to testing candidates on the required job-based skills.
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* MBTI mapping is not based on any data from controlled trials.
** Even a simple yes-no or true-false binary response presupposes correct self-assessment from the user, and, therefore, is not necessarily correct.
[Disclaimer: The menu options described in the example, i.e., frappes, cake-based desserts, and ice cream, are strictly vegan. And, yes, vegan butterscotch ice creams exist.]
