MBTI Is Pseudoscience

I'm not sure that you pinned down the idea of what pseudoscience is. Borrowing from Wikipedia, a definition I like is: A belief, claim, or practice, that presents itself as science but lacks supporting data and can't be reliably tested. A purposefully terrible claim for example, would be "the earth spins as long as there are asteroids in space". We obviously can't remove all the asteroids from space and see if the earth will stop spinning. We can't stop the earth to prove that it can cease to rotate despite all the asteroids in space. And we can't even detect all the asteroids in space to know if they are in fact present or not. Asteroids and earth's rotation seem to be independent according to one's common sense, but there's no way to test for a dependence so it's a pseudoscientific claim. --- You say that MBTI personality type provides an understanding of your skills and a list of recommended careers, and that this is an example of a concrete claim. An example of a skill would be interpersonal communication. I can just make up reasons off the top of my head why that could be so. Maybe people with strong Fe have good interpersonal communication. Maybe it's people who have one of the EXXX types. Maybe the rationals, the XNTX's, are good at interpersonal communication because they try to find purpose and pragmatism in having meetings and conversations. That's wishy-washy rather than concrete. WHY is it that certain types have certain skills? Also here's a list of careers suitable to my type, an INTP: Scientists Photographers Strategic Planners Mathematicians University Professor Computer Programmer Technical Writer Engineer Lawyer Judge Forensic Research Forestry and Park Ranger If this is a scientifically arrived at list, then can you explain why any of them are suitable for an INTP? Or do the same thing with any career list corresponding to any other type? --- The reason that alternate explanations tend to be common in pseudoscientific claims, is that there's generally a weak connection between the cause and effect in the pseudoscientific claim. Take the example of "the seasons happen because the goddess of summer goes away during the winter months, causing the land to cool down, and she returns in the summer bringing the heat back with her". Then of course someone notes that "When the northern hemisphere has winter, the southern hemisphere has summer and vice versa". So then the claim can be changed to "well obviously the goddess of summer leaves the northern hemisphere in December and goes to the southern hemisphere, and returns back to the northern hemisphere in June." The point is that when the claim fails to explain a natural phenomenon, it's just haphazardly modified as necessary. There's no rigour. The same sort of thing happened with my example of Allen the ENTJ up above, I don't think you really dealt with that. --- The results of MBTI tests are better than chance, but that's not enough to classify it as a full fledged science. I'll just use myself as an example. I know my type is INTP. In fact if I test as anything else that means the test is wrong. The reason I know my type is because it's just the one I identify with the most. No one is really sure what CAUSES a person to fit the description of one of the sixteen types. People just tend to identify with them. People tend to identify with various religions too, but there's nothing scientific about one guy being Christian or another guy being Muslim or another guy being atheist. That's just the view that they tend to identify themselves with. A scientific claim would be that their brains all send electrical pulses, or some other fact like that, you get what I'm saying. There's really no scientific basis as to why one person is a particular MBTI type, and another person is a different MBTI type. And it's hard to measure it, the only way we have to measure it with is by self-report. Which isn't a scientific way of arriving at conclusions because the person could answer however they wanted to. --- --- So besides the question above, here's a list of questions I have for you: (2) What is the mechanism or biological reason why certain people are certain types? (3) Is there any better way to test for MBTI type rather than just questionnaires? How do you quantify things like "prefer to be alone rather than in a group" - do you expect people to measure the hours that they are alone/in a group? (4) Is the preference stack always the same or does it vary depending on situation? For example, does an INTP always prefer to use Ti over Ne, Ne over Si, and Si over Fe? Or are there certain situations where an INTP might prefer to use Fe over Ti? Is the INTP still an INTP if they are at any given moment (if it is possible) preferring a stack such as Fe > Ne > Si > Ti? (5) Could there possibly be any more cognitive functions other than T, S, F and N? Are you sure that they are the only 4?