user: I recently took an MBTI personality test - which came back as me being an INTJ. Typically, we are known to often be falsely understood as rude, even when our intentions are not nefarious at all. Should I try to improve? Should I trust personality tests?

assistant: As a language model AI, I don't have personal opinions, but I can provide you with some information.

Personality tests, including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), can be useful in providing insight into one's personality traits and tendencies. However, it's important to keep in mind that these tests are not a perfect representation of who a person is and should not be used to make important decisions or label oneself.

If you feel that people are misinterpreting your intentions, it's always a good idea to communicate clearly and openly with others to ensure that your message is received in the way that you intended. Improving one's communication skills can help with avoiding misunderstandings and making stronger connections with others.

It's also worth considering that people may have different perceptions and interpretations of the same situation, and it's important to be open to feedback and to work on being more mindful of others' feelings and perspectives.

In conclusion, while taking personality tests can be an interesting and informative experience, it's important to approach the results with a critical and open mind, and not to use them as a definitive label or an excuse for behaviour.

user: I've heard that the Myer Briggs personality test is not scientifically validated, you comment on its scientific validity.

assistant: The Myers-Briggs type indicator, while popular, is widely regarded as pseudoscience by psychologists. The two people that came up with the test, Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers were a mother and daughter from the US that were both home schooled and did not have a degree in psychology. The biggest problem with the MBTI is that it provides a binary classification for personality traits that are a spectrum; you would expect most people to be close to the middle of said spectrum rather than the edges. It is more sensible to assign people a numerical value on some axis, for example telling them that they are a 6 on a scale from 1 to 10 when it comes to extroversion.

Another problem is that a good measure for personality traits should be uncorrelated. In simple terms this means that knowing the value for any one of the scales of the MBTI should not give you any information about the values for the other scales. However, it turns out that the various scales of the MBTI are correlated which means that a single scale can only be sensibly interpreted in careful context of all other correlated scales. In the worst case it could even mean that the various scales do not actually measure different things but are just different names for the same things.

An alternative to the MBTI that is more widely accepted by psychologists (but is still not uncontroversial) are the Big Five personality traits. In very simple terms those traits are:

* Openness to experience: Whether you like to do or try new things.
* Conscientiousness: Whether you're a hard worker that is careful and diligent or whether you're more relaxed.
* Extraversion: Whether you prefer an intense experience with a lot of people or a quiet experience with few people.
* Agreeableness: Whether you prefer cooperating with others or getting your own way.
* Neuroticism: Whether you tend to feel bad emotions like anxiety or fear when exposed to stress.

A test for these traits will put you somewhere on the spectrum for each trait. I hope you found this helpful! Do you have any other questions or do you want me to into more detail about something that I talked about?