Lolcowery/Drama brewing in r/MBTIpersonality testing thread goes somewhat nuts

The fuck is an MBTI

 

Why is there a subreddit on a Facebook quiz

 

psychology as a whole is mostly quackery and borderline pseudoscience tbh tbh

 

That's what I was going to fucking post

I know every single tumblerina and twitter user posts their MBTI on their descriptions, but, how the fuck do you make a community out of this?

 

The same way people base relationships on zodiac pseudoscience.
"Oh you're a ABC? Well I'm an XYZ and this online quiz says we should be best friends. But DEF people are bad evil people so avoid them." Which spirals into the mess you see in the OP.

 

Honestly I don't think they would care even if it was voodoo runes invented by ancient mayans, they just need something that validates their autistic impulse to label and categorize everything.

 

People take MBTI very seriously. I have seen some people make assumptions over these shit Facebook quiz labels

The biggest spergs out of the group are INFJs, who think they're all supergeniuses. They have an entire forum dedicated to the INFJ lifestyle. Here, these superior beings talk about not understanding why they constantly get friendzoned:


Or how their MBTI type correlates with their immune system:


And "Does being an INFJ correlate with autism?":

 

these are more fun to joke about than other zodiacs but they are basically zodiacs.

 

I wonder why psychology in specific attracts so much bullshit. You have to search for psychologists that actually uses proven methods like CBT.

 

It's still a relatively new field that's only existed since the early 1900's, a lot of sciences seem to take 200+ years before they start actually filtering out most of the bullshit.

 

Whats an INFJ?

 

MBTI is, as others have said, pseudo-science that claims to sort you into a label (or a set of labels, in this case) that can tell you abstract things about yourself, like you'd be best at a job involving interacting with people, if you'd be a good leader, are naturally artistic, etc. It's more of a glorified Tiger Beat quiz than horoscopes, but people treat their MBTI like they would a zodiac sign. MBTI then becomes something that people start to base their lives around and use as a barometer for compatibility with others, like certain zodiac signs have affinity for others (supposedly)

Taking the test has your answers plotted on 4 different spectrums that are essentially dichotomous, and when you're finished, you get four letters correlating to where you landed on each spectrum.

The first set is introverted (I) vs. extroverted (E), the second is sensing (S) vs. intuition (N), the third is thinking (T) vs. feeling (F), and the fourth is judging (J) vs. perceiving (P). There are 16 possible outcomes from this, and some people take this shit way too far, despite it being just as much as an insight into your person as the "What kind of person are you in the bedroom?" quiz in a Cosmopolitan magazine. So a person who scored a 75% on introvert (0%) vs. extrovert (100%) would be assigned an "E".

Thus an "INFJ" is someone who scored majority Introverted, Intuition, Feeling, and Judging. I tried my best to give the basics of the whole thing, but this page goes into more detail without drowning you in word salad.

What's more important are the results. From the same website, here's the profile of what a common INFJ person would be like. It's just like reading a horoscope, with phrases like "self-expression comes more easily to INFJs on paper, as they tend to have strong writing skills", "INFJs are generally well-suited to the 'inspirational' professions", and "INFJs are champions of the oppressed and downtrodden".

So a random sperg who gets INFJ as his result will start taking ideas like that as gospel and suddenly sees himself as this beacon of justice, even though he's never done anything heroic in his life.

 

This "IFPJ" (or whatever) crap is obnoxious as all fuck- It's like the navel-gazing bullshit of star signs, plus the self importance and responsibility-ducking of self-diagnosed psych issues, dressed up with needless jargon and insider terminology.

Also it's a huge autism-magnet, with all the catagorizing and over-analyzing and ready-made excuses for being socially dysfunctional. It's like the interpersonal equivalent of the kid who obsessively lines up his Matchbox cars according to color and size, or something.

 

Actual psychology major here, the MBTI has been proven in the world of academia to lack any real reliability or validity at all. Big 5 is way better with that regard. And I've learned from actual research professors.

 

I feel ashamed for knowing this stuff. Still, I'm going to point out that most people consider the cognitive functions entirely distinct from the MBTI percentage letters system, which has led to a lot of ridiculous slapfights on that sub/PerC/wherever the spergs hang out about whose pseudoscientific system is better.

 

The main thing I've noticed with the MBTI is that most internet people will wear their Introversion as a badge of honour. Many of them also treat people who are Extroverted as 'the popular kids' and therefore as if they're vapid and/or bullies.

Celebrating your Myers-Briggs beginning with an I used to be a very Tumblr/LiveJournal thing, until merely being an introvert wasn't enough and you also had to be all the other mental bullshit to keep up your special snowflake status.