The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless
Personality typing is obviously incredibly shaky ground because of the huge potential for the suggestion bias, but we shouldn&#x27;t throw out the baby with the bathwater. 
It&#x27;s almost obvious that there are patterns of human behaviour that are often distinctive and repetitive across society. It&#x27;s hard to identify these regularities and we should be sceptical about any blatant simplifications, but we shouldn&#x27;t stop trying to understand them.<p>There is another personality typing method called Enneagram, that takes a more interesting approach than static M-B. Rather than attributing some essential properties to each person, it assumes that personality is formed by a set of cognitive habits. These habits condition our attention to pick specific aspects of experience and giving it interpretation in line with this bias. Most people use all of these 9 identified patterns, but one is dominant, and hence it defines what we perceive as personality.<p>These habits are mostly crystalised in childhood and depend on the environment and upbringing. Eg. when a child is punished at random without any consequence there&#x27;s a chance it will become type 8, on the other hand if there&#x27;s great deal of regularity and rules at home, it may and up as type 1 etc. Seems like a gross oversimplification, but it&#x27;s just an example of this type of conditioning.<p>The general approach seems legit (based on what we know about cognitive science), but what&#x27;s more important, learning about these 9 habits&#x2F;types usually leads to incredible insights into one&#x27;s behaviour. There&#x27;s lot of regularities that we suddenly find in our actions that fit specifically to one of these 9 types.<p>Unlike what article states about M-B, Ennegram mostly focuses on the dark, habitual and unconscious aspects of each personality, so it&#x27;s much less susceptible to the &quot;horoscope effect&quot; (where we&#x27;re more likely to attribute anything positive to ourselves).<p>I try to challenge it as much as possible, because as anything related to personality it may become a self fulfilling prophecy, but still I found it very hard to falsify, there&#x27;s just a lot of positive evidence.<p>Since there&#x27;s strong overrepresentation of rational thinkers on HN I&#x27;d love to hear some comments from anyone here who took Enneagram test or heard about it (there&#x27;s a lot of free tests on the internet).