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Why use MBTI when OCEAN is available and makes better predictions? And how is the Fi/Fe dichotomy different from just Agreeableness?
Because MBTI (or you could say more generally, "Jungian typology") is a language for talking about internal phenomenological experience; it's not a tool for making behavioral predictions (although behavior is obviously correlated in an important way with internal phenomenology). OCEAN could perfectly predict all human behavior for the rest of time, while also simultaneously telling us nothing about what it actually feels like to be a given individual, from the inside.
See the other reply I just wrote for some examples.
There's certainly a high degree of overlap, yes. The biggest difference is that I've here proposed a(n admittedly highly speculative) mechanism that helps explain why some people are highly agreeable and some are not, along with an attendant phenomenological account of what being an agreeable or disagreeable person feels like from the inside. And furthermore MBTI makes additional predictions about Fe and Fi being correlated with other (rather specific) psychological and personality traits, instead of simply treating it as an isolated and free-floating random variable.
I'm very skeptical, on Hansonian grounds.
I'm skeptical that there's a rigorous way to show a difference between really experiencing something vs. claiming to experience it for the evolutionary advantage.
What are those predictions? And how are they validated or falsified? If not by behavior, then what? I would expect that any correlation with other psychological and personality traits would fall out of the analysis that produced OCEAN.
I of course knew that in many cases, we would quickly run into this issue of a fundamental difference in perspective. Which is perfectly fine. Not everything has to be for everyone.
First-person subjective experience exists. Almost all materialists will acknowledge that humans are not pure behavioral black boxes, but instead they also have subjective experiences that accompany their behavior. These subjective experiences are, in principle, not directly observable by anyone except the person who is having the experience. You know what red looks like, and you know what blue looks like, and you know how they're different, but I can never be 100% sure that your red is the same as my red, nor could you put your experience of red and blue into words that would communicate the experience to someone who has been blind since birth. You can only describe the experience of red in relative terms ("a very dark shade of red") to people who already have some sort of shared subjective experience with you that they can use as a starting point.
I have my own subjective experiences, and other people have theirs, and it seems clear enough that these do not always align. Individual variation in subjective experience is intrinsically interesting and worth studying in its own right. Since we can't actually observe the subjective experience of another individual, we have to ask them to talk about it instead. This will always be fraught with dangers, as there are numerous philosophical problems regarding the nature of introspection and the extent of its reliability (this was essentially the founding problem of the psychoanalytic tradition, of which Jung was a follower), but, since the pressing nature of the inquiry cannot be ignored and we have to start somewhere, we ultimately have to start with the only tools we have, which are introspection and linguistic communication.
If you disagree with any of the above, then Jung's thought is simply not for you. And that's ok! You are encouraged to instead pursue matters that you find more fruitful and useful.
Quite a number, but probably the most basic and obvious one is that "introverted feeling" is always paired with "extroverted thinking", which is characterized by a number of traits that center around themes of: driven to use thought as a utilitarian tool to attain tangible, real-world results; low tolerance for theoretical speculation that does not make an attempt to ground itself in "consensus" truth, whether that "consensus" be the facts of empirical reality as observed by the subject, or a religious tradition, or the consensus of the scientific community, or any other source of truth that lies outside the subject; a greater subjective need to have one's own beliefs and opinions grounded in such sources of consensus truth. And "extroverted feeling" is always paired with "introverted thinking" which would be, well, something of the opposite. I am aware that these traits sound somewhat behaviorist, and they are, but you still ultimately have to do a phenomenological analysis to determine whether any given action was performed or any given belief was held for an "extroverted thinking" reason or an "introverted thinking" reason.
By phenomenological introspection.
OCEAN deals with behavior and MBTI deals with phenomenology. MBTI unavoidably does make some behavioral predictions, and if it's wildly inaccurate in those predictions then that would be a problem worth knowing about, but ultimately at the end of the day the decisive factor for the theory is the phenomenology, which empirical psychology does its best to studiously avoid.
If your primary criticism is "MBTI is not empirical science", then yes, I completely agree with you. None of this is empirical science and I do not intend in any way to misrepresent it as empirical science.
I don’t think the Hansonian argument is about there being no subjective experience. Hanson’s arguments emphasize that there are some emotions and thoughts that we are not fully aware of because it is better not to know.
For example, you may brag to increase your status, but your brain avoids noticing that you are trying to do that because bragging is socially discouraged.
The same ideas can apply to your perception of your own personality or any part of your subjective experience.
...Yes, that was the foundation of Freud's entire body of thought. Jung was a close associate of Freud's in the early part of his career. He was intimately aware of all these issues. (Hanson thinking that he's providing an original insight here is a bit like someone walking up to an engineer who's knee deep in troubleshooting a critical production issue and asking them, "have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?")
Although the problems of introspection are extremely complex, it's also clear that people are able to successfully introspect on certain things at least some of the time. Otherwise, they would never be able to accurately report their own emotional states, they would never be able to tell you any of their stable preferences or dispositions, they would never be able to accurately report on biographical memories, and in short, it's hard to see how interpersonal interaction could ever function at all. So, keeping in mind that introspection will sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, we have to simply dive in and get started, and address individual problems as they arise.
There are certain well known biases in the MBTI community, in particular it's common for people to mistype themselves as INxx types because these types are seen as the most "intellectual" (which is, well, one way of putting it I suppose. Personally I think that the INxx types all represent distinct flavors of autism spectrum disorders, or at least they represent personality types that are "on the way" to autism spectrum disorders). But there are many other cases where people are honest about their own traits and honest about their own strengths and weaknesses.
So it is not as big a deal as one might think. Got it.
I agree that there is a lot of information in reports of subjective experience, I think most people would agree. Some people are mistakenly believed to disagree with this just because they believe that it is easy to be led astray by such information.
Can I ask for a recommendation on Freud and/or Jung here? I have never tried to read them, and my knowledge comes only from popular depictions (which seem to be unfair, tbh). I did read The Denial of Death, which made quite a bit of sense to me. What’s the best way to learn about the work of Freud or Jung for someone who is worried about it being just woo but willing to give it a chance?
Well, no, it's... a very big deal. It's the deal. But asking for a comprehensive explanation of how psychoanalysis relates to introspection and the problems thereof is kind of like asking "what does physics say about matter and how it moves?" How much time you got?
For listening material, and also probably the easiest place to start: look at the backlog of episodes for the Why Theory podcast, pick one that interests you (quite a few of them specifically analyze different works by Freud and Lacan), and just dig in. (Lacan was another important psychoanalytic thinker who took himself to be developing and expanding upon the work of Freud.) They're fun to listen to and they usually stay relatively grounded in terms of concrete examples.
For reading material:
For Freud, many of his works are self-contained and you can start almost anywhere, although I'm fond of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Totem and Taboo.
The book that actually turned me onto psychoanalysis in the first place was Bruce Fink's A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. It... does have a decent amount of woo jargon, but as the name implies, it's focused on showing how psychoanalysis works in a clinical setting, so you can skip the theory parts if you want and just read the case studies, if you want to get an idea of how this stuff actually works as a therapeutic practice using real life stories.
The Jung book that MBTI was based on is called Psychological Types.
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