If introverts feel drained by social interaction and extroverts are energized by social interaction, I think it is fair to say introverts would tend to be less interested in people than extroverts. It's hard to be terribly interested in something you find physically draining.

I only find people interesting from an anthropological perspective. Interacting with them all the time is not fun for me. But I can still read tells fine as I don't need to be genuinely interested in or energized by someone to analyze their behavior.

There's really not that much social stimulation at the poker table. Not in the games I play. It's pretty typical for nobody to be talking to each other or just a couple people talking to each other while the rest are listening to music or whatever.

Well it’s not thinking they find draining, it’s being around people. Maybe they even have a higher affinity if not capacity for thought, their preference for analyzing behavior being arbitrary.

One of the most frustrating aspects of psychology is how loose the definitions are and its un-testability.

Introverts can be very interested in people just not in spending extended periods of time with them. In fact introverts are usually much better at in depth conversation than extroverts are. That's why we tend to prefer having coffee with a friend than attending a cocktail party. I enjoy talking with people about their lives (for about an hour or so) but I hate the prolonged periods of superficial chit-chat and small talk at parties.

Thinking is draining for everyone, introvert or extrovert. But when introverts are tired the last thing we want is to be around people.

I agree, in fact being introvert means enjoying himself's company.

The Myers Briggs is akin to the "fun what's your personality type quizzes on Facebook".

There's really zero evidence the Myers Briggs has any type of test validity or reliability which is why in psychology we don't use it for actual psychological assessments. I don't know much of the Five Factor Model but sounds like more evidence is needed on that one as well.

What's really scary is that I heard on NPR that some employers' HR departments have taken to using the Myers Briggs to "assess goodness of fit in an organization based on personality type." While there's certainly something to be said about how different people handle different environments, interactions, situations, etc...I'm not sure we want untrained people administering "personality assessments with zero reliability/validity" to determine whether or not you should get the job. That seems like a step down a slippery slope for sure.

Of course there are personality types, specific traits correlated with various types and so forth, but there are empirically supported and valid/reliable assessment tools that can help trained professionals make inferences and interpretations based on results that are normed for different demographics like age groups, levels of education, etc based on large sample sizes of the test results of thousands of test administrations when the tests are developed . Which helps determine which items/questions have statistically significant results in correlating responses to interpretations. (There's much more to it but I don't design the tests, just use them!).

Sure I get that this post is likely for fun and it's interesting to speculate which personalities might be best suited for poker (after all we know ourselves as poker players that individual traits such as patience, discipline, persistence, and self-awareness are all key traits of successful players). But as someone who has administered, scored, and interpreted hundreds of various psychological assessment measures that do have evidence of accuracy, reliability, validity in my continued training to becoming a clinical psychologist, I often feel the need to call out these "pseudo tests" as the "results not to be used for anything serious" silly quizzes they are.

And yes I have noticed my training and skills in psychology have helped me at the tables both online and live...especially in regards to mental game work, tilt control, discipline, awareness, and yes sometimes slightly in detecting tells or understanding human tendencies when gambling...but those last two sadly aren't the biggest areas that psychology has helped my poker game in. But if non-poker players ask if psychology gives me an edge...I tell them I can read not only the table but the entire poker room on tells! Makes for good cocktail party conversations...

I'll see myself out now.

Great post, thanks.

Part of the appeal of the MB is that the taxonomy is intuitive and probably has some validity in 90% of cases, albeit not rigorously verifiable. IOW someone has 85% of the traits of an ENFJ so their MB-savvy friends say, "You are so very ENFJ! How could anyone doubt a test that pegs you that well?" But there's no reason why you couldn't draw the taxonomy differently, and that sort of 85% match isn't going to produce publishable academic research unless it's very stable and observable across significant samples.

BTW as a possibly recovering academic I have a lot of respect for peer review but also for quantitative knowledge that doesn't pass peer review. We make probabilistic assessments all the time without statistically significant evidence, of course, especially at the poker table.


Anyway I have this ongoing debate with my wife (who also loves the Enneagram, sigh....). I like MBTI a lot for shorthand, but I take it with a grain of salt. She's less convinced by the lack of psychologists' buy-in into the MBTI because it just resonates with what she observes.

And that's tension is OK in my opinion. Although I wish she'd admit the tension.

Which is exactly what people love about it. The types do capture elements of our personalities so, like the Facebook quizzes, people love taking the test and then saying, "Yeah, that's so me!"

One of the biggest flaws with the MBTI is that it treats personality characteristics as binary when they actually exist on a spectrum. You can only score introverted or extroverted, not slightly introverted or a mix of both. Since most people will fall near the middle of the spectrum you get the phenomenon that people can end up with different results taking the test at different times. Answer a few questions differently and you can flip from being an INTJ to an ENFJ.

Poker is a pretty nice game in that so many different types of people can have more or less success at it, in some form or the other.

Intuitive thinkers are said to have a problem in grinding; they can solve the game so to say, but find it hard after that. Being a sensor thinker does not have that problem, and even if they know less of the theory (that always isn't the case) they overcome it with experience and they are our sports players.

Then there probably are some types in-between of those that might not be for massive grinding but play up to regularly and understand the theory better.

I think the ISTJ is more like a poker player and a gamer than the INTJ.

Properly administered it actually gives you a ranking from 1 to 100 I believe for each trait so it's not exactly binary. What's silly though is if you barely score more E than I you're an E rather than "inconclusive" or "ambivert". So yeah the end result of the letters are binary but the test does put you on a spectrum for each trait.

The only ones really reliable for me are I and N. I score near 100 in both. T/F is a toss up. P/J is usually P but also a toss up. I most commonly score INTP or INFP but have also scored INTJ and INFJ.

Reading the summaries of each type I do seem most like an INTP so it's odd the only ones I get consistently are I and N. Not a very reliable test. Like INFJ and INFP do not describe me well at all but I sometimes score them.

Well said about the significant samples issue. As for resonating with what people observe, it could probably be thought of as "what people think, what people expect" a la concepts such as hindsight bias, confirmation bias, and even to an extent self-fulfilling prophecies. In hindsight we might think the Myers Briggs test results make sense, our friends might get confirmation of what "they already of course knew about us!," and in terms of our responses to the test items we might even answer in a way that self-fulfills what we expect.

There was a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in which they looked at hindsight bias and participants' initial judgements of someone's personality type, then they asked them again after seeing some different aspects of the person (maybe a video/pic of a scenario) as well as cues that suggest changes/different approaches. I believe the finding was that even though participants were about to perceive the changes and the cues of something being different and changed their perception of the person, when they were reminded of their original assessment of the personality type of the person, they basically tried to re-agree with it and fit their initial judgement into their changed judgement when shown conflicting cues/perspectives of said person.

Basically I think it's kind of like a Ouiji board, we direct the little marker to spell out what we expect/want to see. Or like a tarrot card reader, we might not agree with the results but we'll try to fit it into some situation or experience anyways. And you see similar behavior when people have their "signs" interpreted such as "being such a Leo."

So for example an item on the Myers Briggs might seem odd to the person and not represent them, but if the results show them as a certain personality type and it was derived from that item response, they might try to fit that into their understanding of it even if it doesn't make sense (ah I "guess" I can see that, or "there was that one time I did/said something like that now it makes sense!).

I haven't had coffee yet so might not be 100% on the mark here. But it's interesting how different people interpret the results and even more interesting how the same people can get different results each time.

That's a great way to summarize the biggest flaw for sure. And you can do some mental gymnastics to fit in either one if you fall in the middle. Especially when we go back and say "yeah that does fit me!" even if it doesn't really.

To be fair, the test linked showed the traits on a continuum. So I was something like 55% on the introvert/extrovert scale.

Perhaps but based on your scores you still get classified as I or E and that's what people take with them.

Here's a fascinating article on the history of the MBTI: http://digg.com/2015/myers-briggs-secret-history

Has anyone ever taken the "Myers Briggs II"? I took it a few years ago as part of career counseling.

The funny part is in one sense it's a complete canard. The real Jungian theory doesn't accommodate intermediate levels of gradation, as we've discussed above. It certainly doesn't accommodate breaking introversion down into 8 different subfactors or whatever they do.

But on the other hand it's much truer to life and probably more useful in career advising. For example, I'm an introvert who still needs to talk through everything verbally. So giving me a different taxonomy than a standard introvert is probably valuable.

But.... it's not really Myers-Briggs! That's just the brand name. It's really a 32 (or whatever) facet personality test that groups them by MBTI letters. You could group them by DISC or Big Five or (gulp) even Ennagram taxonomies. Without empirical research to show that the 4 MBTI clusters are meaningful, who cares where they draw the boundaries?

pretty sure isabel myers could not define what 'introverted feeling (Fi)' meant. and classifying people as 'thinkers' vs 'feelers' is quackery bull****.

Old thread bump:

I'm INTJ-A 99% introvert. I crush live 1/3 at the softest room in town, low hours, been playing a long time.

I think I've benefited from the test as I'm more accepting of myself and think less that there is something wrong with me. The intj descriptions nailed me pretty well but, before taking the test, I expected to be the "debater". I struggled with the questions and worked hard to be accurate sometimes stopping myself and asking, is that the real me or my own view of myself/my ego?

I haven't taken a big 5 test but I think I would score super high on conscientiousness and pretty high on agreeableness to a point.

Is is possible for an INTJ to have low self-esteem/inferiority complex? It seems pretty unlikely based on the stuff I've seen.

The popularity of the test is probably due to it seeming accurate for some portion of the population. It may only need seem accurate to 10% of the test takers for it to gain traction.

Aggression, extroversion, risk-taking personality might be better suited for tournament big scores, but less suited for cash games where they always seem to self-destruct.

Have you read Susan Cain's book Quiet? This was exactly the reaction I had when I read it. I always felt like my introversion was a pathology, something I had to apologize for. I would refer to myself critically as "anti-social," as though it was a choice and I was choosing to avoid people. Her book helped me understand that it's a feature of how my brain is wired, and more importantly how social interaction affects my energy and fatigue. Now I proudly refer to myself as an introvert.

I have not but will look into it. Thanks very much.