Giftedness Is Statistically Associated with Particular MBTI Results

http://www.sengifted.org/articles_social/Sak_SynthesisOfResearchOnPsychologicalTypes.shtml

by mdakin • 17 years ago

30 27 17 years ago

sengifted.org

mdakin• 17 years ago

See Table 5. Discussion is interesting too.

antipaganda• 17 years ago

Does "gifted" mean intelligent? Or is this a case of the horse following the cart?

cabalamat• 17 years ago

I think that's what they're using the word to mean. Which has always seemed a bit silly to me; if you want to say someone' clever. I'm not sure where using the word "gifted" comes from; perhaps a desire not to insult people who aren't "gifted" by labelling them not clever.

chairface• 17 years ago

I'm pretty sure that's the motivation. I'm also pretty sure it doesn't work.

jcl• 17 years ago

Within the context of this research, I guess "gifted" really means "selected to participate in special courses at school", which by itself introduces huge biases. The studies might be measuring the kinds of personalities people expect -- and therefore select -- to be in gifted courses (shy, introspective). Or it might be measuring a personality change brought on by being in such courses, either through the instruction itself or by being surrounded by similar personalities.

j_baker3• 17 years ago

Myers and Briggs would argue that your personality doesn't change, but you do learn new things about your personality. That said, it would be interesting to see how this works on older adults.

j_baker3• 17 years ago

This quote from the article may help:

"However, according to McCauley and Myers, this is not necessarily related to intelligence; rather, it is related to the match between the academic characteristics of IN types and the content of aptitude tests. When gifted adolescents are compared to general high school students according to their preference for intuition, they are more likely to enjoy solving new problems and dislike doing the same thing repeatedly. They also are conclusive, impatient, and interested in complicated situations. They might be more interested in novelty according to the type theory."

ewjordan2• 17 years ago

When gifted adolescents are compared to general high school students according to their preference for intuition, they are more likely to enjoy solving new problems and dislike doing the same thing repeatedly.

My take: they've become bored as hell, conditioned over the years of idiot level race-to-the-bottom schooling to hate doing what they're assigned the way they're supposed to do it because they don't require as much repetition as other people apparently do in order to "get" things. To get any intellectual enjoyment, they had to find interesting stuff on their own.

I'd also suspect that the introvert part comes about mostly because of the various social stigmas against doing well in school; later in life, a lot of people that were silent outcasts in school really come out of their shells once they're around people that value skills other than throwing balls around.

In other words, my take is that there may be a causal relationship here, in that "giftedness" (whatever that really means) tends to force people towards a certain personality type in most high school environments.

I'd be very curious to see if these results continue to hold in cultures where there is less teaching to the bottom and more respect for academic talents.

ewjordan2• 17 years ago

From what I remember, it usually means "Scored in the top N% on a standardized test", where N is some small-ish number, roughly proportional to the amount of noise that local parents make when their children don't get labeled as "gifted." In my town parents tended to make a lot of noise, so it was around 15 or 20% of the students, but in some cases people got in directly because of parental bitching, so I don't know what the real cutoff was from the tests (which everyone had to take, at least in my school district).

Some of the dumbest people I've ever had the displeasure to interact with were in the gifted program, and a couple of the smartest ones were not; it's a rough measure, certainly, but that doesn't mean it's altogether meaningless. It probably has a decent but not overwhelming correlation with actual intelligence, whatever way you may wish to define that.

Edit: It's also worth noting that more and more districts don't have gifted programs any more, due to an increased emphasis on getting the lowest scoring students past thresholds for NCLB.

I'd be curious to hear what others here thought of these programs if they were available - the one that I was a part of actually pulled us out of school one full day per week, and let us choose and work on our own projects, so I found it very valuable, far more than the missed schooldays would have been, but I know there's a lot of variability in these things.

hop2• 17 years ago

HN readers are about 7x more likely than the norm to have NT intuitive thinking traits from this poll last week - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722

AndrewDucker4• 17 years ago

More likely to be P than J too...

bendotc• 17 years ago

That's not really accurate. It would be safer to say that people who respond to that poll on HN self-report having NT intuitive thinking traits at about seven times higher than the usual distribution would predict, assuming no one voted multiple times.

Which is to say, it's really silly to draw much of anything meaningful from an internet poll.

hop2• 17 years ago

Yeah, I was thinking the same - not a perfect cross section, but the Black and white way it's distributed makes it very telling.

pradocchia• 17 years ago

Intuitive and perceiving say "right brain" or non-linear thinking to me. The Greeks might have called this function the muse.

What of the non-gifted student? Is he deaf, or is his muse mute?

dangrossman• 17 years ago

INTJ.

ludwig• 17 years ago

INTP.

alexfarran• 17 years ago

Credulity statistically associated with people who take MBTI seriously.

AndrewDucker4• 17 years ago

So, would you care to explain how it can be correlated with something in a series of studies and still be meaningless?

ewanmcteagle• 17 years ago

Star Trek viewing correlated with higher IQ. Now what? Anytime you divide a population that's large along any category or measure you will find many many correlations.

AndrewDucker4• 17 years ago

I'm also intrigued that people are voting up the comment which is a sarcastic attack on the people who believe something, while voting me down for attempting to discuss it in a logical manner rather than, say, engaging in discussion of the topic.

duairc• 17 years ago

I'm in INFP or sometimes INTP depending on the test I do. I don't really how understand how thinking and feeling are supposed to be at opposite ends of a spectrum...

logic• 17 years ago

Speaking only for myself (as someone who consistently scores on the far end of T), viewing it as a spectrum of F<->T makes a great deal of intuitive sense, and directly mirrors my personal observations. Just as I tend to quickly write off very emotional people as irrational, I suspect someone leaning strongly toward F would similarly write me off as a heartless bastard.

From your perspective, as someone sitting mid-way between the two, I can appreciate how that distinction might not seem as clear-cut. It's something I hadn't considered before; thank you for that.

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

I'm either INFJ or INTJ, depending on the test.

As a kid I was identified as gifted-lite (the diet coke of giftedness: just one calorie, not gifted enough :) after taking the CTBS/CCAT tests. Apparently I was at or above giftedness cutoff on two of the parts but below it on the third part.

But I showed them: my assessed quasi-giftedness was no match for my persistent lack of motivation.

joubert• 17 years ago

I'm no expert, but: MBTI criticism - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Cri...

Giftedness Is Statistically Associated with Particular MBTI Results

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