I'm currently at work (and your article has now prompted me to finish over Christmas a somewhat similar one that I've had in 'draft' for far too long!) and agree with your core objection that all personality inventories (such as the MBTI) assume that traits are fixed and stable (when there's a good body of evidence to suggest that they aren't). However, that's not to say there aren't good psychological studies that back up at least some of the claims of the MBTI. For example: An Assessment of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Carlyn, M., Journal of Personality Assessment. Oct1977, Vol. 41 Issue 5, p461-74 (Conclusion: "The Indicator appears to be a reasonably valid instrument which is potentially useful for a variety of purposes") and: Recent Assessments of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Carlson, J. G., Journal of Personality Assessment, Aug1985, Vol. 49 Issue 4, p356-66. (A meta-study of 24 peer reviewed papers, Conclusion: "The applications of the MBTI have been broad, although somewhat unsystematic, and with generally favorable validity assessment. Continued attempts to validate the instrument in a variety of settings are needed." However, I'm much more in sympathy with the arguments of psychologists like Graham Richards. The extract below is from "Putting Psychology in it's place (2nd edition, 2002)" - "... not everything which can be measured necessarily exists. This may sound puzzling, but is actually not so self contradictory as it seems. The argument is best made using a hypothetical example: were we living in the Middle Ages we might be very concerned about how devout people were. To measure this we devise a questionnaire containing such items as ‘I prefer reading a holy book to attending a tournament’, ‘A strange feeling of Grace sometimes descends upon me’, ‘I enjoy attending High Mass’ or to counterbalance the direction ‘I often find sermons boring’. (‘I have never been tempted by lust’ could serve as a lie item.) It is surely feasible that at the end of the day our ‘sanctity scale’ would appear to provide a handy way of measuring how holy people were. But no psychologist proposes that there is a measurable ‘sanctity’ dimension to personality, and not even the most devout psychologists have attempted to devise such a measure. Nor is this as far fetched as you might imagine; among the earliest pioneers of scientific measurement were the fourteenth century French scholars Jean Buridan and Nicolas D’Oresme whose efforts were spurred by the desire to quantify the amount of Grace in communion wafers." Reification is the curse of our times! Tim.