RE: Is your right brain active?

Tim wrote:

 

>However, rather than rely on the pop-culture meaning of right/left brain
being thinking/feeling, I'd prefer to rely on the Thinking/Feeling spectrum
of the Myers Briggs survey - it's actually based on some half-decent
research (allbeit 50 odd years old now).<

I don't mean to be the perpetual rain maker, but, this is just another
flavor of pop-culture psychobabble. The Myers-Briggs and its related Kiersey
Temperament Sorter are based on Jungian psychoanalytic theory, which, along
with Freudian psychoanalytic theory, is taken less and less seriously these
days. Most of the early personality theories, even the ones for which
reasonably reliable instruments were developed, have largely been supplanted
by evidenced-based personality models, particularly the now generally
accepted five-factor model.

 

Frankly, the MB and KTS are fun at a cocktail-party level ("I'll tell you my
type if you'll tell me yours" "Well, what can you expect from an ISTJ") and
remain immensely popular in management circles (in part because there are
free versions of the KTS and no training, licensing, or fees are required to
use them, unlike the more industrial strength instruments like the MMPI) and
no doubt also owing in part to their somewhat simplistic categorization of
people into "types". In any case, they are not to be taken too seriously,
certainly not compared to the more recent findings in neuroscience and
cognitive science-even in their popularized packages.

 

Only Introversion-extraversion from the MB remains as a generally accepted
valid dimension of personality trait. As I've said before in this and other
forums, a psychometrically weak test with little or no independent validity
and based on unscientific theory is hardly a good grounding for significant
insight into ourselves and each other. Among colleagues who work in this
field, MB and KTS "types" are regarded as little better than astrology,
garnering comments resembling the oft-quoted Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy-"Mostly harmless." (Although there is debate about that.)

 

Amidst all that rhetorical rain, I confess I have learned things from using
the KTS, but I suspect this has more to do with the process and context
within which it was used than from the validity of the typology or the
measurement instrument. I have seen completely discredited "tests," such as
the Luscher Color Test, yield interesting and useful results in the hands of
skilled therapists.

 

But, we are getting pretty far afield from agility or usability.

 

--Larry Constantine, IDSA, ACM Fellow

  Director, Lab:USE Laboratory for Usage-centered Software Engineering
(www.labuse.org)

  Professor, Department of Mathematics & Engineering

  University of Madeira | Funchal, Portugal