The Illusion of Explanation: Personality Typologies, Just-So Stories, and the Seduction of Ad Hoc Reasoning
Personality, Explanation, and the Limits of Typology Table of Contents When a Description Starts Pretending to Be an Explanation Classification Is Not Explanation MBTI and Enneagram as Unconstrained Explanatory Frameworks Why “It Fits Me” Is Weak Evidence Scientific-Sounding Vocabulary Is Not a Mechanism From Category to Identity: When the Model Enters the Data-Generating Process Why This Matters More in Therapy and Relationships The Big Five Is Not MBTI—but That Does Not Mean What People Think It Means The Psychometric Validity Staircase Prediction Is Not Explanation What Might “Personality” Actually Be? The Seduction of Feeling Explained References Personality typologies are attractive because they promise to compress the messiness of human behavior into a small number of intelligible categories. That promise becomes epistemically risky, however, when a descriptive label begins doing the work of an explanation: a pattern in behavior is classi...