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I agree. There's a risk of assuming these man-made, socially constructed categories somehow "exist" somewhere out there and have only been stumbled upon by diligent scientists. Psychology isn't a science, and despite its claim to be (in order to join in on the goldrush of modernity; both psychology and sociology have roots in positivism -- I hope people here are familiar with the terminology), when push comes to shove standardized tests of any kind only measure how well one does or fits in on the criteria of the test itself: not what naturally existent category the test purports to only identify you as belonging to.</p>
<p>IQ tests are a sham. I can't believe people actually believed they could objectively measure something as vague as "intelligence". Like you said, being a "type" doesn't cause behavior to happen. Also, do we really want to go around claiming "personality" is an innate and fixed thing?</p>
<p>That being said... It's very fun to have a category to identify with, haha.
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<p>Wow - your post was very nicely worded - better than anything I could do (clarified some ambiguities in my original post). :)</p>
<p>Categories are sometimes necessary for categorization purposes (at least we know that our ways of organizing people according to categories do better than chance). But the risk that society pays is when it entrenches itself on such socially constructed categories - and then sorts people according to those categories. Robert Sternberg remarks that intelligence is a subject that we know less about know than we knew about 100 years ago. There has been so much psychological research that depends on such a construct - and we have not been able to dig ourselves out of it. In fact - Nature and Science both publish articles that use intelligence as a valid construct - all along with the articles based on more respectable science.</p>