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Do personality traits affect decision making ability: Can MBTI type predict
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Article  in  The APPEA Journal · January 2011

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 Lead author
DO PERSONALITY TRAITS AFFECT
Matthew DECISION MAKING ABILITY:
Welsh
CAN MBTI TYPE PREDICT BIASES?
M. Welsh, A. Alhakim, F. Ball, J. Dunstan and S. Begg
University of Adelaide
North Terrace
Adelaide SA 5005
matthew.welsh@adelaide.edu.au
abdulaziz.alhakim@student.adelaide.edu.au
finlay.ball@student.adelaide.edu.au
joseph.dunstan@student.adelaide.edu.u
steve.begg@adelaide.edu.au
ABSTRACT
From decades of psychological research, the observa-
tion that people’s decisions are often biased by particular
decision-making flaws has led to discussions of what can
be done to de-bias decisions. A key area of research is the
study of individual differences in decision-making abil-
ity—that is, whether certain people are less susceptible
to particular biases. Much of this research, however, has
focused on the impact of intelligence on decision-making
ability. This, however, is of limited use in industries such
as oil and gas where, due to hiring criteria that commonly
include at least a bachelor’s degree, a restricted range of
intelligence is observed. Given this, it may be more fruit-
ful to consider other sources of potential differences in
decision-making ability such as personality traits.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) (Myers et al,
1998) is a personality test based on Jung’s 1921 theory of
psychological types (see, e.g., Jung, 1971). People are sorted
into one of 16 categories based on their responses to the
personality test. Although the test is widely used to identify
leadership styles and preferences and therefore influence
recruitment decisions (including within the petroleum
industry), the impact of Myers-Briggs personality type
on decision making itself and, in particular, on decision-
making biases, has not been thoroughly investigated.
A large number of specific, cognitive biases have been
identified by psychologists and in this study we have cho-
sen to investigate two of particular interest in the oil and
gas industry: overconfidence and risk attitude/framing. It
has been shown (Welsh and Begg, 2008; Welsh et al, 2007)
that these biases can have disastrous consequences on the
value of projects in the petroleum industry. If it is possible,
therefore, to use an easily administered and well-known
test (MBTI) to quantify and predict an individual’s suscep-
tibility to bias, we can improve decisions in the industry
SECOND PROOF—WELSH 10 FEB 11
by ensuring that the right people are employed to make
decisions where bias may prove to be a problem.
To test this, we distributed a survey—which included
the complete Myers-Briggs test and questions to identify
biases in the respondent’s responses—to engineering stu-
dents at the University of Adelaide, petroleum industry
employees and a small number of employees from other
industries. Individual MBTI distinctions (e.g., extroverts
versus introverts) were studied for bias tendencies. We
discuss the observed relationships between Myers-Briggs
type and decision biases and their relevance to decision
making in the petroleum industry. We conclude that
while there do seem to be some effects of personality on
susceptibility to decision-making biases, these are not
necessarily what one might expect given the descriptions
attached to specific MBTI types. They are also relatively
weak effects and, as such, the use of the Myers-Briggs as a
tool for assessing decision-making ability is not supported
by our results.
KEYWORDS
Decision making, overconfidence, framing, personality,
biases, Myers-Briggs.
INTRODUCTION
The ability to make accurate, unbiased decisions is a
highly valued attribute in industry contexts. Forty years of
psychological research, however, has demonstrated that this
ability is far rarer than we might hope. Instead, research-
ers—starting with Tversky and Kahneman’s (1974) seminal
work—have repeatedly demonstrated that people’s judg-
ments and decisions tend to be influenced by the heuristics
(simple decision rules) that we rely upon, which result
in systematic biases in the decision that we make. These
biases affect experts as well as novice decision makers
(Northcraft and Neale, 1987; Welsh et al, 2005) and, when
affecting estimates of parameters used to feed into models
for calculating reservoir size and development needs, can
have significant impacts on the net present value (NPV)
of oil and gas projects (Welsh, et al., 2007).
Given this, significant work has looked at methods for
de-biasing decisions: that is, methods for reducing the im-
pact that specific biases have on estimates and decisions.
Many of these include changes to the methods being used
to elicit estimates from experts. For example, there is a
APPEA Journal 2011—1
M. Welsh, A. Alhakim, F. Ball, J. Dunstan and S. Begg
sizeable literature devoted to ongoing argument about
the best methods for asking for range (see, e.g., Block and
Harper, 1991; Juslin et al, 1999; Russo and Schoemaker,
1992; Welsh et al, 2004).
In general, however, while these de-biasing techniques do
provide a benefit, they tend to not eliminate bias, instead
only reduce it (Morgan and Henrion, 1990). As a result,
other researchers have taken a different approach to the
problem. Specifically, rather than looking for methods that
reduce bias in everyone, they look for people who are the
least susceptible to bias in the first place. The key observa-
tion that these researchers rely on is that susceptibility to
bias in decision making is not evenly distributed among the
population—instead, a common observation is that while
most people are susceptible to any chosen bias, there are
always a few people who seem not to be. This leads to the
question: is it the same people in each case who are least
susceptible and, if so, can we work out why?
Some progress towards answering this question has al-
ready been made, with an extended research program by
Stanovich and West (1998, 2008) demonstrating that more
intelligent people are, to a small degree, less susceptible
to certain biases. This finding is, however, of limited impor-
tance to industries such as oil and gas looking to improve
the decision-making ability of their personnel, primarily
because most of the decision makers hired by oil compa-
nies are already sourced from among highly intelligent
people—university graduates. Given the relatively small
benefits already described by Stanovich and West, this
truncation of the range of intelligence means that the dif-
ferences in decision-making ability between the least and
most bright of industry personnel that can be accounted
for by intelligence are likely to be very small indeed.
As a result, if our goal is to improve industry decision
making through a greater understanding of individual
differences in decision-making ability, we need to look
at characteristics beyond intelligence. An obvious candi-
date is personality. While personality traits undoubtedly
play a role in determining a person’s career path, they do
not necessarily act as a bottleneck or hurdle in the same
fashion as intelligence for industry employment. That is,
because personality traits such as extraversion or introver-
sion are independent of intelligence, both introverts and
extraverts are capable of meeting the educational criteria
for employment within the industry.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers et al, 1998) is
a widely used personality test based on Jung’s theories of
psychological type (Jung, 1971).While not considered state-
of-the-art by psychologists (see, e.g., McCrae and Costa,
1989), it has nevertheless remained extremely popular as
a recruitment and assessment tool in industries including
the oil and gas industry and was therefore selected for
use here.
The MBTI uses a 94 item, forced-choice questionnaire
to measure a person’s preferences for how they perceive
2—APPEA Journal 2011
the world and make decisions. It yields scores on four
scales: extraversion-introversion (E/I); sensing-intuition
(S/N); thinking-feeling (T/F); and judging-perceiving (J/P).
Standard practice is then to categorise a person based on
which end of each scale they fall closer to. So, for example,
a person who scores closer to the extraversion end of the
E/I scale is labelled an E. In this way a person is sorted
into one of the 16 possible four-letter types—an ESTJ,
for example.
Given the nature of the personality preferences detailed
in the MBTI, one would expect that people with certain
preferences might have different approaches to solving
decision-making problems and, as a result, have differential
susceptibilities to certain cognitive biases. In particular, the
MBTI suggests that the perceiving sensory-intuitive (S/N)
dimension affects how people prefer to gather informa-
tion, while the judging thinking-feeling (T/F) dichotomy
indicates how people prefer to make their decisions.These
distinctions bear some resemblance to the work of Stanov-
ich and West (2008) on two-system approaches to decision
making, where people are thought to make decisions us-
ing either an intuitive system or a rational system. Given
this, it seem reasonable to expect that people in the N
and F categories may be more susceptible to biases as
these people should prefer to make their decisions using
System 1 (simple, intuitive) processes.
Cognitive biases
A wide range of specific cognitive biases have been
demonstrated to affect decisions both generally and spe-
cifically in oil and gas contexts (see, e.g., Tversky and
Kahneman, 1974; Welsh et al, 2005). A central question,
however, is: which of these are most likely to be affected
by personality traits? A brief overview of the various biases
highlights two key suspects: overconfidence, and attitudes
to risk and uncertainty.
Overconfidence (Lichtenstein et al, 1982) in decision
making-literature most commonly refers to the observed
tendency of people to give ranges that contain the true
value less often than they believe they will. This is of
particular importance to the oil and gas industry where
calculations of oil in place are based on the estimated
P10–P90 ranges provided by technical specialists for each
geological parameter. These ranges have been shown to
contain the true value (once it becomes known) less than
50% of the time, rather than the expected 80% (Hawkins
et al, 2002). Confidence (and therefore overconfidence)
seems a likely candidate to be affected by personality
traits. In particular, one might expect that extraverted
people (Es) might be more confident than introverts (Is).
A willingness to accept some risk is necessary in all
corporate ventures and the oil industry is, in some senses,
riskier than most. However, biases in risk attitude—that
is, in technical terms, being risk seeking or risk averse
rather than risk neutral—always erode value in the long
term and therefore are an important consideration when
talking about improving decision making. These attitudes
SECOND PROOF—WELSH 10 FEB 11
 Do personality traits affect decision making ability: can MBTI type predict biases?
to risk and uncertainty also seem likely to be related to
personality rather than intelligence and, once again, one
might expect extraverts to be more risk seeking. Previous
work on this question using the MBTI by Li and Liu (2008)
supported this conjecture, also finding that more intui-
tive and more feeling people (Ns and Fs) were more risk
seeking. Given the impact that individual risk attitudes
can have on corporate profits (Welsh and Begg, 2008),
understanding how personality affects risk attitude is an
important observation, and part of this is the consideration
of how these traits affect biases related to risk attitude.
For example, the framing effect (Tversky and Kahneman,
1981) causes a significant proportion of people to reverse
their choice between two identical options based solely
on whether the choice is framed as a loss or a gain. Thus,
we are interested to see whether people with particular
personality traits are more or less susceptible to this de-
cision bias.
Hypotheses
Given the above discussion, we are broadly interested
in the question of whether personality traits affect sus-
ceptibility to the particular biases under consideration
here. Given the details of that discussion, however, we
are in a position to make some more specific predictions
about how the MBTI types will relate to specific biases.
HYPOTHESIS 1
MBTI N-type and F-type people will be more susceptible
to all biases than S-types and T-types respectively.
HYPOTHESIS 2
MBTI E-type people will be more overconfident and
more likely to be risk seeking than I-types.
METHOD
Participants
Data was collected from 66 participants, including 38
petroleum engineering students from the University of
Adelaide and a further 28 participants, primarily (23 of
28) from the petroleum industry. Table 1 shows the break-
down of the participants by group, sex, age and industry
experience.
Materials
A survey was designed consisting of two main sections:
the first section being the MBTI; and the second containing
a series of questions to test for decision-making biases.
The MBTI consisted of the 94 multiple-choice questions
taken from Myers et al’s (1998) work. These questions were
used to evaluate a person’s preferences on each of the four
dichotomies proposed by Myers and Briggs, and enabled
SECOND PROOF—WELSH 10 FEB 11
them to be categorised as one of 16 personality types.
Section 2 of the survey consisted of questions assessing
various biases, as described below.
Section 2 included 10 range estimation questions, asking
for an 80% confidence range for a value. That is, partici-
pants were asked to give a low and a high estimate that
they were 80% sure the answer lay between these numbers.
The first five of these questions were general knowledge
with the following five being petroleum industry specific.
Although half the questions were petroleum industry spe-
cific, anyone should be able to answer these questions, as
greater uncertainty can be captured simply by increasing
the width of one’s estimates range. These questions are
used to test for overconfidence as follows: the expectation
is that if people are accurately setting 80% ranges, ~80%
of their ranges will contain the true value. If, however,
people’s ranges contain the true value less than 80% of
the time then they are overconfident.
A question to measure the framing bias was adapted from
Tversky and Kahneman (1981). This question was framed
in both a positive and negative way, yielding a question
pair. The question pair can then be used to determine if
people change their risk preference or remain constantly
risk averse or risk seeking. Each survey contained both
members of the question pair to find whether individuals’
responses to the questions changed when the question was
described in terms of losses versus gains.
Procedure
Both surveys were produced in both hard copy and on-
line via SurveyMonkey. Hard copies of the surveys were
distributed among petroleum engineering students at
the Australian School of Petroleum from first year up to
final year. After the hard copies had been distributed to
the students, a follow-up email was sent that reminded
the students about the survey and also gave them the
opportunity to complete it online via SurveyMonkey for
those who had lost the hard copy. Between the hard copy
and online versions of the survey, about 50% of students
completed the survey.
A number of petroleum exploration and production com-
panies were contacted via email through senior personnel
to explain the research project and included links to the
electronic versions of the survey.
RESULTS
Myers-Briggs
Before proceeding to analyses, it is important to know
whether the four groups should be treated separately or
together for statistical purposes—that is, whether they have
the same characteristics or not. To assist in determining
this, Table 2 shows the breakdown of each group along the
four MBTI type scales.
The engineer and other groups are both too small
to conduct meaningful statistics on, but to determine
APPEA Journal 2011—3
M. Welsh, A. Alhakim, F. Ball, J. Dunstan and S. Begg

Table 1. Group breakdown.

Group N Male Female Age (SD) Years experience (SD)

Student 38 27 10 21.6 (4.3) 0.6 (1.3)

Geoscientist 21 16 5 40.5 (9.7) 16.6 (9.3)

Engineer 2 2 0 23.5 (0.7) 1.5 (0.7)

Other 5 4 0 37.5 (18.0) 16.5 (18.6)

Note: two participants did not include their demographic details.

Table 2. MBTI types by group.

Group Total E/I S/N T/F J/P

Student 38 25/13 30/8 35/3 22/16

Geoscientist 21 12/9 12/9 19/2 12/9

Engineer 2 1/1 2/0 2/0 2/0

Other 5 2/3 2/3 4/1 4/1

Overall 66 40/26 46/20 60/6 40/26

whether the student and geoscientist groups should be
considered separately a series of chi-squared tests were
conducted, comparing the proportion of each personal-
ity types in these groups. These tests confirmed that the
proportions of the different types in the two groups did
not differ significantly, χ2(1) = 0.43, 3.13, 0.05 and 0.003,
for extraversion-introversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-
feeling and judging-perceiving, respectively, p >0.05 in all
cases1. Given this, in all future analyses the entire data-set
is considered together.
Looking at the overall pattern in Table 2, one sees cer-
tain types are more heavily represented in our sample
than others. Compared to the population estimates given
by Capretz (2003), our sample has slightly more extraverts
than might be expected and also somewhat more judgers.
Sensors outnumber intuitors even more heavily, but this
is in line with the overall population data. The greatest
discrepancy is seen in the T/F dimension, where less than
10% of our sample are feelers. In a random sample this
would be unexpected, as 50–60% of the total population
are Fs but previous research has shown a preponderance
of thinkers among engineers (McCaulley et al, 1983); the
fact that the same holds true for engineering students
and geoscientists is not too surprising. This does, however,
mean that statistical analyses carried out on the Fs will
be limited in their power and also restricts our ability to
do meaningful analyses of combination of types. For this
reason, we restrict ourselves to comparison between the
paired types in each of the MBTI dichotomies.
Overconfidence
A calibration score ranging from 0 to 10 was calculated
for each participant, from the 10 range estimation ques-
tions included in the survey. This score simply reflects
the number of times that the ranges a participant stated
they were 80% confident would contain the true answer
to the question in, actually did. Figure 1 shows the mean
calibration scores from each of the four pairs of traits
and compares these to the expected calibration score of
8—which would be the mean result if participants were
accurately setting 80% confidence intervals. Looking at
Figure 1, one sees in all but one case (the feelers), the
confidence intervals around the mean calibration scores
do not include the expected value of 8. This indicates a
significant difference between expected and observed
calibration. In all cases, the observed calibration is lower
than the expected value of 8, indicating overconfidence.
The fact that the confidence interval around the feelers’
mean calibration does include the expected value reflects
the very small sample size in this instance—only six indi-
viduals—which acts to increase the width of confidence

4—APPEA Journal 2011 SECOND PROOF—WELSH 10 FEB 11

 Do personality traits affect decision making ability: can MBTI type predict biases?
Figure 1. Mean calibration scores by MBTI type.
intervals as we are less sure of the reliability of our data.
To determine how people’s calibration varied with the
personality types, a series of t-tests (Student, 1908) were
undertaken, comparing the calibration scores achieved by
each type in the MBTI pairs. These indicated that, contrary
to the prediction of Hypothesis 2, extraverts were not more
overconfident than introverts. In fact, while not signifi-
cantly different, the extraverts’ calibration scores were
slightly higher, indicating less overconfidence, t(62) = 0.42,
p = 0.67 (two-tailed).
The first prediction from Hypothesis 1, that feelers might
be more susceptible to this bias than thinkers, was not
borne out by the data, with the calibration scores for the
two groups being quite similar and, again, in the opposite
direction to our prediction—that is, feelers had higher
calibration scores and were thus less overconfident, t(6)
= 0.52, p = 0.62 (two-tailed). Similarly, the second Hypoth-
esis 1 prediction, that sensors might be less susceptible to
overconfidence than intuitors, is exactly the opposite of
what we see in the data where the intuitors have better
calibration and thus significantly lower overconfidence,
t(48) = 2.2, p = 0.03 (two-tailed). Finally, our hypotheses did
not predict any difference between judgers and perceivers.
The data confirmed this, with the two types having simi-
lar calibration scores which the t-test indicated were not
significantly different, t(54) = 0.79, p = 0.43 (two-tailed).
Overall, it seems the personality traits, as measured by
the MBTI, do not predict susceptibility to the overconfi-
dence bias in the manner expected. The data do, however,
support the idea that personality can affect susceptibility
to bias, with the intuitors being significantly less overcon-
fident than the sensors on this task. Exactly why this might
be, however, we defer until the discussion.
SECOND PROOF—WELSH 10 FEB 11
Framing
Each participant saw two framing questions, forming a
matched pair.The first question of the pair was presented in
a positive frame, where participants had to choose between
a certain $250 gain and a 25% chance of a $1,000 gain. The
second also offered two alternatives to choose from with
expected values of $250, but framed the problem as a loss
by ‘giving’ the participant $1,000 to start the game and
then having them choose between a certain $750 loss and
a 75% chance of losing the entire $1,000. Participants were
sorted into one of four groups based on their pattern of
responses to these framing questions as shown in Table 3.
Looking at Table 3, one sees that the classic framing
effect is observed when a person chooses the risk-averse
answer when a question is framed in a positive way (i.e.,
in terms of gains) while preferring the risk-seeking option
when the question is framed negatively (i.e., in terms of
losses). There are, however, three other possible response
patterns: a person can always be risk averse, always be
risk seeking or do exactly the opposite of what the fram-
ing effect literature predicts, being risk seeking for gains
and risk averse for losses. Table 4 shows the breakdown of
our participants into these four groups, divided according
to their MBTI typology as well.
Looking at Table 4, one sees that while there is a fram-
ing effect it is not universal. Rather, it is the result of
about one-third of the participants acting as Tversky and
Kahneman predict, with the majority of others having
a firmer risk attitude—either risk-averse or risk-seeking
regardless of the frame of the question. That is, there are
clear individual differences in the responses to framing.To
determine whether these differences in framing behaviour
APPEA Journal 2011—5
M. Welsh, A. Alhakim, F. Ball, J. Dunstan and S. Begg
are related to participants’ personality traits, a series of
2x4 chi-squared tests were conducted, one for each of the
personality dichotomies. That is, the proportion of people
Es and Is using each of the four Framing behaviours were
compared, and then the proportion of Ss and Ns, and so on.
These showed no significant differences between: ex-
traverts and introverts, χ2(3) = 1.54, p>0.05; or sensors and
intuitors, χ2(3) = 1.43, p>0.05. These tests did, however,
indicate significant differences between the patterns of
responding for judgers and perceivers, χ2(3) = 9.83, p<0.05;
and for thinkers and feelers, χ2(3) = 8.68, p<0.05—although
the very small numbers in the F cells call into question this
result’s reliability. Looking at the data in Table 4, one can
see where these differences arise. Thinkers are far more
likely to be risk averse than feelers, who—if we believe
the current pattern will hold as a general trend—tend
to be more often affected by framing. Similarly, judgers
seem to be more likely to show the classic framing effect
Table 3. Characterisation of participants by framing behav-
iour.
Negatively framed question
Risk averse
Positively framed question
Risk averse Risk averse
Risk seeking Reverse framing
Table 4. Breakdown of participants by MBTI and framing types.
E I
Framing 13
Risk averse 16
Risk seeking 9 5
Reverse framing 2 0
Total 40
6—APPEA Journal 2011
than perceivers who are instead likely to be risk averse.
Figure 2 shows the data from Table 4 converted into
percentages to allow easy comparison between groups of
different sizes. Looking at this figure and recalling that
Hypothesis 1 suggested that N and F types would be more
susceptible to biases, we generally see some evidence of
this here, with 67% of (our very small number of) Fs suc-
cumbing to the framing effect, compared to only 30% of
Ts. The difference between the percentage of Ss and Ns,
who display the framing effect (35.6% versus 28.6%, re-
spectively), however, is small and in the opposite direction
to that predicted. There is also some support for the find-
ings of Li and Liu, with a greater proportion of Ns than
Ss being risk seeking (28.2% versus 17.8%).
Finally, Hypothesis 2 suggested that Es would be more
likely to be risk seeking than Is. While this is true, with
22.5% of Es being risk seeking, almost as many ‘Is’ are
as well (19.2%). As such, there seems little support for
Hypothesis 2 in these data.
DISCUSSION
MBTI E-type people will be more overconfident and
more likely to be risk seeking than I-types.
Overall, the above results offer limited evidence to sup-
port the idea that personality traits—specifically those
measured by the MBTI—can be used to predict suscepti-
Risk seeking bility to decision biases. A particular concern is while the
descriptions of the MBTI traits led us to posit particular
hypotheses regarding how those traits might affect bias
susceptibility, the majority of the significant effects we
observed were not those predicted. This casts doubt on
the parallel drawn in the introduction between the MBTI
types and the Stanovich and West (2008) System 1/System
Framing
2 distinction. For example, while we found a number of
significant relationships between the personality traits
and the biases we studied, it does not seem to be the case
that intuitors and feelers are, as was originally suggested
in Hypothesis 1, more likely to use System 1 (intuitive
thinking) and thus be more prone to bias. In fact, on one
Risk seeking bias we found exactly the opposite of this, with intuitors
being significantly less overconfident than sensors—a re-
sult that needs some explanation.
S N T F J P
9 16 6 18 4 17 5
12 20 8 27 1 12 16
8 6 14 0 10 4
1 1 1 1 0 2
26 45 21 60 6 39 27
SECOND PROOF—WELSH 10 FEB 11
 Do personality traits affect decision making ability: can MBTI type predict biases?
Figure 2. Percentage of each MBTI type showing specific framing responses.
A possible reason for this lies in the fact that accord-
ing to the MBTI typology, intuitors prefer to make their
decisions intuitively—that is, without feeling a need to
resolve uncertainties—whereas sensors prefer to use the
information currently available to them and may as a result
feel less comfortable making highly uncertain estimates.
If this is the case, then one might expect that the advan-
tage that the intuitors have here is a result of the high
levels of uncertainty participants felt about the particular
questions being asked and, as a result, if questions that
the participants felt more knowledgeable about had been
asked this difference might disappear.
The results on the framing task were equally confus-
ing in terms of our initial expectations. Our sample only
partially replicated the results of Li and Liu (2008), with
more intuitors being risk seeking than sensors but we did
not find the difference between extraverts and introverts
posited in Hypothesis 2 on either framing or overconfi-
dence. Our strongest result from the framing task was
the observation that judgers were far more likely than
perceivers to show the framing effect (i.e., changing their
risk attitude as a result of the question frame) but this was
not a prediction we would have made based on the MBTI
descriptions of these traits. Even considered in hindsight,
why these types differ in terms of framing makes little
sense, with the key distinction between the types being
whether they like to have matters settled (judgers) or to
keep decisions open (perceivers).
We did, however, also have some evidence that feelers
were more likely than thinkers to show the framing effect.
This is in line with Hypothesis 1: that feelers might be
more susceptible to the framing bias as a result of relying
on less rational decision-making methods. Given the very
small numbers of feelers in our sample, however, it seems
over-ambitious to hang too much on this finding.
SECOND PROOF—WELSH 10 FEB 11
Caveats and future research
As always, there are a number of caveats to consider with
respect to the above results. Some of these relate to the
composition of our sample. As noted in the introduction, we
chose to look at personality traits rather than intelligence
due to the problem of restricted range caused by testing
people from an industry where a Bachelor’s degree is often
regarded as a minimum entry requirement. Comparing the
distribution of personality types in our sample with those
given for the overall population by Capretz (2003) however,
we see a similar problem may be occuring here. Feelers
make up ~55% of the total population yet less than 10% of
our participants fell into this type. As a result, it becomes
very difficult to know whether the distinctions between
thinkers and feelers that we have observed reflect genuine
population trends. It also makes it difficult to conduct
meaningful statistics comparing combinations of types
with one another as the limited number of feelers would
result in combinations of types that had no members at
all. In fact, of the 16 possible types, only 13 were observed
in our sample, with a further three being represented by
only one individual.
Of course, given that our interest is in decision making
in the oil industry, we should expect some differences
between the overall population distribution of types and
the one that we observe. It may be that our sample is in
fact representative of oil and gas personnel. Data support-
ing this is seen in Davey et al (1993), who found that 47%
of mining personnel are ESTJ or ISTJ types—types that
account for 40% of our sample. If this is the case though,
this limits the usefulness of the MBTI as a method for
distinguishing between personnel and would imply that
future research might be better served by using an alter-
native personality test.
APPEA Journal 2011—7
M. Welsh, A. Alhakim, F. Ball, J. Dunstan and S. Begg
Such a move would probably have further advantages.
As noted in the introduction, our choice of the MBTI was
informed by the fact that it is well known and widely used
in industry. It does, however, have a number of problems
that could be overcome by a change to another test. The
first is avoiding the false dichotomies represented by the
MBTI types. As noted above, the MBTI on the basis of a
series of questions designates people as either extraverts
or introverts, assuming there is a sharp distinction between
these types. In fact, most people are somewhere in between
the two extremes and a significant number of people fall
near the artificial dividing line and could, on any given day,
be placed in either category. This undermines our ability
to use the MBTI to distinguish between genuine extraverts
and introverts as its E and I groups contain a large number
of people who are, in reality, neither. For this reason, it
may be better to move to a test like the NEO PI-R (Costa
and McCrae, 1992) that gives people a numerical score
on each of its dimensions rather than sorting them into
categories. Alternative tests also have more than the four
dimensions considered by the MBTI—with the NEO PI-R,
for example, measuring five dimensions each comprised
of a number of related facets. This finer-grained division
of personality may enable differences to be isolated that
the MBTI simply can not identify.
Another potential concern might be that we have only
tested a limited number of biases. While this is undoubt-
edly true, the biases examined here were chosen because
they seemed the most likely of those commonly consid-
ered to be affected by personality traits rather than being
a result of intelligence-based memory or computational
limitations.Thus, while the consideration of further biases
is a necessary next step, we do not believe that their inclu-
sion here would in any way have altered our conclusions
regarding the usefulness of the MBTI as a predictor of
the decision-making ability.
Finally, despite our concerns about the restricted range
of intelligence we would encounter if testing oil and gas
personnel, it may be worth considering a more detailed
analysis—looking not at overall intelligence but rather at
the range of specific intelligences identified in the work of
Carroll (1993). As noted above in the discussion of alterna-
tive personality tests, a finer-grained analysis may enable
distinctions to be drawn between the types of intelligence
that help render one person resistant to biases.
CONCLUSIONS
In conclusion, while we found a small number of rela-
tionships between MBTI types and performance on the
overconfidence and framing tasks used herein, these results
do not paint a consistent picture about the type of person
one should prefer to make decisions, with less susceptibility
to bias.This is of particular importance as the relationships
we found were not those that we expected to find based
on our reading of the MBTI materials. That is, while the
descriptions of specific MBTI types may seem to indicate
a person will have strengths in particular decision-making
8—APPEA Journal 2011
contexts, it is important to keep in mind that the MBTI,
according to its own creators, is designed to measure pref-
erence, not aptitude. Thus, even accepting the underlying
psychological theory on which the MBTI is based and that
a person’s MBTI type is accurate (both statements that
a contingent of academic psychologists would debate),
this does not tell you whether they are good at making
decisions in a particular manner—only that that is their
preferred manner.
Despite this, we still feel a more in-depth consideration
of the role of individual differences in decision making is
necessary. As seen in our framing results, overly simplistic
characterisation such as ‘people are risk averse for gains’
miss a significant portion of what people are actually do-
ing. Given this, we feel it is important to continue trying
to determine what causes one person to be, for example,
risk averse while another changes according to the way
the question is framed.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors wish to thank the following people for their
assistance in contacting the industry personnel tested
herein: Peter Gilliland of EPM Training Services; Teof
Rodrigues of Santos; Yacoub Al Dossary of Saudi Aramco;
Ian Sylvester and Janny Spilsbur of Woodside; and Steve
Mackie of Bass Oil.
NOTES
1. Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is used
throughout. The p values given in the text represent
the probability of finding as large a difference as
was observed in the data by chance alone (that is,
if there really is no difference between the groups
being compared except that due to sampling error).
By convention, a p value below 0.05 is regarded as in-
dicating a significant difference between the groups.
That is, if there is a less than 5% chance of seeing a
difference between groups as large as was observed
in the data by chance alone, we conclude the groups
are significantly different from one another on the
variable being measured. A p value greater than 0.05,
conversely, results in our conclusion that the groups
do not differ from one another. The 95% confidence
intervals displayed on Figure 1 show this same statisti-
cal effect pictorially.
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APPEA Journal 2011—9
M. Welsh, A. Alhakim, F. Ball, J. Dunstan and S. Begg
THE AUTHORS
Matthew B. Welsh has a BA (Hons) in
philosophy and a BSc (Hons) and PhD
in psychology, all from the University of
Adelaide. He has been employed as a
research fellow in the Improved Business
Performance Group at the Australian
School of Petroleum for the past seven
years, conducting research focusing on the
psychological aspects of decision making
and the impact these can have on the accuracy of forecasts
and thus economic outcomes. Member: SPE, Cognitive Science
Society, Association for Psychological Science.
Abdulaziz Alhakim completed his
Bachelor of Petroleum Engineering (Hons)
at the Australian School of Petroleum in
2010. He was sponsored by, and is now
employed by, Saudi Aramco as a drilling
engineer. Member: SPE.
Finlay Ball completed a combined degree
in BEng (Petroleum) and BEng (Civil and
Structural) in 2010. He has been employed
by ShellAustralia since March 2011 as a civil
engineer. Member: SPE, PESA, Engineers
Australia.
10—APPEA Journal 2011
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Joseph Dunstan completed his BPetEng
and BCivilEng at the University of
Adelaide in 2010. He has worked on
civil infrastructure projects and is now
employed as a subsea engineer with
Woodside. Member: SPE, Engineers
Australia.
Stephen (Steve) H. Begg has a BSc and
PhD in geophysics from the University of
Reading, England. He is now is a Professor
of Petroleum Engineering and Management
at the University of Adelaide, Australia,
focusing on decision making under un-
certainty, asset and portfolio economic
evaluations, and psychological factors that
impact these. Formerly, he was the Direc-
tor of Strategic Planning and Decision Science with Landmark
Graphics. Prior to that he held a variety of senior operational
engineering and geo-science roles for BP Exploration, and was
a reservoir characterisation researcher and manager for BP
Research. Steve has been an SPE distinguished lecturer and has
chaired several SPE Forums and advanced technology workshops
related to his areas of expertise. Member: SPE, AAPG.
SECOND PROOF—WELSH 10 FEB 11