Cult testing using Myers-Briggs

While reading about the history of the International Church of Christ at REVEAL, I came across a section where this doctor used the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) test to determine if the Boston Church of Christ (now ICC) movement was cultic or not. This section is particularly interesting:

Upon the request of Al Baird, who had studied at his college, Abilene Christian College, in 1986, a supporter of the Boston Church of Christ, a mainline Church of Christ minister and church growth researcher (the Director of Church Growth Studies at Abilene), Dr. Flavil Yeakley, Jr. was asked to study the phenomenal growth of the Boston Movement. Al Baird and other movement leaders did not know that Yeakly had studied both mainline denominations and what are considered "cultic" groups, and noted that in cultic groups, a simple psychological test known as the MBTI (Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator) revealed that cult members' personalities would converge on a single type, usually the group norm, or the image of the cult leader. Thus, Yeakley ran this psychological test on a large number of disciples from the Boston Church of Christ, and on a control group of members from mainline Churches of Christ and some other denominations. Dr. Yeakley believed that the increasing accusations that the ICC was a cult were wrong, due largely to jealousy at Boston's phenomenol growth rates, and wanted to defend them.

Dr. Yeakley is also an honest man. When his test results showed an extreme level of "personality shift" in the members of the Boston Church of Christ from their normal orientation toward the orientation of the group norm, he realized that the accusations had a significant level of truth in them, and after seeing no changes in the Boston Movement, which had promised to curb its abuses, reluctantly published his results. (Personality shift is one of the most accurate measures of whether an organization is using mind control.) The Boston Church of Christ reacted by "marking" Dr. Yeakley, proclaiming him an enemy of the church and forbidding its members from speaking to him or reading his work.

Take note that initially Dr. Yeakley was trying to use this test to prove that the movement was NOT cultic, but could not deny the results.

The most interesting part though, is that you can use the MBTI psychological test to determine cult groups by checking if their members personalities shift toward the group norm.