The Myer-Briggs Type Indicator: What it really says about you Jasmine Norden
T
he integration of personality quizzes into online habits has been rapid, particularly evident in the relatively recent inescapability of the Buzzfeed quiz. Driving the popularity of personality quizzes, and therefore to blame for me spending valuable minutes of my time to find out which type of cheese I am, is likely a desire to have our beliefs about ourselves validated. Vague, but largely optimistic personality profiles ensure that virtually anyone can see aspects of themselves in their results. This is called ‘the Barnum effect’, first studied in the forties in an experiment that found Psychology students who were all given the same personality profile mostly all rated it as accurate. One of the most popular ways to classify personality is the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), proposed by Myer and Briggs in the 1940s, based on Jungian theo-
ries of cognitive functions. At the surface level, it seems more rooted in Psychology than other popular tests. The MBTI classifies people dichotomously on four dimensions, which together make up your personality ‘type’. These are:
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Extroversion (E) versus Introversion (I) Intuition (N) versus Sensing (S) Thinking (T) versus Feeling (F) Judging (J) versus Perceiving (P)
‘psychologists are largely banded together in their hatred of the MBTI’
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