The Myer-Briggs Type Indicator: What it really says about you

The Myer-Briggs Type Indicator: What it really says about you

Jasmine Norden

The 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 theories 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:

• Extroversion (E) versus Introversion (I)

• Intuition (N) versus Sensing (S)

• Thinking (T) versus Feeling (F)

• Judging (J) versus Perceiving (P)

Marita Kimo

‘psychologists are largely banded together in their hatred of the MBTI’

The MBTI reigns as the most commonly found personality classification in popular culture; one glance on twitter will leave you berated with self-proclaimed INFJ’s reminding everyone they’re the ‘rarest personality type’. The biggest clients of the MBTI though, perhaps surprisingly, are large-scale businesses. Particularly in America, the MBTI is widely used to screen prospective employees. Reportedly, around 70-80% of Fortune 500 companies use the MBTI. A brief Google search will return with hundreds of articles telling you which type earns the most on average, which types suit which careers.

‘in reality, it’s not a particularly valid or reliable measure of personality’

Psychologists, on the other hand, are largely banded together in their hatred of the MBTI. In reality, it’s not a particularly valid or reliable measure of personality; people often get different results at different times (which explains why last year I was an INFP and this year I’m an ENTP). Statistical methods for uncovering the core dimensions of personality, provide little support for the four dimensions of the MBTI.

Furthermore, dichotomously characterising people on each dimension is likely unrepresentative of how personality actually works. In a normally distributed population, most people fall around the middle of each dimension in a pattern that resembles more of a continuous curve than two distinct ‘types’. And yet, large companies continue to use the MBTI, so we remain stuck with continuing research that means little more than astrology.

The MBTI is an example of a type theory of personality, restrictive by nature in how it insists on categorising people. Better liked by Psychologists are trait theories, which instead describe personality by the extent to which people possess certain core traits. The most popular one of these is ‘The Big Five’. The five core traits in the Big Five are:

• Extroversion

• Openness

• Neuroticism

• Conscientiousness

• Agreeableness

The Big Five has emerged as much more reliable than the MBTI so far. It is supported by biological evidence to some extent, and reasonably well by statistical analysis. It also has some predictive validity for behaviour and life outcomes. For example, conscientiousness has been found to correlate positively with later career success.

The Big Five, however, has not managed to receive the same following in popular culture as the MBTI. This is probably due to it not having the support of hundreds of businesses, and the ability to describe yourself quite as succinctly in terms of traits as you can in four letters.

The Big Five is not entirely infallible; some of the dimensions are less well supported than others. Some researchers argue that Openness should not be a part of the Big Five, others that there should be a sixth dimension. Other cross-cultural research has previously indicated that three factors would be a better universal model. Personality is such a hard construct to quantify, and almost certainly dependent on situational factors that models struggle to account for. What we can draw from the field so far though, is that the MBTI ought to be left in the past where it belongs.