The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is one of the most popular personality tests in the world. It’s also one of the most regularly debunked.
The test sorts people into one of 16 four-letter personality types based on their preferences for Sensing (S) or Intuition (N), Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I), Thinking (T) or Feeling (F), and Judging (J) or Perceiving (P). The company’s website boasts the assessment has a 90% accuracy rating and a 90% average test-retest correlation, “making it one of the most reliable and accurate personality assessments available.”
Many researchers, however,have long questioned the MBTI’s scientific merit.
“In social science, we use four standards: are the categories reliable, valid, independent, and comprehensive?” Adam Grant, a professor of industrial psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School,wrote in an essay on the subject. “For the MBTI, the evidence says not very, no, noand not really.”
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These faults are likely in part because neither of its creators,Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, had formal training in psychology, explained Merve Emre,author of "The Personality Brokers,” which explores the history of the MBTI.
Katherine Briggs became interested in Carl Jung’s book “Psychological Types” and began “typing” everyone she knew, said Emre, a professor at Oxford University. In 1943, amid the labor boom of World War II, her daughter took that system and designed a questionnaire to determine what job a worker’s personality is best suited for.
“It really was this very unscientific process,” Emre said.
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In 1975,Consulting Psychological Press, now known as the Myers-Briggs Company, commercialized the test and became its exclusive world wide publisher,according to Suresh Balasubramanian, the company's general manager/senior vice president of products, programs, marketing. The company has spent decades improving the assessment and doing more research on its validy,Balasubramanian said.
Research has since found that upwards of 50% of people got a different score when they re-took the MBTI just five weeks later. Studies have also shown that the test is not effective at predicting people’s successin different jobs.
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Balasubramanian claims the research discrediting the MBTIis outdated, but the statistics havebeen so often repeated by subsequent articles and studies that it createda sort of "Internet myth." He added that the problems those researchers encountered have long since been fixed.
"Whenyou look at validity of the instrument it is just as valid as any other personality assessment,"Balasubramanian said.
Today, some 1.5 million people take the test online each year and 88 of the Fortune 100 companiesare clients of the Myers-Briggs Company, according to Balasubramanian. So why do people continue to take a test thatreporters from Vox said in 2015, “has about as much scientific validity as your astrological sign?”
Emre, the Oxford professor, explained that unlike other personality tests, the MBTI is appealing because it is “nonjudgmental” meaning that that all the results are positive.
It was designed that way because its creators “thought that would be very motivating for workers to believe the only purpose of the indicator was to match them to the best job that was suited for them,” Emre said.
She added that the test satisfies an innate desire to know more about ourselves and an easy way to describe that self to others.
"Once you know that you can figure out ways to bring your life choices into alignment with that version of yourself," Emre said. “I think that’s a really, really appealing fantasy that we can aspire to a kind of self governance and a kind of coherence."
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