Why The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Nonsense

Briggs died in 1968, while Myers would continue to refine the test until her death in 1980. Coincidentally, she also wrote two murder mysteries where the detectives apply a bit of personality type research, including one where the twist is that a family of stuffy Southern aristocrats have been killing themselves upon discovering they’re tainted with, uh, “negro blood.” That old twist.

Meanwhile, Katharine wrote that “enlightened men” were distinguished from “lower orders” by personality, although the MBTI has been revised a million times since the days when it assumed that other tests, like IQ tests, could reveal that some people have no fundamental personality. But Myers-Briggs still has plenty of issues, starting with the fact that basing a test on Jungian archetypes is like basing your surgery on bloodletting. Jung himself warned that his archetypes were only rough concepts and, like the MBTI, they’ve since been discredited almost entirely. 

Another major issue is that the MBTI focuses on four dichotomies. One category determines whether you use “Feeling” or “Thinking” (hence why the third letter of the results is always either F or T), but you can be a warm, empathetic people pleaser who’s also capable of detached logic when the situation calls for it. And no one is just an extrovert or an introvert like a stock TV character; not only are there too many factors to declare such stark differences, but introversion and extroversion are largely constructs that lack context (you can, for example, be introverted at work around colleagues but extroverted at a party among your friends). 

The personality tests used today (in clinical settings, not on BuzzFeed) put respondents on a spectrum. You’re not simply an introvert or a logician, you’re just relatively more or less likely to engage with people and tackle problems in certain ways. That’s why the MBTI fails at predicting how people will react in their professional or personal lives, which is ostensibly the whole point of the test. Plus, if people take the test twice within a few weeks they often get different results, which doesn’t really make it an ironclad concept to build your personality around.