Should You Trust the Myers-Briggs Personality Test?
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It’s a favourite among Fortune 100 companies, government agencies and regular people. More than 1.5 million people take it every year. It is a thriving multimillion-dollar-a-year industry. And as any psychologist worth their salt will tell you, it’s mostly bullshit.
The first reason is one of the least important, but it’s good to start with history. The Myers-Briggs personality test is based on Jung’s ideas, which are—to put it mildly—empirically unsubstantiated. Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who worked in the first half of the twentieth century. He had an abiding interest in religion, mythology, alchemy and astrology. These interests reverberate through his ideas, some of which are closer to mystical or supernatural claims than scientific ones. Jung didn’t place much emphasis on testing his ideas through rigorous empirical studies, a problem that was admittedly not unique to him during his time. After Jung died, two non-experts with limited training in psychometrics or test construction created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a personality test founded on Jung’s empirically unsubstantiated ideas.
This is not enough on its own to reject the MBTI—a test could conceivably be created by non-experts and founded on unsupported ideas, and yet do an accurate job of measuring human personality.
