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DISCLAIMER: Despite its popularity, the scientific community has widely regarded MBTI as pseudoscience. While based on principles suggested by C.G. Jung, the MBTI remains popular due to a cognitive bias called the Barnum effect, which makes us susceptible to vague descriptions of ourselves.
For these reasons, Talent Select AI does not use any metrics from the MBTI.
The MBTI personality inventory aims to make C.G. Jung’s theory of psychological types understandable and useful in people's lives. The theory states that seemingly random variations in people’s behavior are quite predictable, as they are due to fundamental differences in the ways individuals approach essential functions of thought, behavior, and interaction.
The theory assumes that consciousness has different attitudes and functions, which are pairs of opposite and compensatory tendencies.
According to Jung, whichever attitude or function dominates consciousness, its opposite will tend to be repressed and characterize the compensatory activity of the unconscious. People’s unconscious tendencies are often recognized through expressions in dreams, under stress, or intoxication.
MBTI remains the most popular personality test in workplace-related situations. But does popularity equate with quality and accuracy?
Why Are Personality Tests SO Popular?
We can trace back the origins of the personality test to the first world war. Charles Myers, a doctor with the Royal Army Medical Corps, documented a case of a 23-year-old soldier who was suffering from ‘shell shock.’
The condition of ‘shell shock’ would later be better understood as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but the work Myers conducted created a system that would become widespread use by the US Army.
Personality tests were never intended to be used as they are today, but according to the Harvard Business Review, they are now a $500 million industry. And its annual growth rate is estimated at between 10%-15%.
Personality tests are often used in psychology to help refine diagnoses or in business to assess potential candidates and build cohesive teams. These tests can also help individuals better understand their strengths and weaknesses to become the best versions of themselves.
In hiring, self-reported personality assessments tend to be several questions that each participant or candidate has to answer. Answers may be based on a scale (e.g., 5 = Agree and 1 = Disagree) or be yes or no.
The general idea of these tests is to identify an individual's traits based on how much they relate to statements or the answers they give.
On the other hand, projective tests are less straightforward. These personality tests look at ambiguous images, scenes, or even words, focusing less on someone’s traits and more on their hidden beliefs and values.
The MBTI assessment is one of the world's most popular personality tools, used by over 88% of Fortune 500 companies in 115 countries and available in 29 languages.
“The MBTI is popular for at least two reasons,” Emily Campion, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Management & Entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa, told Student Select AI in a recent interview. “One reason is that humans have an innate need for self-categorization. That means we like being put into identifiable groups, whether through a shared interest or shared background.”
“These categories create common ground and communities, and more extremely, function as a mechanism for survival. Another reason the MBTI is so popular is that it has been well-marketed. Some people have invested hugely in the continued use of the MBTI, including organizations or trainers deployed to lead participants through MBTI workshops,” Campion continued.
But even the most self-aware individuals have personal blind spots, as the nature of self-awareness is itself limited.
Therefore, self-reported personality tests are not always accurate because they rely on the person's memory and self-assessment of their behavior. People can be dishonest about themselves, which skews the results of a test. Or, someone may not be able to accurately self-report their personality traits.
Why the Myers-Briggs Personality Test Isn’t Valid for Use in Decision-making
Companies and organizations ask as many as 60% of workers to complete personality tests as part of the hiring process. Some employers leverage personality tests for career development, while others use them to assess specific personality traits, such as persuasiveness, detail orientation, and conscientiousness.
Many academics created different personality scales during the first half of the 20th century. The problem with most of the assessments at the time was they were built on the creators’ subjective feelings about personality.
The MBTI is the most popular of all the personality tests out there. Katharine Cook Briggs was an American writer and co-creator, with her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, of an inventory of personality types known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
Simply put, Briggs was interested in psychological types as a child-rearing tool. She was interested in how someone could type their children early in life and determine what they should specialize in.
Briggs once said that people can put themselves through a lot of psychological pain by trying to solve incompatibilities. But instead of trying to change oneself, she proposed that the differences in how people respond to life are innate and unchangeable.
Rather than improving yourself, you just "accept" yourself, and everyone else should accept you, too. Briggs had a "fixed mindset" about people. Her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, inherited this way of thinking years later.
At some point, Myers takes issue with the personality tests already developed because they divide workers into categories: good and bad or normal or abnormal. So, she devised an indicator in which all types were created equal, and each type had a place in the world.
Interestingly, neither Katharine Briggs nor her daughter, Isabel Myers, had any psychology, psychiatry, or testing training. Neither ever worked in a laboratory or academic institution.
Unsurprisingly, people started questioning whether these personality tests really measure what they think they’re measuring. How reliable are those conclusions, and are they valid?
And according to experts, most of these tests might not be worth the money. “You should be skeptical,” Simine Vazire, a personality researcher at the University of California, Davis, said in a press release. “Until we test them scientifically, we can’t tell the difference between that and pseudoscience like astrology.”
In fact, recent research shows that 90% of people want to change their personalities and improve themselves.
But non-scientific theories like MBTI can lead people to believe they can't change because their "core" attributes or "type" is inflexible. Hence, type-based tests that create a label can also create a fixed mindset.
There is very little, if any, science behind most of these tests. MBTI relies strongly on limited binaries and provides an oversimplified view of human personality. But human beings are complicated and don't neatly fit into categories.
Merve Emre, associate professor of English at the University of Oxford and fellow at Worcester College, discusses this lack of science and inconsistency in her books, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Training.
