Does Myers-Briggs Actually Work?
Austin Harber
Clear, concise, and competent content that's both technically accurate and persuasive
“Instead of doing a mastermind question, let’s try the Myers-Briggs personality test instead.”?
Everyone at my leadshare perked up. They’ve mentioned an interest in the Myers-Briggs thing before. So why not try it out? We like to experiment— think outside the box.
You’ve probably heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in passing. It’s a personality assessment that distills key aspects of yourself into four-letter codes. INTJ, ENFP, ISFJ, etc. You might have seen such codes on dating profiles. There are 16 types in total.?
You might have already taken the MBTI. It’s the most popular personality assessment in the world!?
So it’s incredibly prolific, but why?
I mean… if so many organizations are using it, then there has to be some merit to it… right??
Anyway, I prepared my Myers-Briggs presentation for my leadshare group and uncovered some… interesting perspectives.?
Just a cursory glance at its Wikipedia page reveals it’s considered pseudoscience by the broader scientific community. I thought that was very odd because of how popular it is.?
I’ve seen MBTI results on dating profiles, for crying out loud! Yet again, I’ve also seen zodiac signs on dating profiles…
I didn’t have time to delve into that rabbit hole; I was trying to make a shortened MBTI test for my leadshare. But you can take your own Myers-Briggs test online in a matter of minutes.?
There are countless MBTI look-alikes all over the internet. My personal favorite is 16personalities; they do a great job modernizing the assessment and explaining the concepts. But there is only ONE official MBTI, which can only be administered by the Myers-Briggs Company or those they certify. So, if you want the real thing, you’ll have to pay $60!
The original creator, Isabel Myers, sold the rights to the MBTI near the end of her life to the Consulting Psychology Press. They later rebranded into the Myers-Briggs Company. (Remember them, they’ll be important later.)?
So, they own the exact wording of the MBTI assessment and its related materials. But you can’t own the general concepts of personality types and those four-letter codes.?
How does the MBTI work??
The BMTI centers around four dichotomies that supposedly comprise our personalities.?
So you find out which binary you are for each category, and that delivers the four-letter results. There are 16 distinct personality types or archetypes. According to my make-shift test, I’m INTP, so I’m introverted, intuitive, thinking, and prospecting. 16Personalities calls me a Logician.
“These flexible thinkers enjoy taking an unconventional approach to many aspects of life. They often seek out unlikely paths, mixing willingness to experiment with personal creativity.”
~ 16Personalities on the Logician personality type.?
On the surface, that sounds like me, and most of my leadshare members had the same reaction.?
“That’s exactly how my kids would describe me,” one member proclaimed after reading his personality type.?
But remember, this is pseudoscience.
Why do the MBTI results kind of describe us??
After my leadshare meeting, I dug deeper into MBTI’s reliability.?
You might have already noticed some limitations under the foundational concept.?
The MBTI is based on dichotomies, putting us in binaries. You are either this. Or you are that. No in-between. Doesn’t it make more sense to see these as continuums? Yeah, some people are at the ends of the spectrum, but most of us are in the middle.?
Can our MBTI results change? Or are they rigid? Do our personalities change based on life-changing events? Or can something as simple as daily moods swing the results?
Well, proponents of MBTI say your type is rigid. According to an older article published by the Consulting Psychology Press (remember them?), “The type to which you are born will be the one you take to your grave. We may adjust our behaviors over time — or at a party versus a funeral — but our personal Type remains the same for life” (Tieger et al., 1992.). The Myers-Briggs company’s modern-day blog echoes this.?
So, under that theory, if you take the MBTI once, you should get the same results when you re-test.?
One independent study administered the MBTI to a group of students. They took the test once and then again after 20 months. Around 50% of participants received different results. However, that was a relatively small sample size. (Salter et al., 1997)
Proponents of the MBTI claim that in a similar study, 65% of participants received the same results upon retesting. And 93% received the same results for three of the four categories. So they would say only 28% received different but very similar results. However, I could not find the original study that concluded this.?
The organization that initially made this claim sells various MBTI tests to corporations, individuals, colleges, and government agencies. They didn’t cite their sources, which bugs me! They are a vendor of the Myers-Briggs company and only reference them in their article.
It’s easy to be cynical and say, “Since they’re selling the product, they must be fudging the studies.” But I don’t think they’re lying; I think they probably genuinely believe the MBTI is very reliable. However, when we conduct studies, and we have a vested interest that our results lean one way… we tend to — either knowingly or unknowingly— stack the deck in our favor.?
Even if you believe that 65% of participants will receive the same results, that’s not very reliable.?
So either the MBTI is measuring what it claims to measure and our types are not as rigid as we thought. Or our personality types are rigid, and the MBTI doesn’t measure them consistently.?
Does the MBTI measure what it claims to measure? Is the MBTI valid??
The concept of personality types is abstract, so we’ll have to use factor analysis. Factor analysis is a statistical tool that can validate psychology tests by studying underlying patterns. In other words, it illuminates patterns and relationships in datasets.?
The MBTI theory says that there are four distinct dichotomies (factors). So, when a question on the MBTI aims to assess one factor (such as extraversion vs. introversion), it should only assess that factor.?
Each E vs. I question should correlate with each other but not any other type of question like S vs. I. So, if MBTI theory is valid, we should see four distinct clusters around these factors independent of each other. This would show that the MBTI is measuring an underlying variable, that being a personality aspect of the test taker.?
When researchers conducted a factor analysis on the MBTI results from over 1,200 students, they found six different factors instead. The JP and SN dichotomies correlated, contradicting the idea of four distinct dichotomies. The researchers also found a high level of measurement error, suggesting that the MBTI factor questions are not as related as they should be (Pittenger, 1993).?
Enough math! What about the real world? The MBTI is supposed to help us with our careers. If the MBTI theory is valid, there should be a correlation between MBTI and occupations.?
One of the original intentions behind MBTI was to help women enter the industrial workforce during World War 2. Isabel Myers believed that a personality assessment would help employers match employees with roles best suited for them.?
So, if your personality predisposes you to be more comfortable and productive in certain roles, shouldn’t people naturally gravitate towards those roles even without knowing their personality type??
The evidence is mixed. For example, one study found that INTJs were more prevalent among configuration management (CM) professionals than they are in the general population (32% vs. 1-2%) (Moreria, 2007).?
But David Pittenger, in his article “Measuring the MBTI… And Coming Up Short,” argues there is no evidence showing a positive correlation between MBTI types and their success within an occupation.?
Interestingly enough, another study tried to find if there was a correlation between leadership roles and MBTI types. They found a low correlation, but some of their results suggest that your Myers-Briggs type may correlate with how you lead (Zárate-Torres & Correa, 2023).?
That makes more sense to me. As humans, we adapt to our circumstances, but how we adapt is probably determined by the individual. However, our question is flawed. If money was no object and the economy was no pressure, we would all fall into our dream jobs. Yet, there are a million economic factors that limit the careers available to us and influence which we choose.?
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In summary, the evidence for MBTI’s validity is moderate at best and nonexistent at worst.
If the MBTI doesn’t have scientific validity and isn’t very reliable, why do so many organizations use it??
There are two answers to that. The first one is history.?
MBTI was perhaps the first personality assessment from the emerging field of psychology in the 1930s-1940s. As such, it became engrained in corporate culture.?
Before the Briggs Myers Type Indicator Handbook was officially published (they changed the name to Myers-Briggs in the second edition), Isabel Myers’s early work caught the attention of employers and the United States Military. The Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, even hired Myers to help them match covert operatives to secret missions.?
This was World War II. Men were off fighting, and many women were entering the industrial workforce for the first time. So, Isabel Myers and employers thought they could streamline the hiring process with a psychological assessment.
The post-war economic boom further cemented its role in the working world. Isabel Myers leveraged every connection she had to sell her test. Her test reached well-respected institutions like the National Bureau of Standards and the Roane-Anderson Company, a defense contractor (Pan, 2018).
The second answer is control.
Merve Emre literally wrote the book on the MBTI. If this article has sparked your curiosity, I recommend her book The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. In an interview with Marketplace, Emre describes two scenarios where management uses MBTI as a soft power tool.?
In one case, Emre’s sister made it through the first round of interviews because they were looking for a specific Myers-Briggs Type. In the second, one of Emre’s past managers had everyone working under them report their MBTI results. He would try to mitigate potential conflicts based on who is collaborating with whom and how their types mesh with each other (Nguyen, 2018).?
Even if the MBTI doesn’t work as these employers think it does, it still gives them a sense of control. It also gives them ambiguous language to obscure their hiring and firing decisions. (Pan, 2018). “You just weren’t the right fit.” We were never going to give you your asking salary. “We’re looking for a different personality type.” We found someone who would accept a lower wage.
“you can see [MBTI] as a tool of the managerial class that emerged during the height of Fordist production and mass standardization. With the push for workers to be more specialized in the postwar economy came the need for a group of people who could deduce exactly where to place each employee, how to maximize their productivity, and—perhaps most crucially—how to make them like it.”
~ J.C. Pan explains in their excellent article, “The Tyranny of Personality Testing.”
Psychology has changed a lot since then, but the MBTI has stagnated.?
Isabel Myers’s work was influential, but that doesn’t mean she was right. In recent decades, the study of personality has blossomed into its own branch of psychology. Personality psychology hosts a whole range of diverse theories, assessments, and debates.?
Limiting ourselves to one outdated personality assessment is like limiting our understanding of history to one test we took in the 5th grade.
So, MBTI is outdated and obsolete; what do we do now??
Underneath the MBTI is a very human desire to understand ourselves and our differences. To some extent, I think the MBTI can still help in that regard.?
As research for her book, Emre took an official Myers-Briggs certification course. She writes, “For many of my fellow trainees, the five days we spent learning the language of type presented a rare opportunity to confront themselves, to speak their truths in a strange but useful tongue.” (Pan, 2018).
There are so many more ways to understand personality.?
For example, the Five-Factor Model (FFM) or OCEAN model is more widely accepted and has more supporting evidence. It measures five core traits that comprise personality.?
Similar to MBTI, FFM also has a bunch of free online tests you can take.?
Self-discovery is excellent when initiated by ourselves or from the good faith of a supportive community. But when employers make you take a personality test…
It’s not really self-discovery, now, is it? It’s people sorting. We embed social relations within economic structures. The asymmetrical power dynamics take the authenticity out of self-discovery.?
Understandably, a personality assessment might provide career guidance. What is essential is that it gives that insight and power to the worker— to the person making their career.??
I think my leadshare 1) had a natural curiosity about themselves, but 2) they also wanted to learn how to mesh well with others. Leadshare is a networking group, after all, and Myers-Briggs is just one lens through which to view personality. There are no major power dynamics in leadshare like in a traditional work setting. We’re equally invested in each other.
If you are an employer, don’t worry. There is a way to authentically increase productivity, employee retention, job satisfaction, and all-around office happiness without any psychology tests.?
Work-life balance. Research shows that when employees can more allocate time for personal pursuits, hobbies, and spending quality time with family and friends, they become happier in their jobs. Better work-life balance correlates with higher job performance, higher retention, better mental health, improved relations both inside and outside of the office, and higher job satisfaction (Susanto et al., 2022).
So, if you want people to authentically work harder and better with others, give them less work and more time to authentically be themselves.
About Austin Harber,
I greatly appreciate all of you reading this far. This is a much longer article than I usually publish, but there was a lot I wanted to cover. I’m Austin Harber, and my job is explaining complex things in easy-to-understand ways.?
I work with B2B tech and SaaS companies to communicate complex solutions through clear, compelling storytelling— ensuring content is both technically accurate and compelling. With a technical background and experience on the front lines of system design and installation, I bridge the gap between engineers and business audiences.?
If you’re trying to sell an innovative but complex solution, I’m the guy to call for clear, concise, and competent content!
If you’re in the DC or Northern Virginia area, why not visit my leadshare?
Bibliography
Cunningham, L. (2023, May 17). Myers-Briggs: Does it pay to know your type? Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/myers-briggs-does-it-pay-to-know-your-type/2012/12/14/eaed51ae-3fcc-11e2-bca3-aadc9b7e29c5_story.html
Grant, A. (2016, January 31). Goodbye to MBTI, the fad that won’t die. Huffington Post. Retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/goodbye-to-mbti-the-fad-t_b_3947014
Moreira, M. (2007, Sept 19). Study of Myers-Briggs Types Relative to CM Professionals. CM Crossroads. Retrieved from https://www.cmcrossroads.com/article/study-myers-briggs-types-relative-cm-professionals-2007
Nguyen, J. (2018, Oct 30). How companies use the Myers-Briggs system to evaluate employees. Marketplace. Retrieved from https://www.marketplace.org/2018/10/30/business/big-book/myers-briggs-system-evaluate-employees/
Pan, J. (2021, May 11). The tyranny of personality testing. The New Republic. Retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/151098/personality-brokers-book-review-invention-myers-briggs-type-indicator
Pittenger, D. (1993). Measuring the MBTI … and coming up short. Journal of Career Planning and Employment. 54. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237675975_Measuring_the_MBTI_and_coming_up_short
Salter, D. Evans, N. & Forney, D. (1997 Aug 1). Test-Retest of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: An Examination of Dominant Functioning. Educational and Psychological Measurement. 57. 590-597. 10.1177/0013164497057004005. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233762406_Test-Retest_of_the_Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator_An_Examination_of_Dominant_Functioning
Susanto, P., Hoque, M. E., Jannat, T., Emely, B., Zona, M. A., & Islam, M. A. (2022). Work-Life Balance, Job Satisfaction, and Job Performance of SMEs Employees: The Moderating Role of Family-Supportive Supervisor Behaviors. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 906876. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.906876
Tieger, P. D., Jr., Barron-Tieger, B., & Consulting Psychologists Press. (1992). PERSONALITY TYPING: a FIRST STEP TO a SATISFYING CAREER. Retrieved from https://jobtalk.indiana.edu/Articles/develop/pers_typ.pdf
Zárate-Torres, R., & Correa, J. C. (2023). How good is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator for predicting leadership-related behaviors?. Frontiers in psychology, 14, 940961. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.940961
Founder @Agentgrow | 3x Head of Sales
4 个月Interesting points, Austin. I have been curious about how MBTI compares to other tools, like the Big Five. Has your team explored these alternatives?
Writing Enthusiast Seeking Opportunities to Connect | Passionate About Storytelling, Exploring Ideas and Sharing Knowledge |
4 个月Thats a lot of thought management done Austin. Loved to read the positives and negatives of MBTI. This will help to incline towards sides when looking at the MBTI results of a person.??