Myers–Briggs Type Indicator
[7] The test assigns a binary value to each of four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving.
[8][9] The perceived accuracy of test results relies on the Barnum effect, flattery, and confirmation bias, leading participants to personally identify with descriptions that are somewhat desirable, vague, and widely applicable.
It is estimated that 50 million people have taken the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator and that 10,000 businesses, 2,500 colleges and universities, and 200 government agencies in the United States use the MBTI.
Briggs embarked on a project of reading biographies and subsequently developed a typology wherein she proposed four temperaments: meditative (or thoughtful), spontaneous, executive, and social.
[20] After extensively studying the work of Jung, Briggs and her daughter extended their interest in human behavior into efforts to turn the theory of psychological types to practical use.
[24] Briggs and Myers began creating their indicator during World War II (1939–1945)[9] in the belief that a knowledge of personality preferences would help women entering the industrial workforce for the first time to identify the sorts of war-time jobs that would be the "most comfortable and effective" for them.
The publication of the MBTI was transferred to Consulting Psychologists Press in 1975, and the Center for Applications of Psychological Type was founded as a research laboratory.
[39] Jung speculated that people experience the world using four principal psychological functions—sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking—and that one of these four functions is dominant in an individual, a majority of the time.
Those who prefer thinking tend to decide things from a more detached standpoint, measuring the decision by what seems reasonable, logical, causal, consistent, and matching a given set of rules.
[65] ... a major task in interpretation is to help respondents with less clear reported preferences arrive at a comfortable and accurate assessment of their type.
[11] Psychometric specialist Robert Hogan wrote: "Most personality psychologists regard the MBTI as little more than an elaborate Chinese fortune cookie".
[13] A 1996 review by Gardner and Martinko concluded: "It is clear that efforts to detect simplistic linkages between type preferences and managerial effectiveness have been disappointing.
"[13][72] The test has been likened to horoscopes, as both rely on the Barnum effect, flattery, and confirmation bias, leading participants to personally identify with descriptions that are somewhat desirable, vague, and widely applicable.
Thus, psychometric assessment research fails to support the concept of type, but rather shows that most people lie near the middle of a continuous curve.
[12][75][76][77][78] Although we do not conclude that the absence of bimodality necessarily proves that the MBTI developers' theory-based assumption of categorical "types" of personality is invalid, the absence of empirical bimodality in IRT-based research of MBTI scores does indeed remove a potentially powerful line of evidence that was previously available to "type" advocates to cite in defense of their position.
The 1991 review committee concluded at the time there was "not sufficient, well-designed research to justify the use of the MBTI in career counseling programs".
[86] The terminology of the MBTI has been criticized as being very "vague and general",[87] so as to allow any kind of behavior to fit any personality type, which may result in the Barnum effect, where people give a high rating to a positive description that supposedly applies specifically to them.
For instance, Keirsey's descriptions of his four temperaments, which he correlated with the 16 MBTI personality types, show how the temperaments differ in terms of language use, intellectual orientation, educational and vocational interests, social orientation, self-image, personal values, social roles, and characteristic hand gestures.
[75] One factor-analytic study based on (N=1291) college-aged students found six different factors instead of the four purported dimensions, thereby raising doubts as to the construct validity of the MBTI.
Thus introversion correlates roughly (i.e., averaging values for males and females) −.44 with dominance, +.37 with abasement, +.46 with counselling readiness, −.52 with self-confidence, −.36 with personal adjustment, and −.45 with empathy.
", Roman Krznaric wrote: The interesting – and somewhat alarming – fact about the MBTI is that, despite its popularity, it has been subject to sustained criticism by professional psychologists for over three decades.
The consequence is that the scores of two people labelled "introverted" and "extraverted" may be almost exactly the same, but they could be placed into different categories since they fall on either side of an imaginary dividing line.
[97] Robert and Mary Capraro in 2002 meta-analysis published in the journal Educational and Psychological Measurement found out that "In general, the MBTI and its scales yielded scores with strong internal consistency and test-retest reliability estimates, although variation was observed."
[12] Some researchers have expressed reservations about the relevance of type to job satisfaction, as well as concerns about the potential misuse of the instrument in labeling people.
[109] It is argued that the MBTI only continues to be popular because many people are qualified to administer it, it is not difficult to understand, and there are many supporting books, websites and other sources which are readily available to the general public.
[111] McCrae and Costa[75] present correlations between the MBTI scales and the Big Five personality constructs measured, for example, by the NEO-PI-R.[112] The five purported personality constructs have been labeled: extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism (emotional instability), although there is not universal agreement on the Big Five theory and the related Five-Factor Model (FFM).
These findings led McCrae and Costa to conclude that, "correlational analyses showed that the four MBTI indices did measure aspects of four of the five major dimensions of normal personality.
The five-factor model provides an alternative basis for interpreting MBTI findings within a broader, more commonly shared conceptual framework."
"[75] At the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, MBTI testing became a fad among young South Koreans who were using it in an attempt to find compatible dating partners.
[119] In 2021, director Tim Travers Hawkins's film Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests premiered on HBO.
