“Who are you?”
Despite being widely known and one of the most religiously taken psychological tests throughout the world, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is remains to this day controversial within the field of psychology.
The MBTI is a personality inventory that places individuals into 1 of 16 possible personality types. There are four pairs of opposite personalities:
1) Extroversion-Introversion (E-I): “Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world?”
2) Sensing-Intuition (S-N): “Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning?”
3) Thinking-Feeling (T-F): “When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances?”
4) Judgment-Perception (J-P): “In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options?”
It was developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers during World War II to help the women entering the workforce to figure out which jobs were suited for them. The MBTI takes after Carl Gustav Jung’s Psychological Types Theory.
The problem I have with the MBTI is that it forces individuals to choose between one of two possible answers to each question. According to what I have read about this test, you are placed into a personality type based on how many items you have chosen from that set personality type. My preferences could be circumstantial, and could depend on my mood, thus I believe it would be hard for me to get the same exact answers were I to retake the test. My answers to this test could just vary by a little bit, but the test would see me as a completely different personality type, so the test-retest reliability of the MBTI is questionable. Up to 75% of the test takers are assigned a different personality type when they retake the test.
Even though the MBTI is designed with the intention to measure how individuals perceive the world and make decisions based on their personality preferences and values, I feel as if people could easily fit into any of the 16 personas because the personality type descriptions seem general enough. Parts of each personality type could fit most people, similar with personality types for horoscopes and astrological signs, which could be the Forer effect taking place.
It is not as if we could completely dismiss the MBTI because of its popularity, but I suppose it could somewhat help with career directions, though I do think that it should not be the main force that drives people’s path.
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