A Flynn Effect in MBTI
How Zeitgeist has Muddied the Waters of Personality
I first encountered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter when I was 14 or 15 years old, and have been borderline obsessive about the subject ever since. Perhaps one of few things that deterred me from studying psychology in college is that I have always been more interested in normal behavior than abnormal behavior, and psychology generally emphasizes the latter.
Having variously used the MBTI in team-building at my start-ups, and in our community-building and entrepreneurship mentoring at Exosphere, I have relied primarily on my gut read of people using Keirsey’s archetypes and descriptions. Keirsey differed from Myers and Briggs in his assessment of what the four broad types were. Where Myers and Briggs saw the primary differentiations being Intuition vs Sensing and Thinking vs Feeling, Keirsey saw the Judging vs Perceiving trait as being more dominant in Sensing types, concluding that the categories should be-
- Rationals — iNtuitive Thinking (NT)
- Idealists — iNtuitive Feeling (NF)
- Guardians — Sensing Judging (SJ)
- Artisans — Sensing Perceiving (SP)
My study into the mechanics of Myers’ research on Jung’s cognitive functions was minimal, as I thought it was at best subordinate detail to Keirsey’s categories, which seemed congruent with my life experience.
In July of 2013, Exosphere launched our first entrepreneurship boot camp in Santiago, Chile, attracting applicants from all over the world. As part of the application process, we required everybody to submit their Myers-Briggs Type, and provided a link to a free version of Keirsey’s Temperament Sorter for those who had not previously taken an MBTI survey. To our surprise, all but one applicant to the boot camp returned an iNtuitive type for their perceiving function, even though statistically according to Myers’ research, only about 25% of the general population (in the US) have that trait. Rather than question the data, as we ought to have, we explained it by saying that iNtuitive types were more likely to pursue careers in entrepreneurship, and to attend the first of something. Additionally, because I had personally written the copy, and being an NT myself, perhaps my rhetoric had naturally attracted similar people.
Taking these simplistic explanations of tremendous statistical improbabilities for granted, we opened the application for our second boot camp, with the same requirement of submitting an MBTI result. We were complaining internally that we weren’t receiving any Artisan applicants, and a joke about their short attention span made us think maybe they look at the test and say “screw this!” Consequently, we moved the box on the application form related to MBTI to the bottom of the application, and made it optional. Several people applied without the survey results and based on their writing style in the application, we think they probably are, indeed, Artisan types.
But then, one of my colleagues, Niccolò Viviani began noticing his friends back in Italy returning strange results when he asked them to take the MBTI survey. Most of them, who he was sure by years of interacting with them, were Sensing, were showing up to be iNtuitive. At first we thought maybe it was the language used in the test, especially for non-native speakers of English. We were temporarily mollified by this hypothesis.
Nevertheless, something didn’t feel right, and through hours of discussion, and a series of realizations upon deeper inquiry into Myers’ analysis of Jung’s cognitive functions, we started realizing that the test was producing blatantly inaccurate results due to culture. The confusing results were primarily coming from fellow Millennials, whereas my parents and friends in the Baby Boomer Generation, everything was much more clear-cut.
Why would age matter to personality?
It seems that it’s not age that matters but The Age. The cultural expectations of Millennials emphasize differing kinds of achievement, especially amongst the educated bourgeoise middle class in the West and its aspirational imitators in Latin America and Asia. Subjects like Spirituality, Community, Innovation, and Self-Reliance, which previously resided on the fringes of the iNtuitive minority have come into the mainstream memetic discourse, dramatically altering the landscape of the expression of personality and temperament.
Given that most of the sociological data collected on type cited by both Myers and Keirsey was gathered in the 1940s-1950s, and their tests were designed based on these cultural norms, it should not be surprising that cultural evolution has rendered much of their analysis moot. Nowhere is this more evident than in Keirsey’s Guardian (the Sensing-Judging archetype).
Keirsey’s analysis of Guardians describes them as being moralistic and dispositionally conservative—wanting to preserve the status quo and its institutions. While this may well have been the case during America’s Golden Age, it turns out to be a superficial reading of personality in a limited cultural milieu, and read in such a way, would seem to indicate that Guardians will be extinct in America when my parents’ generation passes on.
For the Baby Boomers, the Guardian archetype would have populated Sunday School classes and the Rotary Club—the father-breadwinner being The Organization Man or his rural counterpart, The Family Farmer, and the mother-homemaker ensuring the laundry is done, the house is kept, and everybody eats three square meals a day, and brushes their teeth before being in bed by 10pm. Read in this way, one would find few Guardians in our midst, and certainly not in such stark relief.
The symbols and expectations in the Millennial Generation have changed, however. We are now expected to find meaningful work, which historically would have been the province of Keirsey’s Idealists (iNtuitive Feeling). Our respected institutions are no longer The Church, The State, and civic organizations, but Charities, socially responsible Corporations, and innovative educational institutions. The society that the Guardians of old tried to preserve changed in spite of their best efforts, and it is the new, changed society that the Millennial Guardians would like to keep, run, and improve at the margins.
Hence, there are a number of Millennial Guardians (and many Feeling Artisans) who mistakenly self-assess and self-identify as NF-Idealists.
But we aren’t finished yet.
There’s another trend in play here, that further complicates the picture: A sort of Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect, of course, is the observation that IQ scores have increased over time, and there are a number of factors cited for why this has happened (and for why it may be coming to an end, too). Here we are not concerned with the literal Flynn Effect, but rather as being symbolic of an important trend that causes many Thinking Guardians and Thinking Artisans (STPs) to mistakenly self-assess as NT-Rationals.
The description of Keirsey’s Rationals is that they tend are preoccupied with technology while preferring to work with systems, Idealists with morale and personnel, Guardians with morality and materiel, and Artisans with technique and equipment. Many of the world’s famous scientists have been NT-Rationals, including Einstein (INTP) and Feynman (ENTP). The term “technology” is not properly understood in our present context, because we misuse the term.
In Keirsey’s usage, technology means something much closer to the Greek origin of the word, meaning systematic treatment rather than mere innovation or device. In this sense, an ISTP, Keirsey’s Crafter who is a master Ruby-on-Rails programmer is fulfilling his expected vocation in dealing with equipment and being preoccupied with technique.
As technology has advanced, we have not stopped calling normal tools “technology.” Nobody refers to forklifts as “technology,” and computers should pass into this same state. Indeed, we now even have to use the term “emerging technology” to refer to what should just be known as “technology,” the systematic treatment of a technical or scientific subject rather than as referring to computerized equipment, like a Smartphone, which is no more technology than a toilet, in the West (this isn’t to say that Smartphones don’t still have a lot of room for marginal improvements, of course, or that it is no more an accomplishment than a toilet, but rather that it is now merely a commoditized tool).
Indeed, those people interested in making “better tools” are quite different from people pushing the known limits of physics. If a thorough and culturally-controlled assessment were conducted of engineers working on iOS at Apple and compared to engineers working at SpaceX, I would propose that there would be far more Artisans at the former and Rationals at the latter.
We could even imagine that one of the reasons companies are unable to sustain truly groundbreaking innovation over the long-term is that once a reliable revenue stream has been established, the marginal improvements to the product require the tinkering skills of Artisans more than the systematic thought processes of Rationals, and the Rationals, being bored and unchallenged, depart for greener pastures.
Google is a good example of a company that has managed to buck this trend, and it is largely due to two factors: their historic policy (though I understand now in jeopardy) of allowing engineers to spend a percentage of their time every week working on whatever they want and the fact that Sergey Brin, an extreme Rational-type if ever one existed, wields tremendous influence in the allocation of resources to the exploration of bleeding edge possibilities.
The Thinking Guardians involved in technology tend to be focused more on its logistics side, as one would expect. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who is an example of the “data-driven” obsession in many tech circles, is likely an ISTJ, which shouldn’t be surprising considering that Amazon is essentially an elaborate logistics company, like Wal-Mart, started by another Guardian, Sam Walton.
However, given Bezos’s seeming clairevoyance, he is often classified as an INTJ. This indicates the externalized problem of seeing the effects of one’s decisions and imputing it to iNtuitiveness because it seems impossible (especially to those of us who do possess the iNtuitive trait) that “mere facts” could yield such results.
As our tools have advanced, we have a sort of Flynn Effect in personality that gives Sensing-Thinking types a reason to answer inaccurately on MBTI surveys and skews them toward being mistakenly identified as iNtuitive-Thinking types.
This brings us to the conclusion that there is a key consideration in personality evaluation that although predates our present concerns, is nevertheless exacerbated by a changing Zeitgeist and technological progress: that individuals have a propensity to see what they want to see in themselves, and that it is determined by cultural expectations.
Retrospectively, we could now consider the possibility that Myers’ own research was skewed by cultural expectations of her own milieu, and that perhaps many NF-Idealists self-identified as Feeling Guardians or Feeling Artisans and NT-Rationals self-identified as Thinking Guardians or Thinking Rationals. On these foregone possibilities, we cannot go back to attempt to control for them.
What we can do, however, is to fully appreciate the usefulness of all cognitive functions and the social roles played by people with their varying 16 different combinations and seek to understand each other, maximize our own talents, minimize our weaknesses, and push humanity forward on all fronts with the appreciation of the individuality of every person, who they are, and the culture from which they come.
Personality typing is useful, but not determinative, and the methodological uncertainties described herein warrant caution before applying labels to people in business and personal life—being wrong can yield unnecessary confusion and difficulty in interaction. To understand another person requires patience and an acceptance that it is impossible to ever fully do so. But we must make the effort, and we must improve the tools available at our disposal.
