Priscilla Xu

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If you are into personality testing, you probably heard of the Myers Brigg Type Indicator. Unfortunately, the results of my test were a roller coaster.

Did your MBTI change results?

My MBTI was INFJ. I scored ENTJ and INTJ in the past. I think the test accurately describes roughly half of my personality traits.

When I first took the test in high school, I got ENTJ. Then, I moved out to San Diego for college and then transferred to Spain for dental school. When I was an INTJ, I was dating. Then, after the breakup during the pandemic, I was forced to face my feelings instead of suppressing them as a coping mechanism because I had to stay at home. Those significant changes are what altered my personality.

The Story of MBTI.

The personality test started out to make Carl Jung’s psychological theories popular access to the public in his book Psychological Types. The theory explains incoherent human behavior is due to perception and judgment. According to the official MBTI website, perception and judgment are defined as.

Perception involves all the ways of becoming aware of things, people, happenings, or ideas.

THE Myers & Briggs FOUNDATION

Judgment involves all the ways of coming to conclusions about what has been perceived.

THE Myers & Briggs FOUNDATION

The deduction results from perception and judgment will explain why people have a wide variety of behaviors.

The theories were hard to understand to the general public, so a daughter and mother, Isabel Briggs and Katherine Briggs, wanted to design a personality test based on Carl Jung’s theories.

They created a test to determine the preferences of human-based on

• Introversion or extroversion
• Information: Sensing or Intuition
• Decision: Thinking or Feeling
• Structure: Judging or Perceiving

The fun fact is that MBTI creators are not professionally trained in the psychology industry.

Why does a pseudoscientific personality test exist for such a long time?

Financial Incentives

A personality test exists because there is a financial incentive to it.

The Myer Briggs company earns around 20 million from selling the test. So whenever there is a financial incentive, there will be people providing supplies to meet the demand of others. 

The Barnum Effect

The second reason stems from a fascinating psychological phenomenon called the Barnum Effect.

The phenomenon occurs when individuals believe that personality descriptions apply specifically to them (more so than to other people), even though the description is filled with information that applies to everyone. 

Britannica

The Barnum Effect has a second name, the Forer Effect. The name was named after the psychologist Bertram Forer. The term came from a famous experiment that he conducted.

First, he assigned a fake psychological test to his students. Then, he asked his students to rate how the test measured their personalities. The rating accuracy of the mock psychological test was an average of 4.3 out of 5.

This is the reason why pseudoscience is so comforting.

However, you are now aware of this effect. You can now slowly start to observe your thoughts and biases when you are mind wandering.

Why is MBTI pseudoscienc?

I am taking a class about the psychology of pseudoscience. The authors discussed the MBTI from a clinical perspective in my college textbook. The access criteria for a diagnostic tool to be accurate were standardization, reliability, and validity.

• Bad standardization. There is no repeatable operational definition to measure perception and judgment. And the descriptions of the test force people with no background knowledge in psychology to fit themselves into one category. The categories are not mutually exclusive.
  • The results are based on the test taker’s preference instead of a score on a continuous variable that can be matched to an extensive set of data for reference. MBTI scoring is similar to categorizing people as tall or short with a struct cut-off point.

• Poor reliability. In psychology, a reliable test should produce consistent results.
  • A study has shown that around 39% to 76% of people who take the MBTI get different results when taking the test five weeks apart.

• Poor predictive validity. Predictative validity in psychology is a person who takes it. A difficulty with predictive validity means that it can predict the future behaviors of the test taker.
  • Many people take MBTI for a career decision or managerial purpsoes. Studies show that MBTI is not a valid predictor for someone’s behavior.
  • It is very daunting to select your career based on a pseudoscientific personality test that most people do not consider as one.
  • The textbook explains that the scientific literature has a narrow interpretation of predictive validity, such as making a career decision.

Can you accurately predict yourself with a personality test?.

Surprisingly, people are horrible at predicting how they will change in the future. In a 2013 research study, Quiodach and his colleagues surveyed 19,000 people from ages 16-68 on expecting how much they will change in the future. The result showed that most people believe that they will not change much in the future, but they did change a lot.

The research named this phenomenon “The End of History Illusion.” Depending on how the test taker interprets the results, the test can be improved.

The Fight against Pseudoscience of MBTI

1 . Take personality tests with a grain of salt and take ownership of your life. MBTI is a snapshot of what has happened. I took the test and found it as a tool to see a shot of my personality at a particular time in my life. After we have understood the theories behind the MBTI, we know what it can and cannot measure.

2. Do not pigeonhole yourself in one category. The danger sneaks in when people innocently label and attach their self-worth to a personality type and develop a fixed mindset that they will not change.

Keep up the fun!

The MBTI still has an extensive entertainment factor in it. Therefore, it is interesting to discuss what category we fall into. It is a valuable tool, but with limitations.

When you allow yourself to stop defining yourself as a specific “type,” such as “introvert” or “extrovert,” you become far more open. As a result, your possibilities and choices expand.

Personality Isn’t Permanent, Benjamin Hardy

Just remember that we are terrible at predicting ourselves. So taking in and reflecting on each experience mindfully are the best thing we can do for ourselves. Think as if we are doing something for the first time. And our past does not define who we are in the present.