How Real Is the Myers-Briggs Test?
And what about the Enneagram? A reader question, answered!
A reader of the ‘stack writes in with a question: He was recently asked to take a Myers-Briggs test at work, and “it made me wonder how ‘real’ these Myers-Briggs types are.”
The short answer: They are not very real.
The longer answer:
I got into this a bit in my personality-change Atlantic article, and will do so more in my book, but the Myers-Briggs isn’t considered a reliable personality metric by most psychologists today.
[As a reminder, please email me your personality questions. I’d love to answer them in the book or in a future newsletter! olga.khazan@gmail.com]
As Merve Emre writes in The Personality Brokers, The Myers-Briggs was developed by a mother daughter duo, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. The pair didn’t have any formal scientific training, but they were fans of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who posited that there were different kinds of people in the world—thinkers and feelers, introverts and extroverts. (Here you see the origins of some of the Myers-Briggs “types.”)
The test took off because in the early days of World War II, Isabel had a job in human resources, and her boss had connections to U.S. government agencies who wanted to match spies with missions best-suited to their personalities. After the war, the test trickled out to other types of jobs and industries, and it lives on today.
(I should say here that though I’m writing a book about personality, which includes the idea of personality testing, I’m opposed to mandatory personality testing at work. I don’t think employers are owed information about their workers’ internal states. And because research shows personality is flexible, I don’t think certain types of personalities are predisposed to only certain types of jobs.)
There are a few big problems with the Myers-Briggs:
People who take the test multiple times tend to get different scores. (Adam Grant, the prominent organizational psychologist, has tested as both an INTJ and ESFP, for example.) About half the people who take the test twice get different results—and those are not great odds.
Jung came up with his theories about “thinkers” and “feelers” in the 1920s, before psychology became a real science with agreed-upon standards and metrics. There weren’t meta-analyses or experiments to back up Jung’s claims—they were just his ideas.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, personality traits aren’t “categories.” They’re a spectrum. Most people will sometimes feel like an extrovert, sometimes like an introvert. You’ll sometimes be more of a “thinker” and other times more of a “feeler.” Most people fall between the Myers-Briggs types.
This same reader asked about the Enneagram—as did many other readers after my article came out. I have bad news about that one, too. In short, it suffers from a lot of the same problems as the Myers-Briggs. (With the additional “yikes” that the guy behind it is described as a “spiritual guru,” not a psychologist.)
“Any kind of personality assessment that's trying to put people into categories or boxes is going to be fundamentally flawed,” Nathan Hudson, one of the personality researchers whose work I reported on, told me at one point. This is the same reason a doctor will describe you as being “five foot nine,” rather than “short” or “tall.” Tall compared to who? And what’s the cutoff for “short?”
What I can sense coming is that some people probably have taken the Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram and found it to be very accurate in describing their personalities, and knowing their type or number has been helpful or clarifying or edifying in some way. I’m not trying to take that away.
Just like there’s no harm in feeling like Fiona Apple is singing about your life, specifically, there’s no harm in feeling like your personality-test answers match up with a “category” that other people have also fallen into, and that there’s a label for that category, and it’s INTJ or “Investigator” or something. Likewise, I have no problem with people born in June calling themselves “Geminis.” We all like to feel less alone.
But that doesn’t mean those labels are going to accurately describe your personality. In fact, you’ll probably often catch yourself behaving in ways that don’t cohere with that label at all. And there are probably better ways to figure out what job you should have.
This is exactly right. I've been skeptical of Myers-Briggs since its heyday in the '90s, when I and virtually all my friends tested as INFPs, despite that type supposedly being one of the rarest. I looked for scientific origins or confirmations of the system and could find nothing.
I was once on a group vacation with an Enneagram practitioner who described the nine personality types in that system. I remember thinking, as she was getting to the end, that none of the types matched my mother in the slightest—and then the next type described her to a T. But does that mean it's a useful way to understand or explain people? At most, both these systems may serve as shortcut ways to describe people you already know well.
I’ve consistently tested as INTJ for 25 years (5 or 6 tests during that time). Does that mean anything?