All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Aug. 31, 2010 - Skeptoid
17:41
Skeptoid #221: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test

A critical look at the world's most popular psychological metric, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
The Myers-Briggs Myth 00:07:49
It's one of those things that everyone just takes for granted.
The famous Myers-Briggs test, which, if you've heard of it, can predict with amazing accuracy what kind of career you'd be most successful in, what position you should play on your sports team, with what romantic partner will you be most successful, and more.
But does the science support all the popular belief in Myers-Briggs?
That's today on Skeptoid.
A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006.
With over a thousand episodes, we're celebrating 20 years of keeping it focused and keeping it brief.
And we couldn't have done it without your curiosity leading the way.
And now we're even offering a little bit more.
If you become a premium member, supporting the show with a monthly micropayment of as little as $5, you get more Skeptoid.
The premium version of the show is not only ad-free, it has extended content.
These episodes are a few minutes longer.
We get rid of the ads and replace them with more Skeptoid.
The Extended Premium Show available now.
Come to skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
The Myers-Briggs Personality Test.
Today we're going to delve into the murky depths of Jungian psychology and examine one of its most popular surviving manifestations.
The Myers-Briggs test is used all over the world and is the single most popular psychometric system, with the full formal version of the test given more than 2 million times a year.
But is it a valid psychological tool?
Is it just another pop gimmick like astrology?
Or is the truth somewhere in between?
The Myers-Briggs type indicator, called MBTI for short, more properly owes the bulk of its credit to the great Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Jung.
In 1921, Jung published his book, Psychological Types, in which he laid out all the same concepts found in the MBTI, but he had them organized quite differently.
Jung had everyone categorized as either a perceiver or a judger.
Perceivers fell into one of two groups, sensation and intuition, while judgers also fall into two groups, thinking and feeling.
So everyone fits into one of those four buckets.
Finally, each bucket is divided into two attitude types, introversion and extroversion.
Thus, the scale proposed by Jung divided us all into one of eight basic psychological types.
An American woman, Catherine Briggs, bought Jung's book and was fascinated by it.
She recommended it to her married daughter, Isabel Briggs-Myers, who had a degree in political science.
The two of them got hooked on the idea of psychological metrics.
Together, they sat down and codified their own interpretation of Carl Jung, making a few important changes of their own.
Jung had everyone fitting into one of four basic buckets.
Myers and Briggs decided that each person probably combined elements, so they modified Jung's system and made it a little more complex, ending up with four dichotomies, like binary switches.
Any combination of the four switches is allowed, and Myers and Briggs reasoned that just about every personality type could be well described by one of the 16 possible ways for those switches to be set.
Basically, according to Myers and Briggs, we're all represented by a four-digit binary number.
The first dichotomy is called your attitude, and according to the MBTI, you're either an E for extrovert or an I for introvert.
Extroverts prefer action, frequent interaction, focus outward, and are most relaxed when interacting with others.
Introverts prefer thought, less frequent but more substantial interaction, and are most relaxed spending time alone.
The second dichotomy is your perceiving function, and you're either an S for sensing or an N for intuition.
Sensing is the scientific, tangible, data-driven approach to gathering information, preferring to deal in concrete, measurable information.
The intuition approach prefers theoretical, abstract, hunch-driven information, finding more meaning in apparent patterns and context.
The third dichotomy is your judging function, and you're either a T for thinking or an F for feeling.
This is basically how you make decisions.
Thinking makes the logical decision, what's best for the situation, based on rules and pragmatism.
Feeling decides based on empathy for the people whom the decision affects, seeking balance and harmony.
The fourth and final dichotomy is your lifestyle, and you're either a J for judgment or a P for perception.
This one gets a little confusing.
Judgment types prefer to use the third dichotomy, judging, when relating to the outside world, while perception types prefer the second perceiving dichotomy.
But how that preference is determined is based on whether you're an introvert or an extrovert.
Suffice it to say, for the purpose of this light overview, that this last of the four dichotomies, lifestyle, is the most complicated, and it's where Myers and Briggs most creatively expanded upon Jung on their own.
The basic test, of which there are several variations and revisions, is called the MBTI Step 1, and it's a series of almost 100 questions, each with two possible answers.
Each question consists of two short statements or word choices, and you simply choose which of the two you prefer.
When the results are tabulated, you should ideally have your preference established for each of the four dichotomies, and congratulations, you're now identified by one of 16 possible personality types.
Myers and Briggs gave names and descriptions to all 16.
Names such as the executive, the caregiver, the scientist, and the idealist.
Perhaps the most common misconception about the MBTI is that it shows your aptitude, helping you determine what kinds of things you'd be good at.
This is not the case.
Myers-Briggs is only about determining your preference, not your ability.
There might be things you're good at that you don't enjoy, and there might be things you enjoy that you're not good at.
The MBTI helps you find your comfort zone, the types of activities you'll like and be most content with, not necessarily those at which you'll be especially competent.
Even though neither had any background in psychology, Myers and Briggs enjoyed great success with their system.
As Mrs. Briggs was getting quite old, Isabel Myers was the main driving force.
Her initial idea was that certain personality types would more easily excel at different jobs, and the tool was intended to be used by women entering the workforce during World War II.
However, it was not published until 1962, but since that time it's become the most widely used basic psychology test.
It's most often used outside of the psychological profession, and is employed in career counseling, sports coaching, marriage counseling, dating, professional development, and almost every other field where people hope to be fit with a role that should work best for them.
So the MBTI's practical use is overwhelmingly unscientific, and it's often criticized for this.
Skeptoid Adventure at Sea 00:02:06
Criticism ranges from the pragmatic fact that neither Young nor Myers and Briggs ever employed scientific studies to develop or test these concepts, relying instead on their own observations, anecdotes, and intuitions.
All the way to charges that the MBTI score is hardly more meaningful than your zodiac sign.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Malaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Why MBTI Fails Science 00:05:44
One obvious trait that the MBTI has in common with horoscopes is its tendency to describe each personality type using only positive words.
Horoscopes are so popular in part because they virtually always tell people just what they want to hear, using phrases that most people generally like to believe are true, like, you have a lot of unused potential.
They're also popular because they're presented as being personalized based on the person's sign.
This has been called the Forrer effect, after psychologist Bertram Forrer, who, in 1948, gave a personality test to his students and then gave each one a supposedly personalized analysis.
The impressed students gave the analyses an average accuracy rating of 85%.
And only then did Forrer reveal that each had received an identical, generic report.
Belief that a report is customized for us tends to improve our perception of the report's accuracy.
I notice this right away when I read Isabel Meyer's description for my own personality type, ISTJ, the duty fulfiller.
Practical, matter-of-fact, realistic, and responsible.
Basically, it's a nice way to say dry, boring, and punctual, which hits my nail pretty squarely on the head.
From that alone, I might conclude that the MBTI is extraordinarily insightful.
But if I look at her description of my opposite counterpart, an ENFP, the inspirer, that person is warmly enthusiastic and imaginative, sees life as full of possibilities.
Well, who wouldn't like to believe that about his or herself?
If I'd taken the test and been handed that result, I might be equally inclined to embrace it, probably thinking something like, wow, I'm even more awesome than I thought I was.
Due to these legitimate criticisms of the MBTI and its unscientific underpinnings, the test is rarely used in clinical psychology.
I did a literature search on PubMed and discovered that, interestingly, many of the published studies of its practical utility come from nursing journals.
Many of the other publications pertain to relationship counseling and religious counseling.
Normally, this is a red flag.
When you see a topic that purports to be psychological being used in practically every professional discipline except psychology, you have very good reason to be skeptical of its actual value.
Should we dismiss the Myers-Briggs type indicator as a psychometric?
The test does have some severe inherent problems.
It's been found that 50% of test takers who retake it score differently the second time.
This is because nobody is strictly an E or an I, for example, but somewhere in between.
Many people are right on the border for some of the four dichotomies, and depending on their mood that day, or other factors, may answer enough questions differently to push them over.
Yet the results inaccurately pigeonhole them all the way over to one side or the other.
This makes it possible for two people who are very similar to actually end up with completely opposite scores.
Isabel Myers was aware of this limitation and did her best to eliminate questions that did not push people away from the center when the results were studied in aggregate.
It was a hack.
From the perspective of statistical analysis, the MBTI's fundamental premise is flawed.
According to Myers and Briggs, each person is either an introvert or an extrovert.
Within each group, we would expect to see a bell curve showing the distribution of extroversion within the extroverts group and introversion within the introverts.
If the MBTI approach is valid, we should expect to see two separate bell curves along the introversion-extroversion spectrum, making it valid for Myers and Briggs to decide that there are two groups into which people fit.
But data have shown that people do not clump into two separately identifiable curves.
They clump into a single bell curve, with extreme introverts and extreme extroverts forming the long tails of the curve, and most people gathered somewhere in the middle.
Young himself said there is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert.
Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.
This does not support the MBTI assumption that people naturally separate into two groups.
MBTI takes a knife and cuts the bell curve right down the center, through the meatiest part, and right through most people's horizontal error bars.
Moreover, this forced error is compounded four times with each of the four dichotomies.
This statistical fumble helps to explain why so many people score differently when retaking the test.
There is no truly correct score for most people, and no perfect fit for anyone.
And this has been borne out in observation.
A number of studies have found that personality types said to be most appropriate for certain professions, notably nursing or teaching, turn out to be no more prevalent among that profession than among the general population.
The Army Research Institute commissioned one such study to determine if the MBTI or similar tests could be used to improve the placement of personnel in different duties, and firmly concluded that the results of such tests did not justify their use in career counseling.
From reviewing the literature, I do find one common theme among mainstream psychotherapists where the use of the MBTI is advised, and that's as a conversation starter.
A Tool for Dialogue 00:01:58
It's a fine way to give people a quick snapshot of what their strengths and weaknesses might be, and of those with whom they interact.
To get the dialogue going, this is a perfectly valid tool.
But as a tool for making career decisions, relationship decisions, or psychiatric assessment, no.
Although it would be nice to have a magically easy self-analysis tool that can make your decisions for you and be your crystal ball, the Myers-Briggs test is not it.
It is interesting and it does have value as a starting point for meaningful dialogue.
But that's where the line should be drawn.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello everyone, this is Adrienne Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and mousse.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double-doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX.
Export Selection