Do You Have Traits or Are You a Type?
Every few years, another intrepid, well-informed journalist writes an exposé of the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator (MBPI). Malcolm Gladwell took a shot at it in 2004 in The New Yorker.1 Eleven years later, Vox ran its incarnation of this eternal story, by Joseph Stromberg and Estelle Caswell, with a headline that could not have been clearer: “Why the Myers-Briggs Test is Totally Meaningless.”2 In case anyone missed the headline, pull-outs in the story emphasized the point:
- “Analysis shows the test is totally ineffective at predicting people’s success at various jobs”
- “The Myers-Briggs rests on wholly unproved theories”
- “About 200 Federal agencies reportedly waste money on this test”
And now Louis Menand of The New Yorker has taken a shot: “Are assessments like the Myers-Briggs more self-help than science?”3 You can guess his answer. You can also guess the answer to this one: How many of the more than two million people a year who fill out the MBPI—in businesses, colleges, churches, couples’ retreats, motivational seminars, and matchmaking programs—read those articles and said, “Aha! I always suspected it was ‘totally meaningless’! Give me my money back”?
The MBPI, like the Rorschach or palm reading, floats above criticism, parody, and evidence. At a conference on science and skepticism, at which I spoke about why people hold on to outdated or incorrect beliefs, a young man asked for my views on the MBPI. When I asked why he cared, he told me he’d been using it for years with his colleagues and students and swore by its accuracy. I admit that I did not give him an honest reply.
People have been fitting themselves and their friends into “types” since the days of Hippocrates, who posited that personalities fell into four categories depending on mixes of body fluids. If you were an angry, irritable sort of person, you supposedly had an excess of choler, and even now the word choleric describes a hothead. And if you were sluggish and unemotional, you supposedly had an excess of phlegm, making you a “phlegmatic” type. The Four Humors theory lives today only in those adjectives, but unscientific tests of personality types still exist, aimed at predicting how people will do at work, whether they will get along with others, whether they will cheat their employers, or whether they will succeed or fail as leaders. You can see how appealing such tests would be to employers: “We don’t have to think about working conditions for our employees or whether we are exploiting or underpaying them; we just have to avoid hiring ‘cheaters.’” And you can see how appealing such tests are to those who take them: “This test will tell me at last what I could do, should do, and would do if only I had the money, education, social support, and motivation.”
The MBPI, like the Rorschach or palm reading, floats above criticism, parody, and evidence.
Of all the type approaches, the MBIT is the longest-lived, most lucrative, and most successful. A big part of its genius lay in its name, because by calling it an “indicator” of the “type” of person you are, rather than a “test” of your qualities or abilities, its originators removed the anxiety of being evaluated and found wanting, or of possibly being less smart or talented than everyone else. There is no one right way to be, the Indicator assures you. All types are equal; they simply differ in reflecting your true self. To find what type you are, you first find where you lie on each of four dimensions:
- E/I (extravert/introvert)
- S/N (sensing/intuition)
- T/F (thinking/feeling)
- J/P (judging/perceiving)
Combining results on each dimension yields 16 possible types: You could be an extravert-intuitive-feeling-judging kind of person, or an introverted-sensing-thinking-judging sort. How easy and fun! People who have been through MBPI programs define themselves by their particular combination of initials: “I’m an ISFP,” one might say; “no wonder we broke up; he’s an ESTP. Completely unmatched.” A friend told me that when her church had all of its members take the Myers-Briggs, she was told she was “an ENTJ—a ‘natural leader.’” Then, being a true skeptic, she added “… which I already knew.” Each of the four dimensions reflects two modes corresponding to the supposedly opposite traits on that dimension—you are a judger or a perceiver, but not both. Yet responses from thousands of people find no evidence of bimodality; on the contrary, their scores end up in the middle ground of every dimension. Unfortunately for the Indicator’s fundamental assumption, therefore, the qualities that describe us don’t divide up in neat binaries; people don’t think or feel when they make a decision, they do both. Some of our decisions are based more on rational calculation than on acting on gut impulse (or we hope they are), but sometimes, as we all know, we do the reverse. We know what we think that a “thinking” decision should be but we override it because, well, we wanna. We feel that we wanna.
The MBPI’s binaries appeal to people’s subjective experience, but they are arbitrary. Why not type people—or try to match couples—on, say, being morning or night people, on time or late, neat or messy, slow or speedy, loves spicy food or hates it? But whatever the binary you choose, people’s behavior typically falls at different points along a spectrum, and where they fall often has less to do with their personality type than with the situation and circumstance. Are you judgmental? The answer often depends on whom or what you are judging—everyone? nonskeptics? members of a political party you detest? that SOB at work? Are you always an introvert or mainly when you are new to a group and uncomfortable with its members? Do you think of yourself as an introvert and thereby fail to notice how often you chat with people in ticket lines or yoga class?
But what should have killed the MBPI is the evidence that it is not much more reliable than measuring body fluids—it isn’t consistent over time. One study found that fewer than half of the respondents scored as the same type a mere five weeks later. Even worse for the Indicator’s purveyors, knowledge of a person’s type does not reliably predict that person’s behavior on the job or in relationships.
In her important new book The Personality Brokers, Merve Emre, a professor of English at Oxford University, gives us not only the MBPI’s history but biographies of the two women who created it and became its indefatigable promoters.4 It was designed in the 1940s by Katharine Cook Briggs, who was rather pathologically infatuated with Carl Jung, and who eventually collaborated with her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. Emre explains that the MBPI was originally named for mother first, then daughter—the Briggs-Myers. But by 1960, when the Educational Testing Service had taken it on as part of their larger effort to study personality tests of all kinds, a squeamish staff member noted that calling it the “BM” type indicator would not do, and the order of their initials was changed. (In the 1960s, the ETS severed its relationship with the MBPI and its creators, realizing, as some of their scientists noted, that it wasn’t much different from horoscopes.)
In the true spirit of pseudoscientists everywhere, Katharine and Isabel were impervious to any evidence that their Indicator didn’t indicate anything reliable or valid about personality. Having neither interest nor training in statistics and the scientific method, they could blithely claim that the MBPI explained why some marriages struggle or fail: If you are an ISFP, it’s no wonder you can’t get along with an ENTJ; you are hopelessly mismatched by type. Never mind that randomly, all couples will differ on at least two dimensions just by chance. And what about that research showing that when people are retested, they often change type? How could that be, since types were supposedly innate and unchanging? Such individuals are simply showing signs of “enantiodromia,” said Isabel—Jung’s word for “going over to the opposite.” So if types don’t change, she’s right, and if they do change, she’s still right.
The “ecstatic perception of self-knowledge” is the key to the MBPI’s success—even when people learn something about themselves they always knew.
Quibble, quibble. “Scientific or not,” Emre writes, “the indicator had always managed to spark a sudden and ecstatic perception of self-knowledge in its subjects, no matter their age, sex, education, occupation, or political leanings, no matter their initial skepticism toward its operations.” I think she nailed it. The “ecstatic perception of self-knowledge” is the key to the MBPI’s success—even when, as with my friend, people learn something about themselves they always knew.
How do type theories of personality differ from the empirical study of traits? Clearly, human beings have “personalities”—characteristic ways of behaving, feeling, thinking, responding—and the task of scientists is to describe those differences and their origins in ways that reflect the complexity but also the consistency of individual differences. No one says “she’s extrovert-ish” or “he’s moderately shy except on vacation,” but we recognize that people differ, on average, in how outgoing they are in a given situation. Unlike the “I am/am not this way” oversimplification of the Myers-Briggs types, the Big Five personality factors are measured along five dimensions (with the memorable acronym OCEAN): openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion (though defined differently from what Jung or Briggs said it meant), agreeableness, and neuroticism (negative emotionality).
Research on the Big Five has been replicated not only with human beings around the world but also with dozens of nonhuman species, including the hyena and the octopus. When Inky the adventurous octopus escaped from his tank in the National Aquarium of New Zealand and found his way into the sea, the public was thrilled—and most failed to notice his shy companion, who preferred to remain safely at home. Evolutionary psychologists recognize that just about every species needs some of its members to be risk-takers and others to be risk-averse in order to survive what dangers the environment might throw at them.
Although it may be much easier to see ourselves as one of 16 types, our behavior varies with the situation, with age, with our partners and colleagues, with maturity, with job requirements and social demands. How can we reconcile our inner sense of self with our often inconsistent behavior across situations? It is much easier to focus on the inner self. We can be tough, mean, and disagreeable at times, and make an effort to be kind, thoughtful, and tender at other times. Which is the real “us”? The Myers-Briggs won’t admit it, but we are both.