Why the long-debunked Myers-Briggs personality test is still being used

Emre’s surprise that Myers and Briggs were women, and that little biographical detail about them was readily available, seems to be not only an example of women’s pioneering work not being recorded by history, but also the result of information being deliberately concealed.

In the introduction to her recently published book, What’s Your Type – The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing, Emre outlines the lengths she had to go to in order to access Briggs Myers’ archive, which was donated after her death to the University of Florida. Although the papers should have been available to researchers, permission was needed from the Centre for Applications of Psychological Type, which Briggs Myers had helped establish not long before her death. Emre was twice told by the university librarian that she would never receive permission to view the archive, because “the staff is very invested in protecting Isabel’s image”.

She was asked by the centre to undertake a Myers-Briggs “re-education programme” in Manhattan, which cost nearly US$2000. She and the 25 other participants were told they would learn to “speak type fluently” over the four-day course.

Various rules about “speaking type” were given: the supervisor asked participants to chant after her, “Type never changes! Type never changes!” Emre found the idea of a singular self that never changed “impossibly retrograde”.

Emre – who is not a psychologist – does not believe that personality is fixed. “Personality is always a series of expressions of oneself that are socially and culturally constructed and constrained,” she says. “In that case, it doesn’t make sense to talk about your personality changing because it was never something fixed to begin with. Those expressions of the self that we emit are almost always mediated by language, and I’m interested in the language we have formulated to describe ourselves and to create the illusion of ourselves as coherent and complete human beings who have some knowable interiority.” That idea, Emre says, is the fantasy promoted by fiction. “It is the idea that characters can be created that are complicated but ultimately knowable and we can set them on journeys of psychological development. It seems to me that personality testing and typing trades on precisely that kind of fantasy.”

When administered properly, the MBTI includes sitting with a certified assessor and telling them stories from your life and taking the questionnaire before coming up with the four-letter result that indicates your “type”. You then make plans about what you might want to do in future, based on your new understanding of your own personality.

“That whole experience, done properly, is supposed to take you from your past to your present to your future. It’s supposed to help you construct this story about who you are, then to send that version of yourself down some kind of trajectory to the future.”

By the time Emre took her week of “re-education”, she already knew enough about the MBTI to be a doubter. “I remember doing exercises with those people in the room for a week and thinking, ‘How do they do this so honestly?’ I could barely get myself to stand up and walk across the room when they said, ‘Okay, extroverts on this side, introverts on the other side’. It made me want to run into the hallway, screaming.” It was probably no surprise that, at the end of the course, the centre told her she would not be allowed access to the archive. “I thought, ‘Why all this fuss?’ What is in those archives and what is the story here that they don’t want people to know about, or that they want [only] someone who is a true believer to tell? That’s when I decided I had to write the book.”

Eventually, Emre did get access to the material and her book is as much a sympathetic biography of the mother and daughter amateur psychologists as it is a critique of the famous personality type indicator that they pioneered.

It seems likely there were several things that the now Myers-Briggs company might prefer not to have become general knowledge, although none seems fatal to the MBTI’s popularity.

Emre accepts that despite the pair having no formal training in psychology or sociology, no cognisance of ethical guidelines, a complete lack of interest in racial, gender and class differences that might affect psychological profiles and the MBTI’s complete lack of scientific rigour, there are nevertheless people who find it compelling and helpful.

As long as people know the test’s limitations, and it is not being applied to make decisions for which it should not be relied upon, it is likely to be harmless to most, and possibly helpful to some, she says.

“Learning that language of type, especially for people who have not had other opportunities to really think about personality or the self or even their own motivations, can feel like a revelation and feel deeply empowering.”

In part, that is because the MBTI, with its 16 possible outcomes, insists that no personality type is better than any other. That made the indicator unusual at the time it was developed, when most psychological testing was designed to identify personality disorders or, at least, those who might be difficult in a workplace.

The MBTI offered acceptance of all types of people who did not have personality disorders, and hinted at the potential for workplace organisation to improve efficiency and happiness for both employers and employees if people could be assigned to tasks that suited them.

It also allowed people who took the test to have possible insights into their own character – an attribute of the MBTI that, Emre says, remains valid for some people.

“The MBTI tells people that you don’t have to apologise for who you are. You don’t have to make excuses for it, you can just own your own preferences and your habitual attitude towards the world and, knowing that, you can figure out what makes you happy.”

Where it can go wrong, it seems, is in its application. It remains widely used to test people’s suitability for jobs – either getting a job in the first place or for promotion or redeployment. It is used for helping to decide who works well in groups and who works better alone. Since writing the book, Emre has had many emails from people who have been discriminated against by employers because of the MBTI, or had it used insensitively by therapists. Equally, she says, “I’ve got a series of somewhat hostile emails from people saying, ‘You have done irreparable damage to something that makes people’s lives better. How could you?’”

Whether her book has damaged the MBTI depends on how you define damage, she says. “I would be very surprised if anybody stops buying the indicator because of this book. It’s been pretty clear for a long time that the MBTI is neither scientifically valid nor reliable, but I think it was kind of useful and helpful and compelling and people were buying it because of that.”

Rather than damage the MBTI, Emre encourages more transparency about what it is and what it is not. She points to the Buzzfeed online personality quizzes, which parody the logic of personality tests such as the MBTI. “For example, asking what your favourite cocktail says about which Taylor Swift song you are, to me, makes very clear the tenuous connection between the questions on a questionnaire like Myers-Briggs, and the results that are given. Buzzfeed has done a really good job of satirising that.”

The satirical quizzes, Emre thinks, also illustrate the commercially driven nature of personality testing – “what Commodity A tells you about which version of Commodity B you will like is really uncovering the self-commoditisation that is encouraged by personality tests – create a version of yourself that you can sell to your potential employers”.

Ultimately, Emre is no fan of any personality test. Inevitably, she says, any attempt to assess will be an attempt to flatten when people, and life, are naturally messy.

“We are often inscrutable even to ourselves, and personally, I like that inscrutability. I think we should preserve some of it and I think the fantasy of knowingness is ultimately just that – a fantasy, and not necessarily a desirable one, either.

“We live in an era of the self, of self-care and self-knowledge, and so we believe in the total mapping of our inner lives, but it is not at all clear to me that it is a desirable thing.”

Also, she says, it is most likely to be white-collar, affluent people involved in service work who take an MBTI or similar test. It is those people who are encouraged to think of themselves as individuals with creative agency, whereas others never get that opportunity.

“The issue isn’t that introverts might be discriminated against, the issue is that people with fewer educational opportunities and lower incomes, women and people of colour are already being discriminated against by not being offered the language of individuality.

“Independent of the fact that organisational psychology is a very credible and lucrative industry, and people are predictably narcissistic – even the least selfish and most outward-focused among us love talking about themselves – I don’t see why any personality test should ever exist.”