Why Myers-Briggs Is Totally Useless — but Wildly Popular

Photo
Credit Brian Harkin for The New York Times

If you’ve ever filled out a Myers-Briggs personality test only to feel the results didn’t describe you at all, take heart. According to Vox’s Joseph Stromberg, “The test is completely meaningless.”

The Myers-Briggs test, for those few who haven’t been called upon to take it, assigns people personality types based on four sets of opposing qualities: extroverted/introverted, sensing/intuiting, thinking/feeling and perceiving/judging. If that sounds unscientific, it may be: Mr. Stromberg writes that the test’s categories were developed without the benefit of any systematic psychological experimentation. And most people don’t fit neatly into them — Mr. Stromberg writes, “there aren’t really pure extroverts and introverts, but mostly people who fall somewhere in between.” He quotes Adam Grant, a professor of management and psychology and critic of the Myers-Briggs test:

“Contemporary social scientists are rarely studying things like whether you make decisions based on feelings or rational calculus — because all of use both of these. These categories all create dichotomies, but the characteristics on either end are either independent from each other, or sometimes even go hand-in-hand.”

Still, as Mr. Stromberg notes, the test remains popular — its publisher, CPP, makes around $20 million a year on the tests and related products. And Myers-Briggs gets name-checked by everyone from Forbes contributors to my420mate.com, “the leading dating site for the cannabis community” (pot smokers are apparently more extroverted than average).

Part of the test’s reach may come down to marketing. Mr. Stromberg writes that once you become a certified test administrator, “you can sell your services as a career coach to both people looking for work and the thousands of major companies — such as McKinsey & Co., General Motors, and a reported 89 of the Fortune 100 — that use the test to separate employees and potential hires into ‘types’ and assign them appropriate training programs and responsibilities. Once certified, test administrators become cheerleaders of the Myers-Briggs, ensuring that use of the outdated instrument is continued.” Government agencies use the test, too.

But part of its appeal may be that regular people just like taking it. In a critique of Myers-Briggs at Business Insider, Drake Baer writes: “When taking a personality test (or looking into a horoscope), you get the feeling of a-ha! Yes, I am an introvert, so please don’t bother me. And that’s satisfying.”

Being able to put oneself in a category may be satisfying, too — the psychology professor Brian Little tells Mr. Baer that some people use their results as a “badge that they stamp on their forehead and use as an identity marker.”

Indeed, Myers-Briggs may be popular for the same reason quizzes in general are popular: Many of us, perhaps surprisingly, really like the opportunity to put ourselves in categories. Mr. Stromberg links Myers-Briggs to BuzzFeed’s quizzes (“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking the test as a fun, interesting activity, like a BuzzFeed quiz”), and Michael Andor Brodeur of The Boston Globe discusses Myers-Briggs and a variety of online questionnaires in his examination of the rise of quiz taking. He takes a somewhat dim view:

“The pull of the quiz is difficult to resist and easy to understand. From the countless forms we complete for our various profile pages, to the statuses we update, blogs we blog, and tweets we tweet, the Internet is fueled by narcissism — a renewable resource if ever there was one. It’s no coincidence that the click-bait-y questions of online quiz headlines echo those workhorse slogans of advertising, the grilling of second-person concern that simultaneously invents and attends to our every need (e.g. ‘What’s in Your Wallet?’ ‘ Where Do You Want to Go Today?’ ‘Are You in Good Hands?’ ‘ What Are You Eating Today?’ ‘Is It in You?’).”

Whether quizzes are merely vehicles for our egotism or true paths to self-knowledge is a matter of some debate — CCP, for its part, tells the BBC that Myers-Briggs is “the world’s most popular personality assessment largely because people find it useful and empowering, and much criticism of it stems from misunderstanding regarding its purpose and design.” This may not reassure Mr. Stromberg or other critics of the test who are disturbed that companies and the government spend money on it. But for individual fans of quizzes, it may not matter so much that the Myers-Briggs categories are scientifically questionable. See, for instance, some of the results of Mr. Brodeur’s foray into online quizzing:

“This will come as a surprise to many of you (I was only just made aware an hour ago), but I am Tyr, the Norse god of heroic glory and combat, whose right hand was famously bitten off by a monstrous wolf.

“But don’t be scared. I am also a daisy. Update: Be scared because I’m also a snow leopard.”

Whatever grounding Myers-Briggs has in reality, the Brainfall quiz that told Mr. Brodeur “like most cats, you tend to be rather aloof” and “very little footage exists of you hunting” clearly has far less. And per Mr. Little, maybe some of us just like a badge from time to time, no matter what it says.