If you ask people whether they prefer to think or feel, or whether they prefer to judge or perceive, the majority will tell you a little of both. With most traits, humans fall on different points along a spectrum. ( Wikimedia Commons/Jake Beech) The Myers-Briggs uses false, limited binaries It still assigns you a four-letter type to represent which result you got in each of the four categories: The test has grown enormously in popularity over the years - especially since it was taken over by the company CPP in 1975 - but has changed little. Myers and Briggs gave titles to each of these types, like the Executive, the Caregiver, the Scientist, and the Idealist. Raise two (the number of possibilities in each category) to the fourth power (the number of categories) and you get 16: the different types of people there apparently are in the world. It copied Jung's types but slightly altered the terminology, and modified it so that people were assigned one possibility or the other in all four categories, based on their answers to a series of two-choice questions. They began testing their 'Type Indicator' in 1942. To learn the techniques of test-making and statistical analysis, Briggs worked with Edward Hay, an HR manager for a Philadelphia bank. Jung's principles were later adapted into a test by Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of Americans who had no formal training in psychology. None of this came out of controlled experiments or data - it was all theoretical 'Jung literally made these up based on his own experiences.' But Jung's influence on the early field was enormous, and this idea of 'types' in particular caught on. 'This was before psychology was an empirical science,' says Grant, the Penn psychologist. Įven these rough categories, though, didn't come out of controlled experiments or data.

These categories, though, were approximate: 'Every individual is an exception to the rule,' Jung wrote. All four types, additionally, could be divided based on attitudes into introverts and extroverts. The former group could be further split into people who prefer sensing and others who prefer intuiting, while the latter could be split into thinkers and feelers, for a total of four types of people. In it, he put forth a few different interesting, unsupported theories on how the human brain operates.Īmong other things, he explained that humans roughly fall into two main types: perceivers and judgers. In 1921, Jung published the book Psychological Types. (Douglas Glass/Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images) The Myers-Briggs rests on wholly unproven theoriesĬarl Jung in 1960. Here's an explanation of why these labels are so meaningless - and why no organization in the 21st century should rely on the test for anything. Yet you've probably heard people telling you that they're an ENFJ (extroverted intuitive feeling judging), an INTP (introverted intuitive thinking perceiving), or another one of the 16 types drawn from Jung's work, and you may have even been given this test in a professional setting. Several analyses have shown the test is totally ineffective at predicting people's success in various jobs, and that about half of the people who take it twice get different results each time. Even Jung warned that his personality 'types' were just rough tendencies he'd observed, rather than strict classifications. The test claims that based on 93 questions, it can group all the people of the world into 16 different discrete 'types' - and in doing so, serve as 'a powerful framework for building better relationships, driving positive change, harnessing innovation, and achieving excellence.' Most of the faithful think of it primarily as a tool for telling you your proper career choice.īut the test was developed in the 1940s based on the totally untested theories of Carl Jung and is now thoroughly disregarded by the psychology community. 'The characteristics measured by the test have almost no predictive power on how happy you'll be in a situation, how you'll perform at your job, or how happy you'll be in your marriage.'Īnalysis shows the test is totally ineffective at predicting people's success at various jobs 'There's just no evidence behind it,' says Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who's written about the shortcomings of the Myers-Briggs previously. The only problem? The test is completely meaningless. The company that produces and markets the test makes around $20 million off it each year. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is probably the most widely used personality test in the world.Ībout 2 million people take it annually, at the behest of corporate HR departments, colleges, and even government agencies.

Personality type test