I was in high school when I first came across the MBTI quiz. As someone who does enjoy doing Buzzfeed quizzes that reveal who my BTS bias is based on the dessert I choose or my architectural preferences, I jumped right into the 15-minute personality test, with little to no knowledge about MBTI.
The MBTI test was put together by Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers. They were inspired by the work of acclaimed psychiatrist Carl Jung and motivated to make his complex work more accessible. MBTI or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a questionnaire to assign a value to the following categories: Introversion or Extraversion, Sensing or Intuition, Thinking or Feeling, and Judging or Perceiving. A letter from each category is obtained to produce a 4-letter result, resulting in 1 of the 16 possibilities. For example, I obtained the result ‘INFJ’. As with other personality quizzes, my result allowed me to introspect on how I perceive the world and what influences my decision-making. While it did present things I was already aware of, for example how I’m more introverted, I suppose like with other personality quizzes, the reassurance in how I think I perceive things and how people perceive me was put forth and I found affirmation in that.
MBTI has become increasingly popular since my high school days. It went from me introducing MBTI to people and expectantly waiting for them to finish their quiz, to people already knowing what their MBTI is when I ask them. More recently, I have found that dating apps have a space for you to indicate your MBTI. Even matchmaking services ask you to indicate your MBTI and further ask if you have a preference for your partner’s MBTI. I have heard of employers making candidates take the quiz in order to get an idea of their working style in an effort to improve productivity at the workplace. While I have heard that MBTI is a topic of debate amongst those who study and work in the field of Psychology, it’s becoming more prevalent in our society whether the experts like it or not.
I am someone who has a strife with Astrology. I always questioned how one could attribute certain characteristics or events related to someone based on the time of someone’s birth and the position of celestial bodies. Astrology has been around for years but, like MBTI, has been increasingly popularized in the digital age we live in. What was once just a section in the newspaper that you might read just for fun has become so omnipresent. You might get a video of someone talking about your horoscope on your FYP on TikTok and have the creator telling you this was meant for you, denying TikTok’s algorithm’s involvement in this. One coincidental occurrence gives enough credence for one to look into astrology further and look for more such occurrences in their life. As a woman of STEM, I always look for evidence supporting a theory. The absence or lack of it with astrology made me averse to it, but on thinking about how I have been viewing MBTI recently, I wonder how MBTI is any different. Is MBTI the new Astrology and am I another follower looking to find solace in what it wants me to hear?
MBTI, like Astrology, has been argued as pseudoscience for years. Why? There is not a lot of research that is endorsed by experts in psychology. In fact, a lot of the research supporting MBTI is actually funded by those who benefit from its success. Therefore there is a lack of critical scrutiny of the presented evidence. I would say another issue with MBTI comes from the way it categorizes people into the sixteen boxes. It essentially classifies the personality spectrum of billions of people into these sixteen boxes and I would say that is perhaps unfair. What if someone receives a result of being 51% extroverted? Categorizing them as extroverted seems to simplify the complexity of the person’s personality. Once you are assigned a box, you either consciously or unconsciously adhere to the box you’re put in. Straying away from this box seems wrong to someone who hangs by what the box tells you you are. Straying away from the box also makes you an anomaly in a negative light rather than a positive one.
I recently moved countries and started a whole new chapter of my life. As a self-proclaimed and MBTI certified Introvert, making friends and pushing myself into social situations has not been the easiest. I am guilty of bringing up the MBTI in conversations with people I meet for the first time as I found it allowed me to get to know the person in a more profound way. I eventually found that I “vibe” extremely well with the INFP MBTI type. I got excited when this happened repeatedly. It was not until someone brought up how I actually shouldn’t be using MBTI as a means to an end that I realized that I was perhaps putting more trust into typing people based on their MBTI than I should. I realized that when people I got along with didn’t fall in a particular MBTI category I was biased towards, or had a type I didn’t particularly like, I was disappointed.
One could argue that while MBTI has some sort of user input in its categorization, Astrology doesn’t. But at the end of the day, they both categorize people and inadvertently influence your decision-making, the way you see others and how others see you. I realized that a “Oh a Scorpio would hurt me” and “I prefer Feelers over Thinkers” carry the same biased laced attitude. While both had different beginnings and have their own reasoning behind what they present, I realized that they are not that different from each other. Subscribing to what either proclaims should not be looked at with shame-ridden eyes. Astrology and MBTI allow us to introspect and explore ourselves, yes. But it is important to remember to never confine ourselves to the zodiac sign or the personality type. You are allowed to be more than the introverted intuitive feeling judging virgo-an and no personality test or time of birth or celestial body gets to decide that.