Editor’s Note: This is an opinion piece and does not represent the opinion of Beaver’s Digest. This op-ed reflects the personal opinions of the writer.
Personality tests come in all different formats. From Buzzfeed quizzes like “Which ‘Sex and the City’ character are you?” to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which spits out a four-letter acronym to describe you.
As interesting as personality tests and the supposed insights they provide can be, the results “ENFP” and “Carrie Bradshaw” should probably be weighed more or less equally.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assesses users on four separate axes: Extraversion-Introversion, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling, and Judging-Perceiving. Depending on the answers given, the MBTI will categorize the user as one of 16 personality types, a system used by 89 of the Fortune 100 companies to screen applicants and identify candidates with desirable temperaments.
It presents itself more so as a diagnostic exam compared to quizzes that are on Buzzfeed. This perception lends credibility to the MBTI, when in reality it has none.
Scott Mcfee, a psychology professor at Oregon State University explained that the MBTI test is based on Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s work.
“Jung’s work is based on a bunch of really weird assumptions,” Mcfee said. “How do we frame the questions that we’re asking people? Because if we have assumptions in our questions, then those assumptions are going to come out in our answers.”
Isabel Briggs Myers, alongside her mother Katherine Cook Briggs, developed the MBTI in the 1930s by observing and documenting Myers’ children and the other neighborhood kids. Myers’ interest in children’s behavior likely stemmed from her own meticulously regimented and scrutinized childhood.
Treating her daughter’s upbringing like a scientific case study, Briggs was always watching young Myers, recording every minute detail of her development. Briggs, an early adopter of the burgeoning suburban housewife lifestyle, developed a system for childhood optimization, which she expounded in a series of articles published in the wildly popular Ladies Home Journal magazine.
Although the pair were big fans of Jung’s work, neither were formally trained in psychology or sociology. In fact, prior to her immensely profitable foray into social engineering, Myers was an author of mystery novels. But in the midst of World War II, she caught her big break.
The shakeup of the labor force during and after World War II had bosses looking for new methods for screening applicants and maximizing workplace efficiency. After finalizing the MBTI in 1943, Myers sought help from a family friend and corporate consulting magnate, who pitched the test to business leaders.
By the late ‘40s, the MBTI was gaining widespread popularity, being adopted by corporations, universities, government agencies and even parts of the American military. Myers, for better or worse, was a pioneer of industrial and occupational psychology.
Speaking of assumptions, Myers made a lot of them. She was a strong believer that behavior and attitudes emerge from innate and unchanging psychological characteristics, which her test could supposedly identify. Take, for example, her belief that biologically, men are logical and women are emotional, scoring their tests on different scales to account for this supposed fact.
Additionally, Myers’ second novel, “Give Me Death,” had a clear and violent anti-race mixing message, suggesting her belief in a racial element to one’s predisposition. You can dismiss this by saying, “It was a different time,” if you really want to. But then why should we still be normalizing these antiquated theories of personality?
Make no mistake, the Myers & Briggs Foundation, which sustains and sanitizes the Myers-Briggs legacy, maintains to this day a dogmatic adherence to biological determinism. The whole point of the MBTI is to sort and categorize human beings into one of 16 impermeable boxes.
“We need things to make sense,” Mcfee said. “Usually, we end up finding ourselves looking for some kind of deep, essential coherence — the truth about the world, the truth about people, the truth about how we are. We want self-understanding as well.”
For bosses, teachers, parents and even romantic partners, the MBTI promises a foolproof relationship methodology. Instead of getting bogged down by emotions and the complexities of the human condition, all you have to do is give the correct input to achieve a desired output.
Can the MBTI tell you if you prefer going out or staying in? I guess. Can it tell you if you’re more impulsive or indecisive? Sure. But can it tell you who you are? Absolutely not.
It’s humiliating to be caught tongue-tied at a request to “tell me about yourself.” It’s an admission that you’re boring, thoughtless and unqualified; that you’re aimless and don’t have anywhere or anyone to be.
But instead of turning to an 80-year-old test cooked up by a pair of racist helicopter parents for the benefit of your grandparents’ bosses, allow yourself to be defined by your actions, your opinions, your interests and wants, and be skeptical of people who answer the question, “Who am I?” with results from a questionnaire.
