There are 16 types of people in this worldâat least according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), in which each personality can be boiled down to four core attributes: extroverted vs. introverted, intuitive vs. sensing, thinking vs. feeling, and judging vs. perceiving. The idea is that a four-letter classification will help you understand your personality type and how you perceive the world.
In addition to being the most popular personality quiz in the world, MBTI is used to assess employees, students, and soldiers in at least [30 countries](. Articles and books have been written on how to use the types in education, careers, management, and lifelong development. The test is used by Fortune 500 companies and career placement centers, and youâll even find the four letters sprinkled across Tinder.
Despite its appeal, the exam is consistently seen as unscientific, questionable, and meaningless. The black-and-white categoriesâyouâre either an extrovert or introvert, for exampleâconflict with the complexity of real personalities. And yet, we have a deep fascination with personality tests. Do they help us make sense of ourselves and our relationships with others? And what compels us to continue organizing ourselves into distinct types? Letâs analyze.
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[Quartz Daily Obsession]
Myers-Briggs
December 30, 2019
The people testÂ
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There are 16 types of people in this worldâat least according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), in which each personality can be boiled down to four core attributes: extroverted vs. introverted, intuitive vs. sensing, thinking vs. feeling, and judging vs. perceiving. The idea is that a four-letter classification will help you understand your personality type and how you perceive the world.
In addition to being the most popular personality quiz in the world, MBTI is used to assess employees, students, and soldiers in at least [30 countries](. Articles and books have been written on how to use the types in education, careers, management, and lifelong development. The test is used by Fortune 500 companies and career placement centers, and youâll even find the four letters sprinkled across Tinder.
Despite its appeal, the exam is consistently seen as unscientific, questionable, and meaningless. The black-and-white categoriesâyouâre either an extrovert or introvert, for exampleâconflict with the complexity of real personalities. And yet, we have a deep fascination with personality tests. Do they help us make sense of ourselves and our relationships with others? And what compels us to continue organizing ourselves into distinct types? Letâs analyze.
ð¦ [Tweet this!](
ð [View this email on the web](
By the digits
[$20 million:]( Yearly revenue from the MBTI and products that go along with it
[>$2 billion:]( Size of the market for workplace personality tests
[2 million:]( People who take the MBTI every year
[>2,000:]( Personality tests on the market
[$49.95:]( Cost of an online MBTI test
[1.5%:]( Share of people who are INFJs
[93:]( Questions on the Myers-Briggs personality test
2019: Year that more Tinder bios mentioned a Myers-Briggs personality type than called out Game of Thrones, Drake, and Stranger Things combined, according to Tinder
Giphy
Brief history
Type cast
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People-sorting goes back to ancient history. In the [Hippocratic tradition]( an individual could be categorized as innately sanguine, choleric, melancholic, or phlegmatic. In 19th century Europe and America, phrenology was used to interpret character, and in 1921, the Rorschach test, a systematic personality test, was created.
In 1921, Swiss psychoanalyst [Carl Jung published Psychological Types](. He observed that people generally engage in one of two mental functions: 1) taking in information, which he called perceiving and 2) organizing information and coming to conclusions, which he called judging. After encountering the theories of Jung in 1923, mother-daughter pair [Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Cook Briggs]( were driven to implement Jungâs theories to help people make better life choices and see individual differences in a constructive way. Enter MBTI.
For the [next three decades]( Isabel Myers, a graduate of Swarthmore College, would assess thousands of people via a paper-and-pencil questionnaire, devoting the rest of her life to fulfilling her motherâs vision. The test was slow to catch on until the systematizing of the postwar American workforce, in which the highly structured approach to industry described by William H. Whyte in his 1956 book The Organization Man [proved a fertile ground for Myers-Briggs](. Since then, the MBTI instrument has been officially translated into 30 languages.
giphy
Time, time, time
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Are you spending time the way you want to? Lots of New Yearâs resolutions are responses to that question. But if you want to change how you spend time, or at least feel less overwhelmed, start by rethinking your relationship to time. [In her state of play, Quartz at Work editor Heather Landy offers three ways to think about time]( a resource, as a currency, as a source of conflictâeach of which will help you think through how you want to manage your time in the New Year.
[Read: Three ways to think about time](
quotable
â[T]here are lots of people who view themselves as âsensitive introvertsâ, when they are really covert narcissists. These individuals are characterized by their sense of entitlement to social attention. Accordingly, they are hurt easily by the slightest remark of others, are hyper self conscious and self-absorbed, and are frequently upset that others donât recognize their brilliance.â
â[Scott Barry Kaufman, psychologist at Columbia University](
Explain it like Iâm 5!
Letâs get personal
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So how does a test seen as largely unscientific continue to allure? The design of the personality quiz does a good job of âconvincing people that it is non-judgementalâ and the âlanguage is simple and relatable,â [according to Merve Emre]( author of The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing.
Myers-Briggs taps into our affinity for tribalism. [As Vox reports]( in the 1970s, social scientist Henri Tajfel ran a series of tests to show how easy it is to get people to adopt a tribe mentality. Subjects were assigned to random teams by flipping a coin, and the study found that people start to favor their teammates âalmost instantaneously.â At the end of the experiment, all of the subjects were isolated and told to split a pool of money between one person from their team and one from the opposing team. Tajfel found that subjects were more likely to award more money to fellow members of their team, even though they were well aware that their relationship was based on chance.
Preference for a certain group is consistently pleasurable to human brainsâlike political parties, for instance. Studies show that we seek out viewpoints that conform with our own and [avoid conflicting information]( because the former feels good. We will even go out of the way [to interpret information]( in a way that fits in line with our own tribal ideology.
Giphy
pop quiz
What is the most frequently reported MBTI personality type?
ISFPESFJENTPISTJ
Correct. The type makes up 14% of the population and is characterized by being organized, responsible, and steady.
Incorrect.
If your inbox doesnât support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email.
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fun fact!
Isabel Briggs Myers was [also a detective novelist](.
Giphy
Million-dollar question
Do personality traits change over time?
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Many of us tend to see personality as being fixed, but a 2018 study found that our personalities do change over time. Researchers from the University of Houston, University of Tübingen, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [asked about 1,800 American adolescents]( to fill out questionnaires in the 1960s and then again fifty years later.
The study found personality traits did not always stay the same over the five decades, with many of the subjects showing dramatic changes. They also found that most people become more [agreeable, conscientious, and emotionally stable]( over time.
Other research shows that [social roles have an effect on personality]( such as being in a job that calls for being hard-working and responsible. Over time, those behaviors tend to be integrated into our personality. [Goal-setting]( may also help an individual change their personality.
[Read the Quartz Obsession on Theory of Mind](
How we ð¢ now
You canât hang with us
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MBTI is a common assessment at work. [A 2014 survey]( (pdf) of more than 1,400 global HR professionals found that 62% of respondents used some sort of personality test pre-hire. Organizations [including McKinsey]( the [US Air Force]( [and Nokia]( turn to personality quizzes to evaluate job candidates for âfit.â In addition to candidate evaluation, these quizzes help with assessments of current employees, development of more effective teams, or lead to fun team-bonding sessions. (Quartz employees once took a âWhich Muppet are you?â quiz to find out in real-time where we all stood on the [chaos-order spectrum]( though it was not used for anything other than fun, so far as we know.)
The use of test âresultsâ to justify things like promotions or important assignments, can have negative effects on workplace culture Neel Doshi, coauthor of [Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Motivation]( [told Fast Company](. Defining personalities, and predicting success in a rigid framework may discourage employees or implicitly encourage blame, which can lead to a toxic dynamic.
Perhaps the best way to look at these quizzes? Theyâre useful for breaking the ice and finding people with similar interests.
Watch this!
âEvery individual is an exception to the ruleâ
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Still clinging to your Myers-Briggs type? Let Adam ruin it for you.
take me down this ð° hole!
Considered the [most scientifically sound]( personality quiz, the Big Five doesnât sort people into types; rather, the quiz tells you where fall on a spectrum of clusters: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, negative emotionality, and openness to experience. Your results are also based on comparing you to others who have taken the test. The idea is that everyone has a little of all five traits. [As FiveThirtyEight reports]( the research began in the 1920s and 30s, when researchers first theorized that you can figure out the anatomy of a personality by studying the words we used to describe what people are like.
Despite the scientific rigor, [Quartzâs Olivia Goldhill found]( that many online versions give biased resultsâdepending on whether you say you are âmaleâ or âfemale,â the exact same answers will produce very different personality assessments.
REUTERS/Suhaib Salem
poll
What do you think of the Myers-Briggs personality test?
[Click here to vote](
I believe in it!Itâs fun to do, even if I donât take it seriously.I take it out of curiosity.I take it when I feel lost.I would never take it.
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Todayâs email was written by [Michelle Cheng]( (INFJ), edited by [Whet Moser]( and produced by [Tori Smith](.
The correct answer to the quiz is ISTJ.
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