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Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
1943; published 1962· Theory or model
Weak or failed to replicateFamous but not holding up in careful repeats.
A popular questionnaire that sorts people into 16 personality types; widely used in business, it performs poorly in scientific tests.
See it on the Psychology map →What it says
Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, neither a trained psychologist, built it from Carl Jung's 1921 book Psychological Types. The first form appeared in 1943; Educational Testing Service published it in 1962. It scores four either-or preferences: extraversion–introversion, sensing–intuition, thinking–feeling and judging–perceiving, giving types like INTJ. Its publisher says millions take it yearly. But most people score near the middle of each scale, so small answer changes flip their type.
Why it matters
It shows how a test can feel insightful yet predict little. Researchers prefer the Big Five, which measures similar traits as continuous scales and adds emotional stability.
Think of it like
Like classifying every building as big or small at 50,000 square feet: a 49,000 and a 51,000 square foot building land in different bins.
The evidence
Retest studies find many people, by some counts half, get a different type weeks later, and type predicts job performance weakly. McCrae and Costa (1989) showed its scales overlap four Big Five traits.
Open questions
Why it stays popular: there are no bad types, the descriptions flatter, and four-letter labels are easy to share. Whether it has real value for team-building is debated.
Connections (2)
▸Carl Jung: archetypes and psychological types inspired Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)Well replicated
The connection
Katharine Cook Briggs read the 1923 English translation of Jung's Psychological Types and adopted its contrast of introversion and extraversion and its four mental functions. With her daughter Isabel she turned Jung's descriptive types into a questionnaire, adding an explicit judging–perceiving scale Jung never formalized.
Who showed it and when
Washington, D.C., and Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 1920s–1940s. Briggs corresponded with Jung; Isabel Myers drafted the first questionnaire in 1943, hoping to match wartime workers to suitable jobs.
The evidence
Briggs's articles and letters, Myers's own accounts and the published manual all credit Jung's book as the theoretical basis.
Open questions
Jung saw types as tendencies, not boxes; how faithfully the MBTI reflects his ideas, and whether he would have endorsed it, is debated.
▸Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is less valid than The Big Five personality traitsWell replicated
The connection
When researchers compared the two, MBTI's four scales lined up with four Big Five traits: extraversion–introversion with extraversion, sensing–intuition with openness, thinking–feeling with agreeableness, judging–perceiving with conscientiousness. The Big Five measures these as continuous scales, adds neuroticism, and predicts outcomes better.
Who showed it and when
Robert McCrae and Paul Costa's 1989 study at the US National Institute on Aging, of several hundred adults who took both tests.
The evidence
Correlations between matching scales were substantial, and later studies show Big Five scores predict job performance and well-being better than MBTI types.
Open questions
Whether 'types' exist at all. Statistical tests of MBTI data find continuous dimensions, not distinct groups, though some defend types as useful shorthand.