When you meet a person, do you usually keep the first impression or do you try to get to know them in depth before making an assessment? This could be one of the questions on an occupational test at a high school, on the form sent to you by the human resources staff at the company you applied to for a job, or on the teen magazine you bought twenty years ago. One question after another with a closed answer, A or B, yes or no, which aims to find out what your personality type is.
The Myers-Briggs Typological Inventory, known as MBTI for its acronym in English, is a questionnaire created by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers that assesses how people perceive and make decisions about their environment. It is based on four dichotomies, made up of eight pairs of opposed categories —extroversion-introversion, sensory-intuitive, thinking-emotional, and qualifying-perceptive— to attribute, based on the answers, one of the 16 possible personality types resulting from all its possible combinations.
The creators of the MBTI were women ahead of their time, with higher education, who patented this questionnaire at the dawn of World War II. They were inspired by the essay Psychological Types that Carl Gustav Jung published in 1921, who in turn drank from a budding theory of psychoanalysis raised by Freud. Over time, the great companies of Taylorism, the pedagogues or the professional development coaches that we know today, implemented this methodology in their personality tests until it became a model of success.
However, neither the Myers-Briggs had specific training in psychology, nor did Gustav Jung defend the reality of the categorical descriptions of his work. The Myers-Briggs indicator does not take into account the divergence of people. Several studies have shown that it is a totally empiricist model, based on the experiences or the vital moment of the people who perform it.
In this model, classification into one type or another of personality prevails, and that is why a person who is asked the same question hours apart can give an answer and the opposite. Therefore, it is not a reliable indicator to entrust to it your professional career, your future partner or any other determining aspect of your destiny.
If it doesn't work, why is it successful? The categorical nature of their proposals contrasts with the fact that, as users report one indicator or another, we will feel reflected by the very divergence of our personality. People tend to belong to an intermediate point instead of an opposite between categories, so any result will produce in us a feeling of complacent self-affirmation. Something similar happens with zodiacal horoscopes and their ambiguity, an industry that, like the MBTI patent, moves huge amounts of money.
