Is the MBTI unscientific and meaningless: An Exploration of why this might not be true

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:01]hello you may have watched my previous video where I summarized the 10 most common criticisms of the mbti now this video repeats those criticisms but then fills in some of the reasoning behind why those criticisms are often simplistic and sometimes misinformed or wrong I'm Dr Roy Childs My Views are informed by many years as a trainer in a wide range of different instruments and I'm also a test author and a British psychological Society BPS verifier and a consultant editor for the BPS test review process this means that I review a wide range of test and questionnaires and I have become increasingly critical of the direction the psychometrics is taking and I've become more aware of how uninformed people are about the fundamental issues even well respected academics the vitory on against the mbti by respect academics can be partisan and uninformed and wrong but their supposed expertise makes their comments far more impactful than they deserve to be so let me elaborate but I suspect that everyone is aware of the increasing polarization in our public debate the brexit leave remain or pro-life pro-choice or Biden Trump issues and this polarization can be seen in the type versus the trait approaches to personality for Simplicity I will place a type Yung and mbti on one side and the trait big five and psychometric model on the other so let me begin if the Good Friday agreement enabled Ian Paisley and Martin mcginness to overcome their bitter rivalry they became known as the chuckle Brothers then I'm sure we can do something similar we need to listen and then learn to disagree well here are the 10 most common criticisms of the mbti used as evidence that the results are meaningless so just check whether you've heard them and which you agree or disagree with and you may want to pause a video to read these sometimes the criticisms go behind the mbti to T yung's underlying Theory and as I go through each criticism bear in mind that behind the critic's argument there is usually an implicit or explicit belief that trait represents better science than type approaches the first criticism is about the background of the developers and Isabelle Briggs Meyers and her mom were just untrained Housewives Carl Yung their inspiration was a wacky psychologist disregarded by the mainstream and if that seems persuasive we would also dis count electromagnetism Faraday was just a self-taught scientist genetics menel was just a humble monk continental drift Vagner was not a geologist relativity Einstein dreamt up E equals MC squ on the bus to the patent office and Leonardo D venci well he was just a jack of all trades and a master of none science often progresses from the left field ideas so a attacking the background does not make any of these ideas or the mbti unscientific the second criticism is that type is not comprehensive but who says it should be only those who are seeking a comprehensive map and that was not what yung's type theory was trying to do so criticism too is like criticizing a pig for not flying it was never meant to so again this is a very weak argument the claim that mbti theory is unscientific can be approached from several angles and criticism 3 focuses on the emergence of type Theory which clearly comes from yung's insights based on a limited number of clinical cases plus many years observing people but science often does progress from limited observations Plus Great intuition which can become a theory with testable hypotheses but unlike the big five type Theory goes goes beyond describing personality differences and proposes how the elements interact in a dynamic way now science wants supporting evidence but simply criticizing type theory for how it emerged is another weak argument used to condemn the mbti as unscientific the claim that mbti theory is unscientific can be approached from several angles criticism 3 Focus is on how type Theory emerged which clearly came from yung's insights based on a limited number of clinical cases but let's not forget many years observing people as well and Jung's theory is more than a description of Personality it proposes how personality elements interact in a dynamic way this is the basis of good science a theory that generates hypotheses that can be tested hence how the theory emerged is another we argument used to condemn the mbti as unscientific the implication is that the trait approach is more scientific and I can agree that its Beginnings back to catel did have a more objective starting position he wanted to know what to describe and how many factors were required to develop a comprehensive map or taxonomy and he started by taking all the personality related words in the dictionary combined with fact analysis this convinces many people that it is scientific but is this sufficient catel was well aware are the pitfalls of statistical manipulation such as avoiding author bias where an author can unwittingly oversample an area let's say anxiety and hey Presto a major anxiety Factor will emerge so whilst this approach represents a good start it is insufficient good science needs more than rigorous method methodology and sophisticated stats it needs a depth of psychological theorizing and good measurement and good quality evidence cel's bigger Vision was to emulate chemistry his initial area of study he admired the beauty of how thousands of compounds were reduced to a handful of elements and he wanted to reveal the equivalent Periodic Table of personality does today's big F reveal this periodic table I suggest that is unlikely and let me tell you why most big five and trait theories Converge on a definition of personality summarized here it refers to unique patterns of thoughts feelings and behaviors to relative stability and to the way it is supposed to influence behavior or performance and this definition is reflected in most big five questionnaires for example the Neo supposedly the best marker for the big five uses items that assess preferences item two is reported Behavior three is more about attitude four may be something to do with motivation or preference and five is about emotion likewise with Hogan's HPI and most other mainstream questionnaires however the rationale for some such a range of items is never made explicit and neither do they explain how such items should be sampled they simply produce good psychometric properties but the psychometric model was developed to measure intelligence and if like me you believe that this is an inappropriate model for the more Dynamic concept of Personality then this lack of alternative rationale is a theoretical weakness which detracts from the Big Five's claim of being scientific furthermore catel argued that the big five was simply the five factors that survived clumsy factor analysis take any broad range of items and they can usually be put through the factor analytic funnel to produce five factors and catel argued that they were not always the same Big Five we can investigate potential divergences by examining what is under the Bonnet these are NEOS underlying facets for extra version and these are 16 PFS the facets are different should assertiveness be part of extroversion yes says Neo no says 16pf and why do all Neo's five factors have exactly six facets is this empirical or is it a Costa and mcra need for symmetry I've also looked at mbti step two again there are superficial similarities but also clear differences I suggest this is due to the lack of theoretical rigor this lack of rigor has had unfortunate knock on effects today's popular commercially successful questionnaires such as the opq do claim to be underpinned by the big five but opqs underlying facets are again different and its development bypass cel's mapping of the domain and the aim to get at the periodic table instead they ask managers what do you think is important at work now ask people what they see in the physical world they see compounds such as rocks water baking powder not H2O or sodium bicarbonate or the basic elements and this same approach to developing profiles will identify things that we recognize or want like this surely service orientation is a complex multifactorial and is different in different contexts many profiles are now shopping lists of attractive labels persuasiveness controlling decisiveness service orientation and the lists get ever longer scientific Beginnings do not guarantee scientific outcomes another knock on effect is the impact on the nature of the items see how the opq scale for decisiveness is measured these items are clearly not designed to prob the fundamentals of Personality they're more like a competency survey letting a person say what they believe or wish to project about themselves and then factor analysis can be used to group such results into five blocks that overlap with the big five leading to claims of rigor and scientific credibility perhaps we need to question the rigor of the big five since increasingly diverse range of items all get summarized as a big five using factor analysis does this provide evidence that the big five is fundamental or that it is too broad and loose to be called a scientific theory perhaps the five broad factors are just a convenient way to categorize like the big three tax taxonomy animal vegetable or mineral if you're interested I gave a talk entitled from Shakespeare to goggle box in which I challenge the claim that advances in personality measurement are technical rather than psychological so let me draw together arguments against criticism 3 I hope we can agree that a good scientific theory stimulates ideas and debate since the dominance of the big five debates such as what factors how many factors would make a good periodic table have faded is the answer five or could it be 16 30 or 100 and is discussion about the big two or the big one a logical way to go with factor analysis as some suggest or are we simply paralleling the oversimplification of cognitive ability there another big one IQ could the big five be like a blanket ciling curiosity at least within psychometrics and the search for deeper more complex more Dynamic models or for more Elementary classifications the initial aim was to find the elementary ingredients of Personality has this been abandoned for shopping lists of attractive finished products the ready meal option are we satisfied with a five-page catalog for classifying the complexities of personality so criticism 3 based on the better scientific credentials of trait Theory can be challenged whilst it does tick some of the science boxes there are many unresolved questions trait Theory Majors on method which has provided a high level map but it leaves significant questions such as the underlying detail and the rationale for using eclectic items and there are also questions about the quality of supporting evidence to be discussed later type theory on the other hand has less objective Beginnings but it does more than just description it generates hypotheses for example about how fundamental underlying cognitive functions interact and influence personality which needs to be tested we should acknowledge that type and trait have different beginnings and different scientific strengths so saying that type theory is less scientific is too simplistic and possibly the opposite is true which I will illustrate with criticism 4 criticism 4 is about how people answer the questionaires what do you do may seem more rigorous than what do you prefer and The Eclectic range of items always includes items about what do you do such as this one this is not surprising given psychologist desire to be recognized as a science plus its Legacy behaviorism and we may all agree that what you say is not as important as what you do but milgram's Infamous experiments reminded us that what people do does depend on context here it was people with white coats persuading subjects to administer what they thought was Lethal electric shocks Behavior introduces contextual noise and some questionnaires reduce this by asking typically or on average but average hides so much should we ignore context we should consider the context dilemma Walter Michelle famously makes the point in this book arguing that context has more influence on Behavior than personality and more recently Professor Jerome Kagan in this book calls his first chapter missing contexts let me illustrate by asking you to think of Life as a tug of war with this end representing the inside including personality and this end representing the outside or context the inside is what brings consistency or continuity as we Traverse life but what is the red ribbon it represents behavior and sometimes context dominates what we do sometimes who I am takes over to get a clearer picture of Personality requires a decoupling of behavior from the inner me what I do is not necessarily who I am we need to separate being from do doing reducing behavioral noise unfortunately this behavioral noise is being Amplified the opq says it measures a work personality I.E by thinking of yourself at work but that is behavior in context is that personality or is it a role Concepts that overlap but they are not the same thing similarly the best known role questionnaire belbin does not ask about behavior in a specific team but in some generalized concept of what you take across different teams but behavior in a leadership team can be quite different from a sports club or a voluntary group that you work in it is not really a role questionnaire generalized Behavior across groups May better be defined as a team personality this demonstrates a lack of theoretical rigor concerning behavioral noise and certainly it applies to many mainstream personality questionnaires I Wonder has the mbti done any better examining mbti items shows a similar eclectic range of items as the mainstream and this first item I'm usually a good mixer not only ask about Behavior but also introduces the concept of good and yet all personality questionnaires say there's no right or wrong there's no good or bad but where mbti does score in reducing behavioral noise is with the overarching mindset of preference now clearly item one shows how Isabelle did not write all her items with a clear focus on preference but she did introduce the word pairs which makes indicating preference easier this was a bold decision for this untrained housewife challenging ing psychological Orthodoxy and I suggest this is one of mti's strengths but the mbti does not go far enough consider the preference challenge would you rather have a week of Love or excitement have diarrhea or constipation be stuck in a lift with an istj or an ENFP they are not always easy choices everyone says it depends because they recognize the role of cont text and why is think of yourself at home with the slippers on a solution is that the real you some people are more engaged More Alive more themselves up on the malls in the woods at sea or at the football club mbti makes the same mistake as opq it suggests a context and the issues of preference continue because preference can be influenced by your current role people often confuse or merge role with personality or it could be your comfort zone which may be a natural place or it may be an avoidance of something more challenging and it could be an outdated stereotype what you've always said people often fail to update their sense of who they have become and sometimes preference is an imaginary you the person you'd like to be or could be and sometimes your preference is not really your preference it may be other people such as your parents or an idol and sometimes it is part of yourself that has been neglected for too long so in the Quest for Simplicity has preference been trivialize because of course it does depend we need to think more about the mindset when completing a questionnaire this image symbolizes our visible exterior and the more private ins side and then consider meeting this man or this man or this little girl you would react and behave differently and we need to help people to recognize what I call the contextual self which contaminates personality results we're inviting people to express who they think they are behind the roles they play and I call this the identity self preference is a useful mindset for that but given the many interpretations of preference I suggest a manageable solution recognizing that we all have an ideal self the person I or my parents want me to be how can those who want to understand The Human Condition neglect the ideal self we introduced it with the TDI part of the type mapping system by the simple addition of the preference question which is describe describe it the way it is and then the way you want yes this was stolen from Will schutz and the phyro but the evidence is that 72% of people then report two different types there is there is preference and their want preference I suggest that everyone lives with a difference between their sense of who they are and who they would like to be unless they are a fully paid up narcissist the is want question reveals this and to me this is a much richer exploration of Personality than getting to best fit type but first let me complete number four of the four selves this is because the road to self-awareness is never complete and most people claim to be above average in self-awareness because they're not aware of what they're not aware of so I remind people that there is also an Undiscovered self and to consider what they might learn if they were say in an earthquake or suddenly a refugee we only know ourselves within the limits of our experience so flagging the Undiscovered self keeps the door open to further exploration in summary both type and trait questionnaires have weaknesses in how they ask the questions I call this the mindset issue mbti is criticized for introducing a woolly concept preference the trait approach is criticized for introducing typical or average how would this person respond and by implication all of us since we all have two sides hopefully not as dramatically as Dr Jackel and Mr Hyde and then both approaches instruct people not to ponder too long why if we are using type for self- exloration for personal development does that need to be hurried don't we want people to reflect to update their thinking about themselves to me don't Ponder too long is a ludicrous instruction which comes from a selection mentality y MBT fell into that mindset beats me but I challenge the criticism that preference is a weak indicator of personality I would suggest the opposite it is a strength since it begins to reduce Behavior Al noise but unfortunately mbti does not take that far enough I suggest that both camps would benefit from decoupling personality from Behavior now let's look at criticism four which begins looking at the psychometric evidence used to berate type and to illustrate please complete the preference test make sure you have a piece of paper to record your answers and if you need to you can pause the video but look at this first item it asks you to look around wherever you are at this point in time and to point at something interesting and now record which hand you pointed with by marking l r or n short for left right or neither stroke both and do the same for the next 11 items for and now calculate your total score by allocating one point for every l two points for every n and three points for every R add them up and that will give you your total score you will have a score between 12 and 36 and I've run this test multiple times when I gather people scores together I always get a distribution that looks like this and even very well qualified academics use this as evidence that personality characteristics differ by degree and that the type theory of opposites is wrong they claim that the theory of opposites predicts a bimodal distribution but you do have two distinct entities you do have a left and a right hand and a person who scores 28 does not change gear with their right shoulder in the same way if extroversion and introversion are opposit they can also be expressed at different times to fit different contexts and in different proportions hence continuous scores is predicted by the theory of opposites in the same way as has just been demonstrated here with your left and right hand hence if you hear the criticism that lack of bimodality invalidates type Theory you can be sure that the person has not understood type Theory and of course we all make mistakes but if they claim to have expertise then they are either being lazy or negligent professor John Mitchell provides a devastating critique of the inappropriate use of numbers in psychometrics and way before him both Thorndike and James catel are quoted as saying unluckily our professors of psychology in general are not up to quantitative logic perhaps we should be more skeptical of the academics who fall back on simple Orthodox psychometrics for answering complex questions about the nature of personality and criticism six is related that type takes a more static model of personality does it take this person's score seven on extroversion does it mean less time extrovert than a 10 does it mean extrovert with less intensity than a 10 the seven is an ambiguous average even if it is measured to two decimal places how many people say things like I'm pretty sociable but I appreciate spending time on my own they recognize both ends of the scale perhaps a good questionnaire helps them to identify how they balance each end I suggest that a person's experience of themselves is less as a seven and more as some of this and a bit more of that this gets to the heart of the type concept of Personality perhaps the trait model has adopted the concept of continuity too uncritically why should psychological characteristics conform to the bell curve like height and weight the accusation that type takes a more static view of personality is not necessarily justified in fact when properly understood the opposite is true it views personality as more Dynamic the seventh criticism is another angle on where the type presents a static versus a dynamic model of personality mbti has contributed to the impression of being a static model firstly by presenting type of 16 boxes without explanation this sometimes causes this reaction an mbti has also traditionally presented scores one-sidedly which adds to the misinterpretation of being in a box a more accurate way to present the scores would be like this which reminds people of both preferences it also indicates the degree of balance or imbalance and secondly the mbti community uses language saying I am a WXYZ type now this suggests landing on a correct or fixed type and we know that questionnaires can be inaccurate so a good facilitator is encouraged to help people to find their best fit type but again this suggests a final destination whereas Yung certainly saw type as a station on a longer Journey so perhaps the mbti community is stuck thinking of type as innate now I don't want to address that thorny topic here but suffice to say that the mbti identifies type using self-report I.E what people say or believe or want to project about themselves regardless of whether type is innate or not self-reported type is about people's narrative and those with a personal development Focus are in the business of helping people to evolve their narrative so people's autobiographical narrative is expected to change hence I prefer to be more accurate by saying I currently report as a WXYZ type at least this signals the possibility of change and if you use the TDI is want version I mentioned earlier this then automatically opens the store it reveals a person's uncertainty their internal dialogue potential questions about who they are and who they are becoming so saying I am a WXYZ type contributes to the inaccurate accusation that type labels put you in a box suggesting rigidity criticism 8 focuses on one of the claran calls of psychometrics reliability but what does it mean reliability implies accuracy what is the evidence condemning mbti that more than 50% of people report a different type after just a few weeks but accuracy of abstract Concepts is tricky early psychometrics landed on a solution for intelligence by making the assumption that intelligence doesn't change hence we can use a proxy for accuracy which works in the physical world consistency we can be confident that height hasn't changed or at least within a few weeks and so consistency may be correlated with accuracy but but look at this target you can be consistently wrong the no change assumption has been controversial when applied to intelligence but I suggest it's even more debatable when applied to personality it views personality through a static lens this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy by influencing how we measure it and in the don't Ponder too long instruction what people do is answer what they've always said and so the psychometric model bakes in no change type on the other hand has a more Dynamic view of Personality hence the traditional psychometric reliability indices are interesting but less appropriate and compounding this dilemma is that traditional indices are based on hard numbers by which I mean that we can be confident that a five is more than a four but self-report questionnaires are soft numbers when I rate myself on four as sociable am I really less sociable than when you rate yourself at five we use these scales differently and we apply different definitions and benchmarks so can such numbers be used to infer things like personality does not change or even that personality is genetic I challenged the belief that self-report measures personality it doesn't it measures a correlate by extracting a person's latest autobiographical narrative and we do not need to debate whether personality is fixed the question is how does a person's narrative about themselves change and if 50% of people change type within a few weeks it could be seen as achieving its goal of stimulating greater self-awareness by helping people to reflect on their narrative to consider its accuracy to help them to develop their narrative and hence saying that mbti is unreliable is based on multiple misunderstandings it does not factor in the nature of self-report or the nature of soft numbers or the dynamic nature of personality you observed that people get stuck and fail to develop the purpose of psychological type was as a compass for navigating the next stage of Life something that psychometric reliability does not begin to cover and now the Clincher criticism nine that mbti results are meaningless because the results have no validity the expectation is that it should predict Behavior now I've talked a fair bit about behavior and I do note that tra questionnaires offer predictive validities correlations with some kind of Behavioral out out comes that hover between 0.2 and 0.4 that is interesting at a general level basically it's looking at large groups but it's not so useful at the individual level a parallel is Bo's law which predicts how large numbers of gas molecules behave but does not help predict the behavior of individual molecules and also how impressive are correlations of 0.2 to 0.4 there is evidence that asking a simple question like on a scale of 1 to 10 how persuasive are you it produces similar levels of prediction why well what people say about themselves does have some relation to reality for most people this questions the value of using 200 item questionnaires for that level of prediction and what they predict is often imprecise ratings of varied or generalized measures of behavior or performance now whilst such results can be interesting they are limited and if you want to explore the significant issues with such generalized averages you could start by reading this book by Todd Rose so criticism 9 that mbti has no validity is applying a model of validity that has significant weaknesses and it is based on a static consistent reliable predictor score being aimed at at a well defined and unchanging Target that is not the world we live in and applying it to type it does not factor in context and the difference between behavior and personality it assumes that personality and the world we live in are relatively static and it does not address the issue of self-report and soft numbers and it proceeds to use stats that may reveal interesting Trends but based on generalized averages that are not suitable for understanding individuals I suggest that we need different ways of validating ways that apply to a more Dynamic approach to personality that incorporate change and development and we need to understand that the mbti only partially operate operationalizes the type Theory so we need better measures of type which allows us to validate how increasing self-awareness and decoupling role from personality can increased behavioral flexibility yunga type as a vehicle for better adaptation to both a person's environment and to their internal disposition now this is a big challenge which may explain why it has not made it onto the psychometric or even the mbti research agenda yet but the accusation that mbti results have no validity is equivalent to the pigs don't fly accusation the wrong method is being used and finally with criticism 10 that the reports are like horoscopes is back to misunderstandings their positivity is often cited they're too nice first of all the best reports are not full of Barnum statements something that trait questionnaires can also be accused of and type reports are not supposed to describe the person they describe what those preferences look like when a person whose psyche is in harmony a well-developed example of the type and the downside of it can be explored by examining their opposite type which provides a mirror to those blemishes that the person may find more difficult or irritating so once again the accusation that mbti reports are like horoscopes is based on a misunderstanding so those are 10 of the most common accusations and I would like to conclude by suggesting that we reframe what personality is and what questionnaires provide I prefer to think of personality is like an MRI scan different parts of us get activated by different contexts or stimul and how they interact interconnect switch on and off is dynamic personality is less a profile but a mosaic of characteristics and it is in constant Evolution perhaps Like An Unfinished pain painting the form may be there but it is never fully colored in traditionally personality looks backwards that's how I became the person I am today but type is a model for looking forward to what I am becoming and in that process I would like more recognition of how experience shapes us life chips away and whatever material we were born with that chipping slowly reveals who we really are becoming so to conclude I didn't want this to fuel a tennis match between right and wrong I have pushed back on what I consider to be unfair or uninformed criticisms of type mostly directed at the mbti and this is to redress the balance the criticisms from Academia have been rather one-sided a better understanding of type Theory may help us achieve what has been achieved in physics two very different theories wave theory and quantum theory coexist both bring something valuable and there is value in both type and trait take away the vitriol recognize neither is right or wrong and we can benefit from exploring the insights that each one brings I like the metaphor that personality models are like still pictures behind every profile there is a person who lives breathes and moves and our job is to make those snapshots come to life so I hope this video has stimulated ideas about personality and that in our quest for understanding The Human Condition we should all expand our thinking about what we mean by personality the current approach by mainstream psychometrics may have given us a useful map but it is constrained by the psychometric model that takes a rather narrow and rigid view of this complex concept so no matter how you view personality perhaps yung's quote should be born in mind he said learn your theories and your models well but put them aside when you meet the miracle of the human soul thank you for listening