We found the most accurate personality test in the world.
Myersbrigg style personality tests are the most popular type of personality test in the entire world. But how well do they actually work? Do they truly provide you with useful insights or are the millions of people who think these tests work actually deluded about their accuracy? Today we’ll dig into this topic to explore what’s really true. Sometimes MBTI style tests are dismissed because of their origins. Katherine Cooksbriggs and her daughter Isabelle Briggs Meyers developed the concept for
This kind of test during the 1940s inspired by the theories of Carl Young. That’s why they’re sometimes called Youngian tests. Here’s the thing, though. Neither Meyers nor Briggs had formal education in psychology and were largely self-taught when it came to personality test construction. Certainly, their lack of credentials provides a little bit of evidence against their test being effective. After all, better training tends to produce better results. But they’re being selftaught is actually a shitty reason for dismissing the test.
Rammenujin was selftaught yet was an incredible mathematician. Joseé Saramago was largely selftaught as a writer yet won a Nobel Prize for literature. Sure, without any other information, it makes sense to evaluate someone on their credentials. But once we have access to their work, their work is far more informative than their credentials are. So we shouldn’t dismiss MBTI style tests based just on credentialism. Another way you may be tempted to judge MBTI style tests is to see whether people resonate
With the results that they get from those tests. Isn’t the ultimate measure of a personality test if people feel that the results capture what they’re really like? Nope. It turns out that’s a terrible method for telling how well personality tests work. And here’s how we know that. In 1948, a psychologist named Bertram Forer brought 39 psychology students into his lab. He had them fill out a personality test and gave them each a personalized vignette based on their test results. Then he
Asked each student to rate how accurate the vignettes were about them. They largely said they were quite accurate, giving an average rating of 4.3 on a 0 to5 scale. The only problem for had lied. Every student had been given the same results regardless of their answers on the personality test. Every person’s results included the same statements like you have a great need for other people to like and admire you and you have a tendency to be critical of
Yourself. It turns out it’s not that hard to provide results that people resonate with, even if those results have nothing to do with people’s responses. This effect, which is now wellknown among psychologists, is called the forer effect. Because of the forer effect, we can’t tell if a personality test is accurate merely by seeing if many people find that the test resonates. So, how can we tell if a personality test works? One interesting approach is to look at what’s known as
Test retest reliability. This basically asks the question, when someone takes the test twice, do they get the same answer both times? The most common way that people use MBTI style tests is to talk about their type. Their type is represented by a four-letter code, such as ENTJ or ISTP. Each of these letters corresponds to which side of each of the four dichotoies they fall on. Here are the four dichotoies. First is extroversion E versus introversion I.
It’s about where you direct your energy and attention. Extroverts prefer to focus on the external world and feel energized by it while introverts prefer their own inner world of thoughts and reflections. The second is sensing s versus intuition n. It’s about how you prefer to take in information. Sensing focuses on concrete details and facts while intuition is more about abstract patterns, the big picture, reflections, and possibilities. The third is thinking T versus feeling F. It’s about how you
Make decisions. Thinkers seek to be objective and to lean more towards logical analysis while feelers seek to be empathetic and give more weight to emotional impact. The fourth is judging J versus perceiving P. It’s about how you approach the outside world. Here judging means preferring structure and pre-planning while perceiving means preferring flexibility and spontaneity. These four dichotoies combine to form a person’s type such as ENTJ. Each type is then typically given a description. For instance, ENTJs are bold and strategic.
They’re fueled by a love for progress and a drive to execute complex projects. So, when people take an MBTI style test one day, wait a little while, and then take the test again, do they get the same result? Well, the MyersBriggs Company publishes results about this on their website. 101 people were given the English language version of their test and then tested again on the same test within the next 15 weeks. Shockingly, only about 50% of them received the same
Type the second time. What could be the reason for this? Well, through our research, we believe we figured it out. We created a new MBTI style test from scratch based on the underlying theory of these tests. That way, we could study its behavior. When we plot the distribution of scores that people get on any one of the four traits, we see that we get a bell curve. What’s shown here is the distribution of people’s scores on the sensing trait. What this
Shows us is that most people are right near the middle on the trait with few people getting very high or very low scores. If someone is just below the middle, they’ll get assigned a letter N. Whereas, if they’re just above the middle, they’ll get assigned a letter S, forming the NS dichotomy. The problem is, since most people lie near the middle, when they retake the test, they can easily end up just on the other side of the divide due to random fluctuations
And therefore flip letters. But that’s not the only way to measure how good a personality test is. Another way to look at it is to see how well you can use that personality test to predict actual facts about a person, such as their satisfaction with their life, how many awards they win at work, and how many close friends they have. We developed this approach so that we could actually evaluate different personality tests and pit them head-to-head. So, how well does
The MBTI fare? Well, it’s a proprietary test, so we couldn’t test it directly, but we could test our own MBCI style test that was designed based on the same underlying theory. We used the personality test results to predict 37 outcomes about a person’s life, and then we could look at the average accuracy across all of those outcomes. So, how well did it work? Well, we can start by comparing it to other things. Let’s start making predictions using
Astrological sun signs, that is whether someone is in Aries, Pisces, etc. Well, using linear and logistic regression, we found that astrological sun signs had no ability at all to predict any of these 37 facts about a person’s life. The MBTI style test performed better than this. On average, predictions made from it had a small positive correlation with those actual life outcomes. We can make these predictions more accurate, though, if we stop using categories. Categories, as we
Saw before, are unstable. If we treat each MBTI trait as a continuous score instead of as a dichotomy, the prediction accuracy improves. However, even if we use continuous scores, our MBTI style test loses at predicting life outcomes to its academic rival known as the Big Five. The Big Five is the most commonly accepted personality framework in academic psychology. We decided to dig deeper to try to understand the connection between MBTI style tests and big five tests. What we found was
Fascinating. There was quite a lot of alignment between the two tests. In fact, three of the MBTI style traits were each closely aligned with one distinct Big Five trait. For example, the MBTI style intuition trait map closely onto the big five openness to experience scale. But the fourth MBTI style trait had a more complex relationship being negatively related to two of the big five traits and positively related to a third one. So, could it be that the Big Five already
Captures most of what MBTI style tests measure? To find out, we tried to predict life outcomes again, this time using both people’s MBTI style test results and their Big Five test results, all taken together. Interestingly, these predictions weren’t meaningfully better than just using their Big Five test results alone. In other words, this suggests that the big five already captures most of what’s measured in the MBTI style tests, plus additional information that MBTI style tests miss. Looking even deeper into this, we were
Able to figure out what’s missing from MBTI style tests. The big five trait known as neuroticism. Neuroticism is a person’s tendency towards negative emotions such as anxiety and depression and anger. It’s an important part of the big five, but isn’t reflected in most MBTI style tests. So, what’s the upshot? Well, MBTI style tests are not useless. It’s true they don’t seem to be as accurate for making predictions about you as big five tests are, and they have
Problems with the stability of the categories, but they aren’t total either, like some detractors claim. They do seem to have some ability to predict some things about you. Funnily enough, despite our MBTI style tests being less accurate for making predictions than the Big Five results, people actually tended to like their MBTI tests better. In a study we ran, we found that people felt their MBTI style results not only made them feel good, but were more accurate compared to their
Big Five test results. If you’d like to know what your MBTI style and big five test results are, we’ve made it easy for you to find out. You can take our free ultimate personality test, which in about 12 minutes will give you both sets of results. If you found this video interesting, I’d really appreciate it if you’d subscribe. You can also deep dive on this topic on our many articles on our website at clearthinking.org.