OPINION

FEBRUARY 28, 2024 6 MIN READ

Personality Tests Aren’t All the Same. Some Work
Better Than Others
A popular personality test beats out astrology but trails far behind scientific
measure of personal traits
BY SPENCER GREENBERG & SETH STEPHENS-DAVIDOWITZ

Credit: Bernhard Lang/Getty Images

Behavior Opinion

Are you an “ISFP” like Bob Dylan and Rihanna or an “ENTJ” like Bill Gates and
Margaret Thatcher? Perhaps you’re an “INTP” like Albert Einstein and Tina
Fey? If you are one of tens of millions of people who have taken a Myers-
Briggs personality test—a staple of business schools and online quizzes—you
know the answer. But are these personality categories meaningful or just a
bunch of nonsense?

Developed during World War II, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, as it is

formally known, or MBTI, is likely the most popular personality test in the
world. It purports to break the populace down into 16 categories based on four
personality dimensions: extraversion (E) or introversion (I), which measures
whether you get energy from outwardly focused action like socializing or from
inwardly focused activities like quiet reflection; intuition (N) or sensing (S),
which measures how much you see big picture patterns rather than focusing
on sensory information from direct experience; thinking (T) or feeling (F),
which measures whether you make decisions using logic rather than by
focusing on feelings; and judging (J) or perceiving (P), which measures your
preference for structure rather than spontaneity.

Sounds great, but there is a dirty secret to these types of tests. They are usually
not as useful as proponents claim—and less useful than other personality tests.
Take the Big Five personality model, which notably rests on decades of
statistical validation by psychologists. That test rates people on five personality
traits: conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to experience
and extraversion.

My colleagues and I decided to compare the two test types. So we investigated

an MBTI-style test and a Big Five test to see how well each predicted 37 “life
outcomes” in a just released report. (We use the term “MBTI-style” to refer to
tests that are modeled on the constructs of MBTI but aren’t official forms of
the MBTI test.) These outcomes included important facts about people’s lives,
ranging from how many close friends they had to how often they exercised to
how satisfied they were with life. To do so, we recruited 559 people in the U.S.
using our online Positly study participant recruitment platform.

On average, the Big Five test was about twice as accurate as the MBTI-style
test for predicting these life outcomes, placing the usefulness of the MBTI-
style test halfway between science and astrology—literally. When we tried
predicting these same life outcomes using astrological sun signs (e.g., whether
someone is a Pisces or Aries), we achieved zero prediction accuracy. In other
words, sun sign astrology didn’t appear to work at all for predicting people’s
lives. And while the MBTI-style test fared better, it was still often wrong in its
predictions. What’s more, adding MBTI-style personality results to Big Five
ones didn’t lead to predictions that were any more on the mark than Big Five
ones alone. (If you’d like to compare your own Big Five and MBTI-style results
to see how accurate they are, you can do so here using a free version of the test
that we created as part of our study.)

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: How Accurate Are Popular Personality Test Frameworks at Predicting Life Outcomes? A Detailed Investigation. André Ferretti et al.
ClearerThinking.org, February 24, 2024

Why are MBTI-style tests often so much worse than Big Five ones? We found
two major reasons.

MBTI-style tests typically measure four of the Big Five personality traits. The
tests’ scales for extraversion, intuition and feeling are a decently close match
with Big Five’s extraversion, openness to experience and agreeableness,
respectively. And in our study the test’s judging dimension represents a
mixture of Big Five openness, extraversion and (lack of)conscientiousness.

But MBTI-style tests typically don’t measure neuroticism, which is an

important predictor of many crucial life outcomes, such as career success,
suicidal thoughts and life satisfaction. Without the trait of neuroticism, our
Big Five test’s predictive accuracy fell by 22 percent (the correlation between
what we could predict about people from their personality traits and what was
really true of those people dropped from 0.23 down to 0.18).

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A second problem with MBTI-style tests is that they force people into two
distinct categories for each trait. Rather than assigning you a score for each
trait (like the Big Five does), they usually report your personality using a letter
for each trait, such as E versus I, and S versus N. We found all four of the
MBTI-style traits to be close to normally distributed (i.e., shaped like bell
curves), however. Most people are far from fully judging or perceptive,
extraverted or introverted, thinking or feeling, or sensing or intuitive. They
are instead somewhere near the middle. We found the MBTI-style test would
be about 38 percent better in predicting major life outcomes if it didn’t
dichotomize people’s traits.

Credit: Amanda Montañez; Source: How Accurate Are Popular Personality Test Frameworks at Predicting Life Outcomes? A Detailed Investigation. André Ferretti et al.
ClearerThinking.org, February24, 2024

So, what accounts for the enduring popularity of MBTI-style tests if they
appear to be surpassed by the Big Five in predictive capacity?

For one, they may be less offensive than other tests. After giving 236 people in
the U.S. both the MBTI-style test and the Big Five test, we asked them what
they thought about the results. When asked if their report made them feel
good about their personality, 10 percent disagreed for the MBTI-style report,
while 19 percent disagreed for the Big Five. That's nearly double the
dissatisfaction, suggesting that the softer framing of the former report was less
insulting.

This may be in part because MBTI-style tests give a more positive spin to
some of the negative traits in Big Five tests. People who, on the Big Five, are
told they are less open to new experiences—which could make them feel bad—
are rebranded as “sensing.” Disagreeableness is rebranded as thinking (by
merging the trait of “not taking into account other people’s emotions” with the
trait of being “logical”). And perhaps the most negative-sounding trait of all—
neuroticism—is left out of the whole exercise.

Interestingly, people in our study believed that the MBTI-style results were
just as accurate as the Big Five results.

If MBTI-style tests offer little meaningful new information about individuals’

personalities that can’t be found in other tests, they do at least teach us about a
widespread trait: the desire to feel good about oneself—and one’s psyche. Our
study suggests that MBTI-style tests may be sacrificing predictive accuracy in
exchange for gratification. Relative to other options, MBTI-style tests may be
worse at telling you whether you will excel at your job, relationship or life. But
they can give some cool labels to some of your personality foibles. And that is
something just about everybody—from an ENTJ to an ISFP—can rally around.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or
authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

SPENCER GREENBERG is founder of ClearerThinking.org and Spark Wave and host of the Clearer Thinking
podcast.
More by Spencer Greenberg

SETH STEPHENS-DAVIDOWITZ is author of Don’t Trust Your Gut,Everybody Lies and Who Makes the NBA?
More by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

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