Often, as I hop onto Discord, I like to scan through the profiles of unsuspecting users. Often, alongside the cheesy or edgy bios that teenagers like to include, I find four letters sitting seemingly out of place. Perhaps an “INFP” or “ESTJ” written somewhere, for example.
This four-letter combination identifies the person as one of 16 personality types based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). This self-report questionnaire was designed during World War II by Americans Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers. Since then, it has been used by 2 million people per year.
Through a series of questions, testers are assigned a binary value on 4 criteria. The four-letter code is a combination of introversion (I) or extraversion (E), sensing (S) or intuition (N), thinking (T) or feeling (F) and judging (J) or perceiving (P). This results in outcomes like INTJ or ENFJ.
When I took the test this April, I was assessed as most likely to be ESTP, known for being outgoing, energetic and action-oriented, with ISTP and ESFP coming up as secondary choices if I didn’t align with ESTP. It took me around 10 minutes to complete the questionnaire on the Keys2Cognition site, which has been recommended by my friends as well as several online sources as the most accurate one; another popular site is 16personalities.
Well, that’s great, I thought. Very useful. The problem with this coded result is that it just doesn’t make sense. Most people don’t know what it means — at best, they have an understanding that “E” stands for extroverted and “I” stands for introverted. The problem can be generally solved by searching Reddit for what your personality type actually represents in real life and what you may act like, compared to a code on paper. This extra search gives more day-to-day distinctions that are user- friendly.
But beyond that, the subtleties that the test attempts to distinguish, such as the difference between Sensing-Thinking and Intuiting-Thinking, for example, are mostly lost to me. MBTI gives an analysis of which cognitive process the test taker is likely the best at.
At first, I thought that these concepts were too complicated for applications in real life. However, the strength the test identified in me, which was Sensing-Thinking, was surprisingly consistent with the brief analysis of several friends.
But regardless of my results, it was about time that I took the test again. People were getting pretty suspicious of my MBTI from several years ago: INTJ (introversion, intuitive, thinking, judgement) . In some ways, I’m still an INTJ — an arrogant strategist — but not as much as before. Now I’m more considerate, or so I’d like to think.
However, I’ve found that the test’s results are inaccurate on some occasions. A few years ago, a friend of mine tested as an INFP (introversion, intuitive, feeling, perceiving). Frankly, I couldn’t see them as anything besides an extrovert, perhaps an ENFP (extroversion, intuitive, feeling, perceiving).
Of course, another friend, who had a crush on her at the time, told me about her MBTI, attempting to defend her INFP score. This was probably because he had scored ENFJ (extroversion, intuitive, feeling, judgment), which is supposed to be highly compatible with INFP. One way or another, they ended up breaking up, maybe because the whole compatibility shenanigans are a scam — or for other reasons, but I guess we’ll never know.
The moral of the story is that you can’t just blindly follow the MBTI guides when searching for the love of your life, just as you can’t trust astrology or voodoo magic. There’s really no substitute for going out and meeting people in real life — or, if you’re a basement dweller as I am, sliding into their DMs
