The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator has by now reached such a level of recognition among the general populace that it has, naturally, become a matter of contention. Critics scornfully denounce it for its binaries, its inconsistencies in scoring, and its lack of scientific credibility, while adherents get defensive and sometimes angry. The rest — those who have heard about the MBTI from their friends and coworkers and may have taken a few online tests without remembering their results — are only too happy to cast the typology system into the bin of dubious intrigue where astrology resides.
But when people say they are an ESTJ (extroverted sensing thinking judging), or an INFP (introverted intuitive feeling perceiving), or any of the other fourteen letter combinations, what do they really mean? If you are an ESTJ, does it mean you’re social, concrete, logical, and judgmental? That appears to be the logic behind the letters: juxtapose the single meanings together and get the composite sum of the individual. But of course that is a simplistic way of looking at an individual. If the Myers-Briggs actually operated by that logic no one would identify with their type and the whole system would be long forgotten. The reality is that the eight letters comprising the basic MBTI vocabulary — extroversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving — are so general and fundamental to the human experience that any human would need to be all eight letters in order to maintain his or her existence past the stage of infancy. The differences between types are less cut-and-dry binaries and more matters of degree in terms of preference and inclination.
People who identify with their type derive their enthusiasm for the MBTI not from the four letters themselves, but from a description, usually found on the internet, that comes stocked with generally admirable qualities. The descriptions make gentle assurances that yes, you are comprehensible, and no, you are not alone. There are people who are like you and people who are not. Your way of being is not an aberration but rather part of a larger, sensible, beautiful framework. You have a place in this diverse world. Isn`t that something a lot of us want?
But this is again only scratching at surfaces. This is where most people stop. If you dig deeper, you will come to realize that the darker depths of the Myers-Briggs proliferate with all manner of complexities that provoke, confound, and cause bitter arguments on online forums. If you are like me, you explore these depths for months, even for years. You familiarize yourself with Kiersey’s temperaments. You memorize and master the cognitive function stacks for each type. You wrestle with the meanings of these functions and observe how they manifest in your friends, your relatives, your nemeses, your favorite book and movie characters. You begin noticing remarkable patterns that the internet descriptions don’t tell you. You no longer have to filter personalities through the vocabulary of the typology; you start intuiting people’s types based on how they remind you of people you already know.
Each type — INTJ, ESFP, ENFJ, whatever, you name it — starts gathering unmistakable signs, and you become amazed by the ways people not only start making sense to you, but also start fulfilling your expectations, over and over. You can predict how they will choose to comport themselves, what kinds of activities they will be drawn to, and even who they’re likely to fall in love with. At the same time, you take pleasure in the diversity of forms, the way a single type can be represented by a panorama of individual personalities, triangulated through different upbringings, cultures, genders, and interests. If people fulfill certain expectations, they also subvert them or brace against them, and sometimes you realize that you mistyped them. These subversions have the nice effect of outlining an individual against his or her type while simultaneously allowing you — by now the impenetrable observer, the invisible eye — to fine-tune the composite type itself. Online multiple choice tests? Ancient history. That acquaintance who calls herself an INFJ, the rarest of types? You know better. You know she only wants to be an INFJ and answered the test questions to lead her to that result.
Personality coding systems often involve labels, but some do not. The Big Five Personality Test, generally approved by psychologists, measures certain characteristics of personality while withholding an all-purpose label, but it lacks the coherency of a code that holistically encapsulates the individual. The MBTI is more popular than the Big Five because it provides apparent coherency. So, too, does astrology. People who follow astrology take stock of what they observe and attempt to fit it into a framework that makes sense to them, and that they’ve internalized. They, too, are familiar with the possibilities and the limits of labeling. They know that a personality label does not necessarily reduce individuals but instead condenses free-floating behavioral data into themes and patterns. They know that newfound complexities will invariably explode out from superficial coherency.
An obvious key difference between astrology and the MBTI, though, is that the MBTI does not predetermine personality types based on one’s date of birth. This seemingly arbitrary metric takes away some credibility from astrology. But when critics attack the MBTI for having no scientific proof, and when they dismiss C.G. Jung (the progenitor of the theory of types and cognitive functions) as a crackpot who believed in ESP and the collective unconscious, I would reply: so what? Are people who believe in the perceptive capacities of the mind, as yet unexplained by biological mechanisms, not allowed to make observations? Is Jung to be dismissed when he writes in “A Psychological Theory of Types” that he values the type-theory “for the objective reason that it offers a system of comparison and orientation”? Like Jung, Virginia Woolf theorizes on the existence of the collective unconscious in A Room of One’s Own — the idea that our mental worlds are handed down and imparted amongst porous human beings, and that the thoughts and experiences and endeavors of the people who came before you coalesce into who you are.
When you have lived with the MBTI as long as I have, you begin to see your own type as part of your identity. But being a writer is part of my identity too. I also happen to be a male, Asian-American, Coloradoan, English speaker, former English major, son, brother, pianist, teacher, Japanophile, half-hearted runner, bad cook, and recent college graduate financially dependent on his mom. Personality type, like everything I listed, is a handy term that offers a way — just a way — of understanding one’s way of being in the world, and learning about other people in the world. By that same token, it can become political: some people will devalue others who are placed into a different category. NTs and NFs in particular have a tendency of falling into this trap — of turning a neutral, constructed system into an excuse to think that they are superior to others. Whether the MBTI is used for good or for bad, the bottom line is that a person does not have the authority to determine for someone else whether or not being an ISFJ or ENFP or whatever is meaningful.
Mark Edmundson, English professor at the University of Virginia, writes of the English major: “But of course we’re talking about more than a mere academic major. We’re talking about a way of life. We’re talking about a way of living that places inquiry into how to live in the world — what to be, how to act, how to move through time — at its center.” What if we saw the MBTI as something beyond an HR fad or a test result on a career choice exam? What if we treated the study of personality with recognition and regard, withholding our braying criticisms of its quantitative lacks or its ambiguity, and see it anew through a literary lens? This requires a respect for the facts that surround and enrich each one of us. This requires us to look at people as if they were complex texts, each imbued with themes, patterns, and latent meanings. The MBTI provides a vocabulary for doing this, regardless of whether you “believe” in it or not. If you do not, you are not smarter than those who do, nor are you better at calling out bullshit. You are simply choosing to disregard a language of themes, patterns, and meanings that other people have used to understand themselves and others. That’s okay, but what’s important to remember is that the MBTI, like everything, must be analyzed — not just asked for proof.
Artwork by Kareem Lotfy. See more of Kareem’s work here.
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