How thousands of companies ended up using a bogus psychology test on their staff

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In September, a new trend went viral on TikTok: “The MBTI Chemistry Quiz”. The quiz requires your friends to input their Myers-Briggs Type Indicator into a website, which then ranks your relationships from “perfect” to “disaster” in an animated circle. Users can turn the animation into videos for TikTok. Videos tagged “mbti quiz” have been viewed 8.9 billion times on the platform, according to TikTok’s own data.

This is all trivial fun for teenagers, of course. No one really believes that the quality of your friendships can be ranked by your Myers-Briggs personality type.

And yet, thousands of companies rely on the test as an internal communication tool or an HR resource.

Goldman Sachs uses it as a marketing tool, for instance. All of the major consultancy firms — McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture, and so on — have used it on their staff. Forbes and Inc. magazines have both recommended it. Imperial College London has a briefing on it for their employees.

Yet few people realize quite how strange and useless the Myers-Briggs method actually is.

Imagine someone in your HR department showed up at your desk one day and asked you to respond to these statements:

Do they suspect you might be a psychopath? Why else would anyone enjoy “watching people argue”?  (Note that they are not asking whether you enjoy having an argument but whether you enjoy watching other people have an argument. Creepy.)

And why might your HR department think you might be fascinated by death?

Yet these are all questions from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test.

Myers-Briggs asks you a few dozen questions and then asks you to rate your answers on a scale. It then places you in one of 16 personality categories. The categories measure you based on your relative propensity for the following traits:

• Extraversion or introversion

• Sensing or intuition

• Thinking or feeling

• Judging or perceiving

The eight categories are represented by initials (E, I, S, N, T, F, J, P) and at the end you are diagnosed with a four-letter combo. Last time I took it, I registered as an “INTJ”, which stands for  Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Judging. That allegedly makes me “innovative, independent, strategic, logical, reserved, insightful, and driven by my own original ideas to achieve improvements.” In some tests, these personality types are given cool-sounding nicknames. Mine is “The Mastermind” or “The Architect”, depending  on which website you read.

It’s all very flattering.

But very few people who know me would describe me as a mastermind.

The Myers-Briggs test is so common you may already have taken it yourself. If so, you have likely received an equally flattering assessment of your personality. Because it turns out that all 16 categories in Myers-Briggs are upbeat, positive, and have only good things to say about you. Myers-Briggs only delivers one type of result, in 16 sunny ways.

There is no way to take the Myers-Briggs test and discover, for instance, that you are a miserable, self-hating jerk who overcompensates for your inadequacies with petty vendettas against your colleagues. Which is strange, because it would  be genuinely useful if Myers-Briggs were able to weed out people like that!

And yet, millions of times a year, corporate HR departments ask their employees these questions, and categorize their personalities based on the results. “More than 10,000 companies, 2,500 colleges and universities and 200 government agencies in the United States use the test,” according to an investigation by the Washington Post. At one point, 89 of the top Fortune 100 companies used it.

Companies use the test to create workplace training programs that, in theory, are best suited to your personality type. They also believe that knowing your colleagues’ personality types will help you communicate better with them.

There’s just one problem.

Myers-Briggs is garbage.

It was invented in 1943 by the mystery novelist Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, a bank clerk. Neither of them had any scientifc training whatsoever. But they were fans of the work of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung who, in 1921, theorized that personalities could be divided into several basic types. However, this was just an idea. Jung never tested it, or proved it, or provided any evidence for it.

Undaunted, Myers and Briggs developed the idea, turning it into a test featuring a series of bizarre questions that respondents are asked to agree or disagree with. The test was picked up by various government agencies and educational institutions, taking on a life of its own.

Since then dozens of scientists have pointed out that Myers-Briggs is pseudoscience. There is no peer-reviewed, statistically significant, double-blind research demonstrating that it works. Scientific American said Myers-Briggs was “one of the  worst personality tests in existence for a wide range of reasons. It is unreliable because a person’s type may change from day to day. It gives false information (‘bogus stuff,’ one researcher puts it). The questions are confusing and poorly worded.”

Simine Vazire, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, has called it “shockingly bad.”

Jung himself disowned the idea behind Myers-Briggs even though his work inspired it. “Every individual is an exception to the rule,” Jung said. To “stick labels on people at first sight,” he argued, was “nothing but a childish parlor game.”

Companies and bosses often feel tempted to subject their staff to some kind of psychology test. It feels intuitively useful to know that Johnny is “playful and enthusiastic” whereas Mary is “action oriented and logical.” Maybe that information could help you communicate more effectively with them, if you can do so in their  style? But at the end of the day, Mary and Johnny both have the  same job. That project needs to be done by Friday, come hell or  high water. The client doesn’t care whether Johnny is an “ISFP” or  Mary an “ENTJ.”

The fact is, it is more important for managers to be good at communicating than to be amateur psychoanalysts. Compatibility quizzes are fun for TikTok. But don’t run your company based on them, please.

Jim Edwards is the author of Say Thank You for Everything: The secrets of being a great manager — strategies and tactics that get results.