The Popularity of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator According to the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), I am an INFJ (Introversion, Intuiting, Feeling, and Judging). I know that because like many Americans I have taken this personality test in the belief that it is a reliable way to know what kind of person I tend to be. A few weeks ago, there was an article on Facebook titled, “Why Does the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Seem So Eerily Accurate?” The article starts as a personal story on how the writer was persuaded by her friend to take the personality test. She took the test and got assigned the personality of an INTJ. Before she took the test she believed that it was just something that people did for fun, but after reading about her personality type, she started believing that it was reliable and valid because it described her perfectly. She explains that millions of people take the MBTI …show more content…
Psychological testing is used every day to make critical decisions based on a sample of a person’s behavior. It takes a large sample size to come up with a theory of personality and then construct and instrument that measures those traits in order to put people into a category. Meaning that there is a lot of room for error, just like in any type of test. A test is a tool not a complete assessment. The general public who is generally not aware of psychometrics, should be careful about the conclusions they make when getting their results back. Every score should be tied to a specific prediction or description, it should not be just a label or a vague description that can apply to anyone (the Forer effect). The problem seems to be that people take free online personality test too seriously, as if they can only be one of 16 different types of people. There are many different versions of the MBTI, all which have different response options and description of each type. This might be one of the reasons why some people might not get the same score when they