Joachim Kennedy

Alternative Personality Tests

Today the phrase that’s been bothering me for years is “Myers Briggs is unscientific”. Why do people say that? Beyond trying to embarrass their friend who brought it up, that is. All the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, does is define 4 binaries and ask questions about them. It’s as scientific as asking your friend whether they like coffee, and then calling them a coffee-liker. If you believe in the validity of self-report, then MBTI is meaningful regardless.

Maybe they’re noticing that MBTI is nonstandard. There are a hundred free tests on the Internet, and I’ve never met someone who took an officially administered version (in the past decade). It’s like the popular Internet technique of using a banana for scale. Sure, it’s imperfect given the variance in bananas, but it effectively communicates relative size. (I’d better clear up early that this is not a full-blooded defense of MBTI).

Speaking of online MBTIs, once they assign you to one of the 16 types, they’ll tell you everything from strengths and weaknesses to potential careers to compatibility with other types to parenting advice (they’ve got your whole life covered). These tend to range from obvious to wild extrapolation, cold reading, and borderline astrology. I admit this is largely the appeal. All that for a short multiple choice survey is a bargain. The rough 1 in 16 split is perfect for feeling special and rare but also validated by the company of others of your type. Though if this describes you, maybe you should check out real astrology. The lore goes much deeper1. (That’s a freebie. We haven’t even gotten to the “real” alternative personality tests yet). That said, the online MBTI target audience is people who are too shy to go to a Tarot reader, so good luck.

I don’t think people actually mean that MBTI is used for unscientific things though; they mean that it was developed in an unscientific way. As contrasted with the Big 5. The Big 5 is almost exactly like the MBTI except it’s used for science. It’s a standard, like a ruler instead of a banana. The traits were chosen by running factor analysis on personality tests of many different traits to group them into independent clusters based on which traits tend to be correlated with each other2. Myers and Briggs chose their traits arbitrarily based on Carl Jung’s writing. The Big 5 are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion3, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. The number 5 is arbitrary because they had to make an arbitrary decision somewhere.

This is not like geo- vs heliocentrism. Big 5 is not more true than MBTI; it’s just more science-flavored4. It’s more like the difference between an amateur’s backyard telescope and the JWST. One required more science and engineering to create and is used more for scientific purposes, but you can use both to see the stars. If anything, the backyard telescope is more accessible to the average person. But I’m still bothered because there are better tools than type indicators for seeing personality traits.

One memorable piece of advice that I have not taken is that you should experiment with drugs that have a large effect on a few people rather than the drugs that have a small effect on almost everyone. Drug companies and trials select based on the most common outcomes, but since you’re only one person, it’s much better to find a drug that has a strong positive effect for you, regardless of its average effect. The same is true for personality. Unless you’re actually doing personality science, you care much more about understanding yourself and those close to you than about the averages. You want to find the traits that describe and predict you the best.

Lucky for you, I’ve developed a slate of alternative personality tests to help discover those traits which you might identify with very strongly. The nice thing about alternative personality tests is that, if personality tests aren’t really scientific to begin with, alternatives don’t amount to alternative science.

Ask your friends

Someone’s strongest traits are usually the ones that you’d mention when you’re describing them because they’re the most directly connected to predictive power. When you describe a friend you’re telling someone what to expect when they meet. What they’ll probably be like. People say introverted or logical sometimes, sure, but they say things like funny, awkward, excitable, and adventurous much more because usually there are more apt traits than the ones from MBTI. You can try to do it on yourself. Imagine how your friends would describe you. Even better: ask them. Or just listen. People have told me, unprompted, that I’m a routine-follower.

There are always differences between the way you see yourself and others see you. To account for this, the official administration of many personality tests includes both self- and peer-report. You can recreate this with any typical test by asking a friend to take it for you. A test designed for this purpose is the Johari Window, which splits traits into 4 panes based on whether they are visible to you or to others. Then you can argue about who’s right and who knows you best.

Take more personality tests

One reason it’s hard to think of your strongest personality traits is that it’s hard to think of comprehensive lists of anything. You can look up lists of traits and see which ones jump out at you, or you can take a few of the many other personality tests. Start on Wikipedia or openpsychometrics. This has the added benefit of driving home how arbitrary the MBTI and Big 5 are, both in the traits they choose and in the fickleness of trends in personality science. I started this post because I thought I knew a lot about personality tests, and in writing it I’ve discovered that there are so many more than I thought.

One I’ll highlight here is the Enneagram because it’s also tremendously popular, some5 people6 find it transformative, and instead of personality traits, it focuses on strongest fears, desires, and motivations.

Think about people you hate

The other reason it’s hard to think about your own personality is that people seem normal to themselves. Sometimes to learn about yourself, you have to think about others (sorry!) and how they differ. The classic wisdom is that your strengths are what others seem unusually bad at, but for personality, I’ve always found it better to think about people who annoy you, preferably frenemies. You like them enough that they’re not horrible people or horribly different from you, but they probably have some trait that you dislike and see in yourself. When I do this exercise I come up with clumsy, rigid, and a little self-centered which are all traits that I identify with more strongly than any of the MBTI traits. Note: it may not be necessary for them to actually possess those traits. It may be sufficient that you see it in them.

A positive side effect of this exercise is that it can help you give them and yourself a bit more grace about your shared faults. But the trouble is that it only reveals negative traits. The opposite doesn’t work. Typically the people you like and admire have qualities you aspire to. That said, your strongest personality traits are likely to be the ones that have both positive and negative effects on your life (e.g. “honest to a fault”, hard-working/no friends) so maybe once you find them in the negative you can also see their upsides.

Eschew Personality

Ok, now that you know your strongest traits forget all about them. There’s a danger in identifying too strongly with personality traits. It becomes tempting to reason forward from them. (e.g. “I’m a Feeler, so I won’t apply to that job even though I’m curious about it”, “I’m an Extravert, so I have to get this party started even though I’m tired”). Personality traits are nothing to base a life on. That’s the role of beliefs, values, commitments, aspirations, and feelings.

Besides, personality traits can be malleable once you loosen your grip on them. If you stick to them, they calcify, but if you’ve been focusing on other aspects of your life, then you may look up one day and notice your personality has shifted. That’s not to say you have total control over your personality. Some traits may be less malleable than others. Over the years, I’ve stopped identifying as an Introvert, but I’m still incredibly clumsy. You also don’t really know a priori how malleable everything is. An inspiration for this post was someone who overcame intense social anxiety by focusing on kindness and curiosity7 and concludes by joking that she doesn’t believe in personality.

It’s annoying and condescending to say you don’t believe in MBTI, but it’s discombobulating to say you don’t believe in personality at all. Or if that’s too bold for you, say you don’t have a personality or that you don’t know your own personality. This is not so much an alternative personality test as an alternative to personality tests.

  1. That’s not to say MBTI doesn’t have lore. It and its Jungian origins get surprisingly deep into total nonsense, but I’m ignoring that here because I’ve never heard anyone bring them up, for or against. ↩︎

  2. There is a slightly more informed argument that MBTI is unscientific because some of the dimensions are correlated with each other, or not fully independent. For this, the banana metaphor is also fitting. You can use the banana to measure even though it’s a little bent. ↩︎

  3. It’s notable that this made it onto both lists, and that it’s the only one that most people remember in the MBTI, and identify with the strongest. It could (and may be) the subject of another post. ↩︎

  4. Another important note about the Big Five is that it’s no fun. Maybe it’s because its traits are spectra so you don’t get assigned a “type” or because it is used in research instead of sleepovers, but it has never achieved remotely the degree of popularity as MBTI. ↩︎

  5. Sasha Chapin, Talking Enneagram 7 blues ↩︎

  6. Cate Hall, There are nine wolves inside of you ↩︎

  7. Eve Bigaj, The Solution to Shyness? Kindness and Curiosity ↩︎

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