Is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI Assessment fake? The claim that the test offers people “objective insight” into their strengths and weaknesses which help them improve themselves, in addition to apparently offering businesses “unrivalled insight to improve interpersonal communication” so as to create “the agile, robust culture companies need to succeed.”

Now this all sounds quite nice, of course, but there’s one core problem: the test is pretty much meaningless. It has no benefit whatsoever and it’s lacking any scientific basis. As the American psychologist Robert Hogan has noted, the Myers Briggs test is regarded by leading psychologists as “as little more than an elaborate fortune cookie.” Based upon untested and widely discredited theories of Carl Jung, the test was developed in the 1940s by two American authors, Katharine Cook-Briggs and Isabel Briggs-Myers, a mother and daughter team.

In the book, Jung had explained that he believed humans roughly fall into two types: perceivers and judgers. These two main groups could then supposedly be subdivided into two groups each: the first group was divided into those who prefer sensing and those who prefer intuiting, and the second into those who are more rational and those who are more emotional. All four types could in turn be further divided based on the attitudes of introverts and extroverts. However, importantly, Jung himself expressly noted that these categories were only proximate and admitted that all people will probably have at least a little bit of each one.

Now you won’t find the same nuance with the MBTI, the test is, quite frankly, based entirely on the simplistic notion that people either fall completely into one category or completely into the other. It arrives at its conclusions based on respondents’ answers to really rather silly questions such as "Do you tend to sympathize with other people?", with respondents only being offered the option between two blunt answers: "yes" or "no."

Ultimately, there is no solid evidence for the dichotomies into which the MBTI Assessment wants to categorize or classify all people. Personality traits are simply far too complex to be evaluated by a test with such immense limitations. No single person in the world is exclusively an extrovert. No single person is exclusively an introvert.

Another central problem with the test is that, regardless of who you are, your results will always be flattering, without exception.

No psychologist, no behavioural or occupational psychologist anyway, will ever use the MBTI Assessment nor recognize its authority. Being a so-called “certified test administrator” for Myers-Briggs is really a meaningless qualification. Personality itself is recognized by psychologists as being simply far too complex to even attempt to categorize the entire planet’s population into a limited number of essentially arbitrary categories.

Now having said all of that, the primary problem with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator is not necessarily the test in and of itself, but more so it's the manner in which it is scored, interpreted and used by employers. No personality assessment, as I’ve said, is reliable enough to sort people into 16 types, which is why people can get different type profiles when they take the test on multiple occasions.

What you could use the assessment for, is to open up group discussions within a training programme or a workshop for example. Participants could discuss these similarities and differences as self-reflection topics rather than hard and fast rules of totally different personality types.

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