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Twelve years ago, I tried to drive a stake into the heart of the personality-testing industry. Personality tests are neither valid nor reliable, I argued, and we should stop using them — especially for making decisions that affect the course of people's lives, like workplace hiring and promotion.

, would lead to change in the world, I was keenly mistaken. Personality tests appear to be more popular than ever. I say "appear" because — today as when I wrote the book — verifiable numbers on the use of such tests are hard to come by.


Personality testing is an industry the way astrology or dream analysis is an industry: slippery, often underground, hard to monitor or measure. There are the personality tests administered to job applicants "to determine if you're a good fit for the company"; there are the personality tests imposed on people who are already employed, "in order to facilitate teamwork"; there are the personality tests we take voluntarily, in career counseling offices and on self-improvement retreats and in the back pages of magazines (or, increasingly, online).

I know these tests are popular because after the book was published, most of the people I heard from were personality-test enthusiasts, eager to rebut my critique of the tests that had, they said, changed their lives.


Actually, it was just one test they were talking about: the 

. If you've ever made a new acquaintance who, after conversing with you for a minute, says, "Are you an INTJ? Because my sister-in-law is an INTJ and you remind me of her, and as an ESFP I'm obviously your opposite, but as long as we know that, we can get along and work together really well," you've met an MBTI convert. The MBTI is a secular religion, and no amount of scientific evidence will dissuade its true believers. I have tried, and have repeatedly been told that it's clearly my fill-in-a-four-letter-personality-type-here nature that makes me so skeptical.


After a number of encounters of this sort, I developed a tolerance and even an affection for type-obsessed fans of the MBTI. Sure, their instrument is a Carl Jung-inspired load of nonsense engineered to make everyone who takes it feel good about themselves. On the other hand, insight often turns up in unlikely places. Wherever you find illumination, I began to tell the type disciples I met, you should seize it.

But the one manifestation of personality testing to which I have never been able to accommodate myself is the administration of tests to captive audiences: students and employees required to place themselves in boxes for an administrator's convenience. If my marshaling of scientific evidence against the test failed to change many minds, I hope that the narrative in which that evidence is embedded makes my larger point: that human beings are far too complex, too mysterious and too interesting to be defined by the banal categories of personality tests.



Indeed, the creators of major personality tests are themselves a colorful bunch of characters whose tests were largely reflective of their own idiosyncrasies. In researching and writing their life stories, I came to believe that personality tests tell us less about the individuals who take them than about the individuals who 

Myers typed herself as an INFP (that is, introverted-intuitive-feeling-perceiving). Having spent many months poring over her letters and journal entries, reading the recollections of those who knew her and reporting on the way she turned an obscure psychological theory into a personality test that has been taken by millions of people worldwide, I can tell you that a string of four letters doesn't come close to capturing the fascinating complexities of this woman. If Myers imagined that her multitudes could be contained by four pseudo-Jungian descriptors — well, that was her limitation. We don't have to make it ours.

Annie Murphy Paul

Author

It can be a lot of fun taking those back-of-the-magazine personality tests. But tests may be less fun when they are used by employers to make big life decisions on hiring and job performance.

Personality tests are popular, but do they capture the real you?

Go Deeper.

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