Where is mbti used

Given all this controversy, you might think people would treat the test as just a curiosity, or at least take it with a grain of salt. Instead, many people use types as a schema for understanding the world. While there's plenty to criticize about the MBTI, it's easy to imagine that, if you put a group of people with the same personality type in a room together, you'll see a lot of similarities.

Thanks to the popularity of online community-building sites like Meetup. Because the best kinds of friends are the ones who are just like you. I've been waiting for me to come along, and now I've swept myself off my feet!

The fact that I know this might be coloring my perception, but these traits all seem to come out at the meetup. One person speaks at a time, and comfortable silences break up the conversation. No one seems interested in small talk. Instead, they consider philosophy and personal issues.

In a sense, they're here for the same reason people go to any meetup: to find people with common interests and attitudes. Except in this case, it's not about going out with neighbors who also like to play golf or go to the beach. It's about looking for people with similar minds. And yet I still felt a little disconnected from some of the discussions. I couldn't quite figure out why until one young woman told us about the time she spent 10 minutes in a grocery store trying to choose between fair trade and regular chocolate.

She almost broke out in tears as she thought about the suffering workers in third world countries, she said. The others nodded, saying they too got upset in these kinds of situations.

I, on the other hand, kept my mouth shut, knowing that whether or not I bought the fair-trade chocolate, no tears would be involved. I'd weigh the various factors price, likely taste, likely impact on the world , make a choice, and be fine with it. After hearing the others talk about how the knowledge of overseas distress caused them emotional pain, I felt a bit guilty.

Did my nonchalance make me a monster? According to the MBTI, the difference between fair-trade-chocolate girl and me is that I am a Thinker T rather than a Feeler F , meaning I make decisions by analyzing rather than by feeling.

And as skeptical as I am about putting people in boxes, this distinction felt true in this scenario. His classmates were surprised how much he could figure out about them, he says, and now he does the same thing at meetups. Companies use it to analyze job applicants, managers use it to determine which employees might get along with one another, and your friends might use it to tell the world what kind of person they are.

Katharine, who had graduated from Michigan Agricultural College now Michigan State in the late 19th century, wanted to figure out how she could use laboratory science techniques she learned there to help in the child-rearing process. The test classifies people as one of a possible 16 different types , across four different spectrums: Extroverted vs. Emre joined us to discuss how often companies still use the indicator and why she thinks it became the most popular personality test in the world.

The following transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity. So the most recent statistics indicate that 1 in every 5 Fortune 1, companies uses it in the hiring process. Eighty-nine of the Fortune companies use it either in the hiring process, or in the workplace for team-building exercises, leadership coaching, executive talent management, things like that.

The kinds of corporations that are likely to use it are service-oriented ones. Some of it is in the hiring process. I have a sister who was interviewing for a very kind of cultish New York City hedge fund. The first round of that interview was taking a battery of personality tests, one of which was Myers-Briggs.

Later when she was hired she was told that part of getting through that first round was having a very particular Myers-Briggs type, in that case they were actually looking for, I think, INTJs, which is her type. So it can be as specific as that. It can be, like I said, more in the process of workplace management and team-building exercises.

She was born in She viewed it as this tool for early childhood education and specialization. Her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, inherits this way of thinking about type from her mother in the s. In the s, she sees the rise of all of these new personality tests that are supposed to match workers to the jobs that are best suited to them.

She takes issue with many of these tests because they divide workers into good workers and bad workers, or workers who have a normal personality and workers with an abnormal personality. And this indicator would help sort people into the jobs that were right for them.

Knowledge Wharton: How quickly was it accepted by businesses and other organizations when it finally came out? In the s, Isabel Briggs Myers is working in Philadelphia with one of the first personnel management consultants in the U. These companies are all using it to have their CEOs assess themselves, to interview job candidates, to figure out whether or not you should charge certain people with certain type profiles higher premiums for their life insurance.

It was a secret operation where they matched spies to the covert missions that they thought were best suited for their personalities. MacKinnon would administer [the Myers-Briggs], along with a number of other psychological tests and role-playing situations and interviews and things like that, to possible operatives whose personalities he was trying to assess.

Knowledge Wharton: You mentioned the growth of this type of testing in the s. Emre: This is why Isabel Briggs Myers found an interested clientele for her product in the s. In the s, William H. Whyte publishes the book The Organization Man , which is thinking precisely about the kind of person you have to be in order to be considered a good fit within a corporate workplace. This conversation about what kind of worker looks like a good fit for a white-collar job has definitely been around for a while.

Knowledge Wharton: As the test was distributed, was there criticism because it was a marketing tool rather than an educational one? Emre: One of the institutions that was interested in being the primary publisher for it in the s and s was Educational Testing Services, ETS.

They were interested in finding a test that could do for personality testing with the SAT had done for aptitude testing, which was that every college would use it to help determine their admissions.

Their team of statisticians could not find a way. They feel judged. When they have to confront the lack of scientific validity and reliability, the indicator takes on this very different kind of function, a softer function. If you go to a contemporary Myers-Briggs training session, which I had to do in order to write this book, one of the very interesting things they tell you up front is that under no circumstances are you supposed to refer to it as a test.

Because a test is something that has right and wrong answers, a test is something that creates hierarchies of its subjects based on how well they have answered the questions.

This is going to sound a little bit tautological, but the indicator is simply a tool that indicates something to you based on what you have revealed to it. Calling it an indicator and describing it as they do is another way of getting around these questions of validity. The way that the people who offer these [Myers-Briggs] courses or training programs define whether the indicator is working or not is if you personally agree with the type that it has revealed to you.