In defense of the MBTI

I’ve been doing some thinking and research about the nature of cognition and I wanted to share thoughts as to why we need to look beyond the Big Five for information on cognition. Some people seem to be under the impression that I stick to the MBTI just because it’s what I’ve heard or because other people have told me it’s good, but I’m going to explain in this post that it’s actually just based on an open minded investigation of the reality of cognition.

So, we start with the Big Five which was better than what we had before. The Big Five improved on the system of just making up random traits and making questions to help ascertain those traits, by algorithmically finding traits based on correlations between a number of different questions. This was an improvement upon the MBTI test since it just made up random traits and had better retest and cross question reliability. Anyway, but we can’t let ourselves get too comfortable with the incredibleness of the Big Five. We are never done, science is a process after all. So, we need open-mindedly ask ourselves the question once again, what is the nature of cognition?

So, if we want to figure that out, we need to ask ourselves what are the flaws of the Big Five. What things does it fail to describe? I think the first most obvious issue we would come across is that answering questions on a test requires cognition. For example, let’s take the statement “I like to go on walks”. Answering that question requires cognition. So, for example, you might answer it by thinking about whether you like to go on walks to some extent or you might answer it based on whether other people think of you as a person who likes to go on walks. You see the issue here? Some people are answering the question on the basis of their own thoughts of how much they like to go on walks where as other answering it based on what they think other people think about how much they like to go on walks. When we looked back at our (Big Five) questions open mindedly, we would see that the questions were asking for a data point, but they were not asking about how that data point came about. A simple algorithm looking at correlations between these questions similarly would find it impossible to figure out whether you are predominantly an extroverted thinker (someone who thinks by imagining other people’s thoughts about thing) or an introverted thinker (someone who thinks by coming up with their own thoughts based on their own understanding of the world). It’s just that “I like to go on walks” and the other similar kinds of questions we were asking don’t convey any information about that. Similarly, even if we make a test that asks, “If I ask you what you think about something, will you respond with what you think other people’s thought about this are or will you respond with your own thoughts about it?”, that question requires a lot of introspection (more than most people will naturally be able to conjure up in a moment) to be able to properly answer and most people will tend towards seeing through that same lens of what do other people think or what do I think, conditional on, you guessed it, their cognition.[1]

So, how can we improve on the Big Five? What if we instead make a system that attempts to answer those questions, ones like “If I am asked what I think about something, will I respond with what I think other people’s thought about this are or will I respond with what my own thoughts about it are?” Strangely enough, there’s a system that, with some modifications, we can adapt to answer these questions, and it’s called the MBTI. I know, the same one we improved upon with the Big Five can be modified to be even better than the Big Five. Through a bunch of rather confusing rules which are unimportant for this post, the MBTI types can be divided into cognitive functions. Anyway, for the purposes of this post, I’ll just name them by listing their cognitive functions. So, for example, for our question about whether people naturally think in terms of what other people think about something or think in terms of how they think about things, we would have that be the extroverted thinking vs the introverted thinking cognitive function (or Te/​Ti for short). Anyway, the same thing goes for the other cognitive functions: introverted feeling, extroverted feeling, introverted intuition, extroverted intuition, introverted sensing and extroverted sensing, in a similar way. So, for example, a person could be Te-Ni-Se-Fi-Ti-Ne-Si-Fe.[2] So, you can see that I still have introverted thinking but it is much less than a Ti-Ne-Si-Fe-Te-Ni-Se-Fi. There are certain patterns as well, for example, thinking and feeling are opposites, as are sensing and intuiting, so with Te at the beginning, you get Fi at the fourth place. Same with Se (second place) and Ni (third place). Then, at the fifth place, you start with inversing extroverted/​thinking the first four functions. CS Joseph theorizes that the cognitive functions are something like 100 rpm − 75 rpm − 50 rpm − 25 rpm − 20 rpm − 15 rpm − 10 rpm − 5 rpm.[3]

Anyway, this post is just summary of why the MBTI is an evolution on top of the Big Five. Basically, the answer is because the Big Five can answer what you think (eg. Do I think I’m neurotic, etc.?) but it can’t answer why you think that. Based on that information, the MBTI can answer a lot of valuable questions that Big-Five-type tests can’t answer like how could I improve on the way I already think—the Big Five can only answer what you already think which is harder to use. That said, I can see the Big Five is valuable for some application—I’m not saying we need to stop using it. I’m just saying that if we’re looking to determine the true nature of cognition, these MBTI-adjacent theories are probably our best bet.

Unfortuantely, I haven’t yet seen a scientific exploration of all the things posited in these MBTI-adjacent theories but I think it is pretty clear that the field of psychology needs to start taking this seriously, looking into the nature of cognition, not just looking at what people answer to simple questions on tests because of the flaws of that method. There are a lot more to these theories than I have covered in this post. Some good resources to learn more about these theories are CS Joseph’s YouTube channel and alittlebitofpersonality.com.

  1. ^

    This massive amount of effort needed to properly introspect means quality > quantity in the case of exploring your own cognition. For example, the Udja test only asks four questions which is probably more accurate than asking a hundred question tests which just encourage you to try to get through the questions quickly.

  2. ^

    This is my type.

  3. ^