The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, is the most popular personality test in the world – more than 2 million people take it every year. Yet the two women who developed the test were not psychologists, and most of the assumptions were based on Jung’s untested findings from 1920. Are personality tests outdated? And why do we put so much faith in them?
Perhaps you were bored at work and killed some time doing a BuzzFeed quiz. (Okay, seven BuzzFeed quizzes: once you know which Game of Thrones character you are, it’s hard not to wonder in which city you should live based on your taste in cheese.) Maybe you signed up for career counselling. Or perhaps it was part of a mandatory office workshop – some jobs require you to take a psychometric test as part of the interviewing process. Odds are at some point in your life you have taken a personality test.
