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| The Meyer-Briggs inventory may not be a valid psychometric test. The seeming accuracy of the results might be based on flattery and the Barnum effect, but the type descriptions provide recognizable archetypes. They can be helpful tools a fiction author can deploy in character development. As such, they are useful. |
Last night, we hosted some friends for dinner and a movie. The âmovieâ we watched was an episode of Seth MacFarlaneâs tribute to Star Trek, The Orville. In the episode, we saw one of the characters, Isaac, standing apart and alone in a room crowded with other members of the shipâs crew, all of whom were socializing and generally having a good time. When questioned, Isaac said he was âgathering dataâ on how biological life forms interact. You see, Isaacâs a Kaylon, a robotic race that regards biological types as inferior. His stilted dialogue sounds rather like it might have been written by an early version of ChatGPG. Heâs given to answering simple metaphorical questions like, âWhatâs up,â with a detailed lecture on orbital mechanics. Thatâs amusing in its own way, but itâs not what made this scene interesting to me as an author.
My initial reaction was that Isaacâs character was an INTJ. When I said so, one of our guests gave me a blank look, which opened an opportunity for me to expound on the definition of INTJ and personality types in general. She told me I sounded just like Isaac. Thatâs not surprising since Iâm an INTJ, too. Or at least, thatâs how I usually test.
Like our guest, you may be wondering âwhatâs an INTJ.â Isaac wouldnât care what youâre wondering--or not wondering. In fact, it wouldnât even occur to him. Heâd just launch into a Wikipedia-like lecture on the topic of the Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator. Iâve already told you Iâm like Isaac in many waysâalthough I admit heâs better lookingâso it shouldnât surprise you that Iâm about to do exactly what heâd do.
The saga begins with Karl Jungâs 1921 book Psychological Types. Later, during the second world war, Jungâs ideas inspired two Americans, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, to design a personality inventory that assigns a binary value to each of four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. The test scores result in awarding one letter from each category to produce a four-letter test result, giving sixteen overall âtypes.â
In Isaacâs case (mine, too), the test would say heâs âintroverted, iNtuitive, thinking, and judging.â This is the rarest type, and advocates of the test sometimes describe this group as âarchitects,â who are âthoughtful tacticians [who] love perfecting the details of life, applying creativity and rationality to everything they do.â If youâre put off by the âjudgingâ part of the type, that description kind of softens it. Anyway, they go on to assert things like, âtheir inner world is often a private, complex one.â
As psychometric tests go, this one is, to be honest, pretty much a bunch of hooey. It has significant deficiencies, including poor validity and poor reliability. The traits it supposedly measures are not well-defined, not âeither/orâ traits, and are not independent. The supposed accuracy derives in part from the various type descriptions (see above for an example), which are both vague enough to apply to almost anyone and written to appeal to the vanity of the test-takerâsee how âthoughtful tactitionâ replaces âjudgingâ in the INTJ description.
Still, the Meyer-Briggs inventory is popular enough that many people have at least heard of it. Indeed, I suspect that the screenwriters had the INTJ type at least in part in mind when they crafted the character Isaacâalthough Spock and Data are also clearly progenitors. Iâve sometimes used one of the sixteen type descriptions to help summarize characters during the spit-balling, planning phases of a novel. If youâre interested in learning your âtype,â you can take the test on the website 16Personalities . The site also has descriptions of all sixteen types.
In the scientific parts of my headâthe âjudgingâ part in Meyer-Briggs jargonâI know that the tests arenât valid. But, let me tell you a story.
In another life I was an academic administrator. All of my training up that point had been as a mathematician, and I quickly learned that my skill at proving theorems didnât seem to translate to dealing with people. Go figure. Anyway, I was self-aware enough that when I saw a conference that included âhoning your people skills,â I jumped at the opportunity.
The conference attendees all had to take the Meyer-Briggs inventory prior to attending. That made me roll my eyes, but Iâd already paid for the conference, so I took the test. On arrival, the first thing they did was seat all the attendees by personality type. That meant that I was at a table off in one corner of a vast banquet hall with the other five INTJ types. Meantime, the other four hundred or so conference attendees were distributed at the other tables-of-six. The first thing they did was give us a task to perform with the others at our table. We were given thirty minutes to do the task, which included being prepared to report back to the larger group on whatâd weâd done.
I donât recall exactly what the task was, but I do recall it was a simple one. In fact, my group finished it with twenty minutes to spare, including summarizing our results and selecting one of our number to give the report if asked. We spent the rest of the time watching the other groups.
I now realize that a more normal thing to have done would have been to take the opportunity to have a conversation. You know, to get to know each other. But rememberâthis was a table of Isaacs, Spocks, and Datas. What would they do? Probably exactly what we did: sit back and observe our environment. Like all scientists, we took this as an opportunity to gather data through passive observation. We were also all introverted, making that conversational step downright painful and something to avoid.
About half the people at the conference were in student affairs. Most of them turned out to have the ESFP type. They spent the entire allotted time going around their respective tables introducing themselves to each other. They never even got to the task.
I admit, I found that pretty revealing. I still do. The conference organizers pointed out that each personality type responds best to different rewards. The ESFPs respond to praise and getting more opportunities to be social. The INTJs respond to getting more work, i.e., more stuff to analyze. In both cases, that translates to more work of the sort they enjoy. In any case, the whole experience made me think that there might be something to the Meyer-Briggs inventory after all.
I mentioned above that I âusuallyâ test as an INTJ. In fact, though, my test results hover on the boundary of most of the traits. Sometimes, when I was still a professor, I was tasked with teaching statistics to human relations students--a bunch of touchy-feely ESFPs. While I was engaging with them, my test results tended to slip into they INFP type, mirroring their proclivities. I havenât taken the inventory in years, but Iâm guessing Iâd still be mostly INTJ given the way that I tend to approach writing. But I bet Iâm also still close to flipping to the human relations type. It might even depend on the character Iâm thinking about.
The Meyer-Briggs inventory may not be a valid psychometric test. The seeming accuracy of the results might be based on flattery and the Barnum effect, but the type descriptions provide recognizable archetypes. They can be helpful tools a fiction author can deploy in character development. As such, they are useful.
By the end of Orville episode, Isaac eventually learned to interact in a more genuine, human way, showing that even for robots the categories arenât rigid. The observant reader will note that I have resisted my natural, INTJ-like tendency to launch into a sidebar on the Barnum effect, so maybe, like Isaac, Iâve learned how behave against type and act in a more genuine, human way, too.
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For Authors: May 07, 2025 Issue [#13119]
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