Personality Tests

I discovered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator the same way that I discovered my mom’s old word processor, the key tenants of Marxism, and the first story I ever wrote: by digging through family crap in the basement. Flipping over a few pages of the slim, yellowing volume about the personality test convinced me that I wouldn’t understand it; it used advanced words like “cognitive” and “psychological” and had some esoteric lettering system that I could only assume was derived from complex math. Still, it gave me a vague idea what we were doing one day years later in high school, when the counselors announced we’d be taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. (Aside from the familiarity, I was relieved that at least it wasn’t another job predictor: the last one had given me the supremely useless result “philanthropist”). 

The MBTI text ended up being a lot simpler than I’d thought: a couple questions on your work habits and friend groups, and then it spat out an indecipherable four-letter code (INFP) and a summary explaining how each letter corresponded to an aspect of my identity and what they all meant put together. I’ve read some descriptions of people getting their MBTI scores that treat it with transcendent awe, like something on par with finding God or finally meeting a lost identical twin. I’ve always scoffed at those, but more than anything out of latent humiliation, because that’s what it felt like for me. It described parts of me that I’d always felt but had never articulated: deeply caring for people while feeling most natural on my own and getting high on blasts of creative energy that seem to ignite spontaneously. There was something a little unsettling about a computer program knowing more about me than I knew about myself, but that was to be expected, of course. We INFPs are inherently suspicious of institutions and authority of all sorts.

For about a year after that, I was hooked. Every time I finished a book or movie, I’d look up internet speculations about the characters’ types, always noticing that I found a unique empathy with anyone who had an INFP label. After cycling through just about every piece of fiction I’d ever consumed, I moved onto more niche MBTI communities: animals sorted by MBTI, nations sorted by MBTI, mythical creatures, deities, foods, and so on and so on. I think I bottomed out what I looked up tyrants sorted by MBTI (apparently I’m a Chairman Mao-type). Though the test was meant to be social and focused on human diversity, my perseveration on it isolated me more than anything, since I never talked to anyone about it, and I wasn’t interested in any type but my own. 

My disillusion with the test started in high school psychology class, where we tallied up everyone’s MBTI scores and found out that a quarter were INFP, and another half were the nearly-identical ENFP. Suddenly the archetype that I thought made me unique also encompassed a full seventy-five percent of the class. Then in college my psychology professors regularly used it to point out the dangers of pseudoscience while my humanities professors claimed that it was a way for the educational-industrial complex to exploit us human resources in the capitalist machine (a problem that hadn’t occurred to me at first because INFPs are by far the least employable type). A couple days ago I looked at the old MBTI message boards I used to hang out on. It was fun for a few minutes, until I stumbled upon a post by pugnacious ISTJ who referred to the personality theory as “the Truth” (always capitalized) and demeaned anyone who questioned it. This isn’t to disparage the MBTI community in general, but it was more than a little disheartening to realize that, a couple years ago, I could have heard someone reducing the entirety of human variability to sixteen personalities called Truth and nodded right along.

But, even if I’d never taken the test in high school or unearthed the book in our basement archives, I still would’ve known exactly what it felt like to get that INFP score. It’s how I felt choosing Grinnell. It’s how I felt declaring an English major. It’s how I felt at a Beto O’Rourke rally last week, when for a moment I forgot the issues and the speech and just sunned myself in the happiness of being in a room of people who all agreed with me for once. For as much as our society is supposed to be radically individualistic, we’re real suckers for certain types of conformity, and I’ve fallen into that trap more times than I can count. But it always is a trap, or at the very least a lie. Certain well-spoken Grinnell students pointed out major flaws, or at least points of doubt, in O’Rourke’s stance. Walk into any English class discussion, and you’ll see that we’re hardly an interchangeable mass. As for thinking that Grinnell is a community you can lose yourself in, a glance at the Facebook group Grinnell Thumbs Down will shatter that quick. Sorting people like that is fun, and sometimes useful. Student-teaching at Grinnell high school, I saw a teacher use the test to form student work-groups, so he wouldn’t end up with a bunch of alpha personalities all jockeying for leadership. All the same, I think that it’s always important to remember than the truth, the real truth, is much more complicated.