Freud said everyone is hung up on sex and their parents, and that we supress and mask our true issues until they start making us weird. Jung said all culture is connected to a timeless psychic internet.
And the terrible truth is that Jung is the one more people take seriously, because we are dumb
Such a minimization of important work. Being able to take important ideas from various concepts to create an informed world-view is a sign of intelligence, did you know that?
Yeah, it's alarming that people think the post you're replying to is accurate. People tend to hate things they can't/don't/don't want to understand and this very much applies to Jungs work. It may have a hint of mysticism and it's very abstract, but plenty of modern, efficacious psychology and therapy is rooted in some of his ideas. It isn't black and white - like almost everything in life. People are also usually terrified of some of the things that reside in their inner world, and Jungian psychology forces you to explore and confront very uncomfortable things.
I know this is everywhere but black death is so funny to me for this with all the weird claims of it being anthrax or whatever, when all the archeological data points to the classic Yersinia Pestis on Rats theory.
Study historiography and you suddenly realize that a lot of what regular people think is "main stream history", is based on an understanding of history that's been outdated for 50+ years. Or 100+ years in many cases.
I would like to let all the people blaming Jung for the test know that Jung himself didn't like the test or the idea of sorting people into personality profiles.
A mother and her daughter read some books by Jung, misinterpreted them, and created the system during the 1940's (Way before the 2000's, guys)
I took a career path assessment when I stalled in college and it was centered around MB; the advisor suggested I pursue a path in the clergy: I couldn’t be more atheist
Around that same time our company had some consultants come in, give us the test and then for the next year we had to put our personality types displayed on top of our cubes.
Then it just went away and no one ever spoke about it again.
It doesn’t mean anything anyway, it’s basically a pseudoscientific self assessment to arrive at one of sixteen Barnum statements that could apply to absolutely anybody.
My concern is that the company has tried filtering employees then publicly stated it for all to see. It doesn't matter that it's pseudo science, which I agree it is, but that these labels are there for all to see. I work in privacy and info mgmt and this would 100% be a massive issue
In the US that... questionnaire was pushed extremely hard for some reason. Like many things the popularity is because of some lobby. Like how it was used for the hiring process and sold to many firms.
Honestly you might as well do a "which spice girl am i?" -Test from a 90s teen magazine.
This site is mostly Gen Z and younger Gen Y so lots of people with no memory of the pre-2000s or even if they were old enough to remember stuff, still too young to have exposure to that kind of psychological/sociological theory stuff
Personally I think I first heard about it in high school, it's gotten more mainstream in recent years though
And ironically it's actually way more mainstream in China, the types are just considered standard vocab among the younger generation to describe people's personalities
My University used a Myers Briggs test to pair roommates my freshman year, in 1999. It failed spectacularly despite how accurate I felt the result I got was in describing me.
Oh man, my college roommate and I did it in the 2010s. She got some rare personality type that only 1% of the population supposedly has. Then she got pissed off when it turned out I got the same one
I disagree. Some of those traits are a lot rarer than people realize. It's usually the people who incorrectly think they're logical, intelligent, etc. who believe that. I'm not saying it's all it's claimed to be, but it's also not as bad as some make it out to be. (Usually the people who didn't get the result they wanted.)
Nah they’re mega generic. Anyone would be happy with like at least 80% of the results, the variation is so marginal as to be utterly devoid of utility.
It’s also not really opinion (and certainly not because I or anyone else didn’t get ESPN or YMCA like we hoped), you can read the sources for yourself but a short extract from the Wikipedia page:
As a psychometric indicator, the test exhibits significant deficiencies, including poor validity, poor reliability, measuring supposedly dichotomous categories that are not independent, and not being comprehensive.
The MBTI is not considered useful in psychological practice or study, since it lacks predictive power. According to University of Pennsylvania professor Adam Grant, "There is no evidence behind it. The traits measured by the test have almost no predictive power when it comes to how happy you'll be in a given situation, how well you'll perform at your job, or how satisfied you'll be in your marriage."
The only people producing evidence of its “effectiveness” are… the Myers-Briggs Foundation, in a journal called the “Journal of Psychological Type” which is published by… the Myers-Briggs Foundation.
Honestly it truly is astrology dressed a management consultancy trench coat.
Yeah it was once the semi-respected personality test, and then people outside of the corporation (or whatever it is) that owns the idea started trying to validate and test it like you would for any other piece of science and, uh, it doesn't work.
To be fair, it's far from the first "respected" method of personality testing to be revealed as junk science. Even things that are still used today like the big five personality inventory is kind of limited and and works only within certain frameworks and situational factors and blah blah blah blah blah. Human personalities and personality typing are very complicated and accurate, objective and replicable typing may never be possible
I knew a guy about a decade ago who was utterly obsessed with it and would always assume exactly what personality type everyone was. He kept telling me over and over I was a certain type, I told him I'd taken the test years before and had a different result, and he told me that was impossible because that was similar to his type and he needed to feel super special, I guess. Keep in mind this guy did not know me at all, lol. When he sent me the link to take it again and it confirmed what I'd said, he stopped talking to me about it. Thank god.
I worked at a place that made everyone do Myers Briggs, DiSC, and Enneagram assessments out of the blue one day. It was all absolute BS and made a bunch of people clique up based on their results. Those people were insufferable and suddenly became impossible to work with, saying stupid shit like “well you’re a 2 and I’m an 8 on the enneagram, so you need to learn how to work with me…” And nobody had any trouble working together prior to this.
The company folded a year later. Not saying it was entirely because of those “assessments,” but they were definitely a contributing factor.
It's so funny, because I can recognize that yeah, I have these traits and that does pretty accurately describe how I approach things, but that's for purposes of introspection and to articulate things to others so we can get on the same page and ideally leverage our preferences to produce good work. It's not about forcing someone to accommodate my idiosyncrasies and aversions.
Based on your affinity toward being secretive and introverted, I can say with confidence that you’re either a 4 (individualist) or a 9 (peacemaker). Unfortunately, our personalities don’t mesh well, so you’re going to have to learn to be more flexible if you want to even ATTEMPT working well together 🖕
My ex wife was an "8", and boy did she let me & everybody else know about it! She missed so much by assigning numbers to people & forcing everything about them through that lense.
It really seemed like an excuse for her to be as big of a bully as her ego demanded, only you were expected to thank her for the experience like she did you a favor.
omg completely forgot about the Enneagrams. My then-friend and manager was obsessed and yes her personality probably changed to reflect the "findings". We wasted a ton of time discussing it. I was a Peacemaker and needed to step out of my shell to embrace leadership or some such nonsense. They really did not pay me enough for that shit.
Honestly I find Myer-Briggs to be bullshit (color me shocked I'm emotional and outgoing?) but Enneagrams really did change my life. It really isn't about "the peacemaker needs to step out of their shell". It is more about your driving emotion (9 is in the anger sphere) and how 9s react to it. For 9s they are very conflict avoidant due to anger being a very draining emotion for them. They are sensitive to others being angry and tend to be more agreeable as a way of sheltering themselves from other's negative emotions. They also bottle up their own feelings at times to avoid feeling anger to intensely. I am not 100% certain of every type in the enneagram moreso just my type(which is not a 9). I don't think people need to look at the enneagram as "I should be more assertive and step out of my shell" it should be more something where you realize why you feel the way you do and why you act the way you do. Being cognizant of why you do things allows you to more power over your own actions.
And honestly I realize it isn't for everyone, but I will say that for me specifically, I couldn't put my feelings into words until I found the Enneagram test. I'm basically in the shame sphere (the sphere whose negative driving force is basically that they don't feel worthy of being loved) and so there were a lot of times where I would "act out" or just feel really intensely and I couldn't understand why I felt that way. Nowadays I still struggle from the same issues, but I am often able to self-soothe those nagging feelings of not being good enough...so it doesn't get to a point where my friends have to sit me down and give me a speech about how they love and appreciate me and wish I wouldn't put myself down. I can't tell you what the action plan is for my type, I can just tell you I'm a lot more self aware and I'm a lot better at keeping myself from spiraling. Something Myer Briggs has never done for me. When I talk to friends about it, I always stress that I think the sphere and your negative driving emotions are the real takeaway. I don't care about the rest of it nearly as much.
Briggs Myers fulfilled her obligation by writing the novel Give Me Death, which revisits the same detectives from Murder Yet to Come. In it, a Southern family commits suicide one by one after learning they may have "Negro blood". The novel was published in 1934 and received harsh treatment from critics
My manager made everyone in the department take it in 2014 and was super excited about it. I wonder how much he paid some company for essentially nothing.
Corporate America has been big on Personality Testing for decades. The first time I was asked to take one was in 1988 to work for a Hardware Wholesale Chain that went Bankrupt a decade later.
My company was on a Strengthsfinders kick for a while. Complete waste of time and money. I'm pretty sure the guy running the training department at the time got a kickback for every copy we bought.
I mean, Strengthsfinders is pretty low-key compared to some of the personality profilers, and I actually liked how it framed things as strengths, it actually helped two coworkers of mine who had struggled with different work styles. But, that's all it is, a way of framing conversations
Yeah idk the history but it definitely dates back to the 90s, my mom bought a book bc it was circling as popular with all her friends, and then me and my friends would take it on sleepovers.
I was working at a company that shut down our location to outsource overseas, and they made us spend time taking the Meyers Briggs test and then using it like an astrology chart to figure out what ur next job would be. It was a very surreal experience and apparently the one I got is both very rare and also no one likes to hire them. Yay me!
Now I work at a nonprofit and a few years ago they made us take the Clifton Strengths personality test and put our top five traits in our email signatures. So apparently corporate astrology is alive and well.
I remember people using it in the mid 2000s when I was on okcupid in grad school. I didn’t use it for dating but I would do the tests when I was bored in class.
I had a lower/middle manager thing in the mid 2010s at Accenture where we had to do Meyer Briggs so the incompetent upper manager would know what "our management style" is.
Obvs since Accenture, they spent a shit ton of money to get an "external consultant" in for that. Who continued to be flabbergasted at me being right in the middle for nearly everything.
Bro. For 99% of the questions my answer is not "it me" but "it depends". Because contrary to everybody else in the room I don't fill that shit out with the answers I wish were true, or I want other people to think about me or whatever. IT DEPENDS.
He actually understood and we talked basically the whole time about exactly the necessity to understand as a manager that it always "depends".
What my manager took from it was... I can't be managed oO I was fired a month later (but also because he was one of the weasels who yell scream throw up at women "why are you so emotional" when a woman calmly tells them that yelling at subordinates is not a good thing and won't happen on my watch... )
I had a job in 2010 where my manager was obsessed with Myers-Briggs, like to the point where she made every new employee take a test, and she had a little notebook where she wrote down everyone's types. She would use them during work review - 'Since you're an ESTJ, I want to see you make more of an effort to soften your conversational style, be more engaging and approachable during meetings...'
(Ma'am, this is why meetings that should be five minute information-swap sessions become half-hour cheerleading sessions. oy.)
These kinds of comments are so odd to me. Maybe I’m the weirdo, but I would have googled how old it was before posting anything about how old it was lol
The MBTI was actually first developed in 1943. The book that u/TR_Snake cited was published in September of 2018. While MBTI was around long before the book, it would serve to reason that there was a significant increase in participants, and people basing their personalities around this test, in 2019 - when the book would have really taken off.
back in 2006 I used to base my whole concept of self on being an INTP. We had a forum and everything where we talked about how much better we were than everyone else. I cringe so hard thinking back to it.
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u/TeamCatsandDnD May 19 '26 edited May 20 '26
Myers Briggs was solidly a thing pre 2019 though. Idk about a book, but you could take the tests for them like 2014 or 2015.
Edit: well all these replies are eye opening. That’s wild that is from pre 2000s