At Boo, our algorithms are driven primarily by personality frameworks. We use these archetypes to help you understand yourselves and each other—your values, strengths and weaknesses, and ways of perceiving the world.

However, these personality types are often criticized, mostly for the wrong reasons, and we wanted to write this article to debunk the myths and address the critics who claim that they are useless.

We are not affiliated in any way with the creators of the framework or the company that licenses it. Instead, we’re people like you, who have found it extremely accurate and useful, and believe everyone should be using it.

What is the 16 personalities framework?

The 16 personalities framework is one that categorizes all people into 16 personality types. It provides a theory for how personality is derived as a function of how we perceive the world differently.

The MBTI® is often criticized as unscientific. Some people say it is not reliable or scientific but the Big Five, used more broadly in academia, is (it also depends on the test, there are 2000+ tests out there). However, in practice, the general 16 personalities framework, like the Big Five, is a measure of personality traits. The categories they test for are also highly correlated. But the 16 personalities framework goes further than the Big Five to provide a theory that explains personality traits as a function of how we use our brains and perceive the world differently, whereas the Big Five remains just an uninspiring percent score without an explanation of why.

But despite its wide use, personality types are still considered a highly controversial topic. Here are the myths and arguments commonly cited against it.

1. Not consistent over time

Some people say because they get different results each time they take the test, the test is not consistent, and thus invalid. There are a couple of points to this.

First, it really depends on the test. There are over 2000 similar tests on the internet. And there’s a high degree of variability depending on which test you take and how well designed it was.

Second, critics are making the assumption that personality isn’t malleable. David J. Pittenger, an often quoted critic, asserts that one’s personality type isn’t supposed to change, quoting Tieger and Barron-Tieger, consultants who don’t have authority over the definition.

Generally, for a lot of people, they’re probably not wrong. Many parents may agree that their children possessed the same soul, sharing the same personality, set of behaviors, and preferences for how they perceive the world when they were 4 to when they were 50. But to discredit the test based off what some consultant and self help author said is just poor research and convenient cherry picking.

And this is not a consensus view. Many people do believe that your personality can and does change. Even Carl Jung, whose ideas on which the 16 personalities frameowrk was based, says he believes that personality can change and develop over time. But what the framework does is describe you, your ways of thinking, values, and how you perceive the world, at that certain moment in time.

Third, even if results are different a second time, it’s usually only by one letter. And it’s typically extroversion/Introversion or Judging/Perceiving, two of the most influenceable spectrums by cultural and societal expectations and immediate changes in behavior. This means the test result was wrong and not their true type and preference, but one they adopt for work or society. For an example, an Introvert who tests extrovert after adjusting to being more social for work, or someone typically disorganized (Perceiving) becoming more organized (Judging) as a result of changes in expectation of responsibility.

Fourth, even with critics like Adam Grant, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, the primary argument against the 16 personalities framework is largely centered around the specific questions and testing methodology, not the meaningfulness of the segments of personalities in the system.

But to do so completely misses the point.

The true beauty of the framework is not in what questions it asks to get the right assessment of your type, which is expectedly subject to error, but it’s how it categorizes and segments personalities into meaningful, descriptive, complex, and accurate segments. These personality types are loved and defined not by a testing methodology, but for its framework.

Even Adam Grant agrees at least that research has shown different types do gravitate toward certain fields and areas of interest.

Personality is something we can’t see and measure physically. The way personality psychologists have always done it is by asking people questions about themselves, which is subject to a lot of errors, like misunderstanding of the question, misunderstanding of themselves, poorly worded questions, biases, and many more.

We’re seeing developments that could improve accuracy of testing methodology, like using facial recognition technology to analyze personality based on facial muscle expressions, and developments in neuroscience that are correlating various dimensions of the Big Five to specific regions of the brain. But for now, asking people to take a personality quiz is one of the best ways we have, and it’s also the method the Big Five uses.

Another criticism is that the four spectrums in the framework aren’t independent factors. In other words, there is a correlation between the segments that are tested: extroversion/introversion, intuition/sensing, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving, etc.

They argue that a good framework shouldn’t see correlation between each of the tested factors.

However, this is making an assumption that the mechanics behind the human mind and factors driving personality are non-correlating.

It’s a bold assertion to make, one that’s currently unverifiable, and likely untrue.

3. Results aren’t normally distributed

Daniel Pittenger also said that personality traits should be bi-modally distributed and not normally distributed because there is “no middle ground”.

This might have been the case 50 years ago when the MBTI® first came out and people were in fact separated just into types.

But most modern interpretations and applications of the 16 personalities framework, even by its official licensors, provide personality type results along with how they score on a spectrum.

Even the evidence Daniel Pittenger cites are decades years old, before the advent of the Internet and personality types’ popularity in our modern-day. Yet people are still citing sources that describe a system that no longer exists in today’s form.

4. The theory was created out of someone’s ideas rather than clinical data

Some critics argue that the concept was developed based off of someone’s imagination and ideas, rather than deduced out of clinical data.

To say so is ignorant of the origins of most of the contributions in science and how science actually works. A discovery often starts with a hypothesis, an idea, and is then validated and tested through experiments.

It’s how we got Einstein’s theory of relativity, Newton’s theory of gravity, as well as many major breakthroughs that were “created in someone’s mind".

In addition, to say the framework didn’t evolve from actual data is ignorant of its origin and simply untrue.

The framework was created off the foundational ideas of Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist considered the founder of analytical psychology, who had in his lifetime studied the psychology and personality of countless individuals and had made many groundbreaking contributions to the field.

Secondly, Isabel Myers and Katherine Briggs, the creators of the framework, also used their own experiences and studies with people to validate the meaningfulness of their categorization. They were also highly educated people rather than just “a mother and daughter” which critics like to conveniently label them as. To say it was just “made up” without any evidence is misleading.

5. Created by people with no formal training in psychology

The reality is you don’t need to be a formal expert to make a contribution to science. Many of science’s best developments came from people who were extremely passionate about something to learn and research more about it and created or discovered something new.

Not because they had a degree in it and took a couple of classes in college. Or studied with or under the direction of an “expert.”

You have people like Elon Musk building the first rocket company and inventing better ways to launch without any prior knowledge of rocket science.

Or the engineers in tech who just read the latest research papers and apply and expand on leading algorithms without ever getting a formal degree, i.e., the official piece of paper that says they learned what they did.

The examples are endless. It’s an arbitrary limitation that is overvalued and completely unnecessary to contributing meaningfully to a field.

And experts can be, and are often, wrong.

6. People are put into binary stereotypes with no spectrum or middle ground

One of the 16 personalities framework’s biggest criticisms is that it perpetuates stereotypes about people without offering any middle ground.

This simply isn’t true. Most modern tests that use these personality types actually test based on a spectrum. Meaning you get a score that indicates a % score of how extroverted/Introverted, etc., you are, in addition to your overall result. Examples include even the official MBTI® test, 16 Personalities, Truity, and ours.

Personality type is a measure of preference, meaning everyone has a little of everything (Who’s not logical? Who doesn’t feel?), but prefers one way over the other. It’s also a relative measure, meaning everyone can more or less agree with a description, but your personality test result descriptions tend to be more true for yourself than others of different types.

The reality, of course, is that many people with the same type can be and are meaningfully different, as should be expected. Personality types are caricatures at extremes; people actually fall on varying spectrums across each dimension. But they are nonetheless helpful in painting a relatively accurate picture of who you are.

Critics also mention that people are more unique than what their type suggests. I don’t disagree that people within the same type are meaningfully different. But descriptions are typically relatively true, and its usefulness can’t be discounted just because it doesn’t capture every single thing about someone. It’s still arguably the most accurate and comprehensive explanatory framework we have.

7. The Barnum Effect: “One reason is that the flattering, vague descriptions for many of the types have huge amounts of overlap — so many people could fit into several of them.”

This also isn’t true. Most modern sites like 16 Personalities and Truity, and ours, give a rather specific and accurate portrayal of who we are, including both strengths and weaknesses.

The weaknesses of a personality type is also the frequent point of topic for any discussion within personality type communities on Reddit, Facebook, and any other online mediums among enthusiasts, even more discussed than their strengths.

The millions who do believe in the framework are advocates not because they feel complimented, but because they feel well understood and explained, warts and all.

To suggest that people are fans of 16 personality types just because they feel flattered by its descriptions is simply not true.

Just ask the INTPs or INTJs constantly memed as the warmest robots and coldest humans, or the gossipy ESFJ, the always crying INFP, or the ESTP Chads. It’s often far from flattery, but they are popular because they resonate with a chilling degree of accuracy.

8. Everyone’s descriptions are flattering, all personality types equally great

The framework does not say all personality types are equally great, but that each type has its own unique set of strengths and weaknesses. What constitutes the best personality is something no one is really qualified to assert.

There will invariably be things that other types of people are better at than other individuals, and the descriptions accurately reflect this.

On the other hand, the Big Five framework makes the assertion that there is one personality type that is better than all the rest. That would be someone high in extroversion, Agreeableness, Openness, Conscientiousness, and low in Neuroticism.

In the framework, this would translate to an ENFJ-A personality type. Although there are many redeeming qualities to an ENFJ, the 16 personalities system reflects the reality that every type has its weaknesses, including an ENFJ.

For example, an ENFJ can be charismatic, altruistic, and generally more accepting of others. But at their worst, they can be smothering, overprotective, controlling, needy, manipulative, passive-aggressive, lazy, over-emotional, and critical of perspectives that don't match their own.

But the Big Five doesn’t tell you that, does it? Instead, it insinuates to those that score high in those areas that they’ve already achieved the best kind of personality they could. For a framework like Big Five to suggest that there is a best kind of personality type is simply ignorant and arrogant.

The Big Five also neglects to point out all of the strengths and abilities of people supposedly opposite that of the “ideal personality”, like detail orientation, open-mindedness, listening ability, humility, the ability to remove emotional influences from rational decision making, and many more.

A significant proportion of personality researchers, and personality enthusiasts in general, are ENFJ types, like this Professor. It’s like one big circle jerk where researchers effectively compliment themselves and their own personalities.

9. No major psychologists working on it and no major research published

Some critics make the 16 personality types system sound as much of a stigma as admitting to being a flat-earther.

The world of academic research has unique rules that make it impractical for the real world.

Science is about building upon what we know to be verifiably true and rejecting the unproven as a basis for further development.

The problem is the Myers Briggs system, like a lot of personality psychology theories, isn’t falsifiable, so therefore isn’t considered scientific truth. That being said, scientific truth is not the only truth, it is just the truth that can be known via the scientific method.

Like modern interpretations of the personality types, the Big Five asks you questions about your behavior and gives you a percentage score across different dimensions of personality. But that’s about where it ends, because any further assertion or theory about how it works, like the 16 personalities framework provides, can’t be falsifiable or proven with today’s technology.

The Big Five introduced the concept of Neuroticism to personality frameworks, but it has since been adopted pretty widely within the typology community, with modern test sites incorporating it as its 5th dimension - Assertive(A)/Turbulent(T).

One of the arguments people raise is that the 16 personalities don’t incorporate the Neuroticism aspect of personality that had later been demonstrated as a meaningful segment through factor analysis. That’s why it’s important not to compare the original framework from 50 years ago, but what most people use today.

The Big Five also contributed to the field by creating an established set of personality traits free from any unproven assumptions about how it worked, becoming an open-source test on which any further scientific research on personality can be reliably based and built upon.

That is why the Big Five is preferred in academic research. It makes no assumptions and tells you back what you told the test, that you’re a 67% extrovert, 32% Open, 55% Agreeable, 45% Conscientious, and 22% Neurotic.

There’s nothing to falsify about it because it’s practically just a self-reported measurement with no theory. It’s not wrong, but it’s uninspiring, to say the least.

On the other hand, what the 16 personality types and the consequent cognitive functions theory can tell you is not only who you report yourself to be, but why, and how. Why are you the way you are? What are the values and ways of thinking that drive many of your behaviors and decision making? What are you like when you’re frustrated? When you’re happy? When you’re angry? When you’re letting loose and having fun? What is your style of parenthood, friendship, or love? How likely are you to like horror movies or buy Jordan’s? How likely are you to cheat?

This would all still be irrelevant and BS, only if it weren’t so incredibly true.

The reality is you could also correlate these behaviors with Big Five scores, which personality psychology researchers are currently doing, but nobody cares. Not because nobody is marketing it, as critics love to claim (Adam Grant, you literally just quoted Daniel Pittenger’s point about this without realizing that this was published 30 years ago in a time before the Internet—things were different back then), but because we already know all of this through the 16 personality types framework, and most of all, we can understand to a reasonable extent why.

The vast majority of people did not discover, love, and advocate for these personalities because of a paid promotion by the geezers in suits that license it and sell it to HR departments. It spread by word of mouth due to the conviction of those who have validated the accuracy of its explanations across many aspects of their lives.

If you understand anything at all about marketing, you’ll know that marketing alone doesn’t create stickiness of a product. It just introduces people to it. What creates decades of lasting relevance is creating something that actually provides value.

“Thousands of MBTI practitioners who paid to be certified” just isn’t a good enough explanation for the millions of people who swear by it. That’s not how I was introduced, and neither was it the way for most. Nice try, though.

Either the boomers in the HR consulting business are elite marketers, or more likely, and what most modern-day typology enthusiasts agree with, it just works.

For those who haven’t looked into this, it can seem like quite a tall order. But assume it’s true for a second, wouldn’t you be excited? There is a community of hundreds of thousands of active typology enthusiasts, and millions of people who have taken the tests, who love typology because they recognize the framework to be accurate with themselves, their friends, family, and the patterns they find in life. It’s not a theory they blindly adopted and recognized as truth; it’s one they’ve seen consistently proven true in their lives.

Why the Big Five isn’t what it’s propped up to be

Don’t get me wrong, the Big Five is a great move toward a better understanding of our personality, but it’s also based on shaky assumptions and often given more credit than it deserves.

One is that the Big Five is “scientific” because it derives its categorizations from a bottoms-up approach of the language lexicon, derived from a factor analysis of differing and related language around personality.

Words can by no means encapsulate everything there is to a personality, nor can it capture all of its nuances and complexity. The words we use to describe ourselves should not be determined as either comprehensive or meaningful segmentations that are mutually exclusive or non-correlating. And this is precisely what Big Five Proponents have criticized about personality types.

It’s like determining the number of modern-day human species by observing hair colors, wrinkles, height, weight, etc. With the Big Five, you would do factor analysis and create categories that separate only based on observable traits, but completely ignore the genetics. It ignores variability and how the traits actually relate to one another.

You might even come to the conclusion that a brother and sister could be two different species based on their different facial features, height, and weight. In actuality, many of the observations are either meaningless or inter-related despite having trait differences, and this is why the Big Five isn’t all it’s propped up to be.

An example is the deluge of differences between an ESTP and an ENTP in the 16 personality type categorization. People who understand the framework would agree they are substantially different people and personalities, but they would likely score the same on the Big Five: high on extroversion and Openness, and low on Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.

In a 16 personality type test, they would score differently on the Intuition - Sensing scale, but on the Big Five, they would get pretty much the same score. The Big Five observes only the surface at a distance, while the 16 personality types identify and explain meaningful differences from the root cause.

The Big Five also validates the 16 personalities framework. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

If you actually look at the questions, they’re pretty much testing for similar things, despite having different names to the categories. “extroversion” is even labeled the same in both systems.

16 Personalities - extroversion/Introversion - Big Five - extroversion

16 Personalities - Intuition/Sensing - Big Five - Openness

16 Personalities - Feeling/Thinking - Big Five - Agreeableness

16 Personalities - Judging/Perceiving - Big Five - Conscientiousness

16 Personalities - Assertive/Turbulent - Big Five - Neuroticism (the typology community added on Neuroticism after the Big Five discovered this, so these are the same)

Here are the questions from both the Big Five and the 16 personality framework. As you can see, the questions are pretty much asking the same thing, which is why they are correlated.

• 16 Personalities: Extroversion/Introversion

“When in a group of people you do not know, you have no problem jumping right into their conversation.”

• Big Five: Extroversion

“Find it difficult to approach others.”

• 16 Personalities - Intuition/Sensing

“You often put special effort into interpreting the real meaning or the message of a song or a movie.”

• Big Five - Openness

“Look for a deeper meaning in things.”

• 16 Personalities - Feeling/Thinking

“You find it easy to empathize with a person who has gone through something you never have.”

• Big Five - Agreeableness

“Sympathize with others' feelings.”

• 16 Personalities - Judging/Perceiving

“You often make decisions on a whim.”

• Big Five - Conscientiousness

“Jump into things without thinking.”

Maybe someone might nitpick and try to say these are subtly different. But to the average quiz taker, it’s practically the same.

You can review all the questions from both systems, and you’ll likely find they’re practically not that very different. It almost feels like the Big Five ripped off the 16 personality framework to some extent and changed the labels. In fairness, the 16 personality type framework has also changed over the past decades to be more like the Big Five.

Academia is also subject to groupthink and misaligned incentives

It’s like nerd prison, where prison rules and culture dictate that you have to beat up what everyone else is beating up to assert your authority and yourself as higher intellectually, or be seen as weak by the rest of the inmates and forever picked upon.

Researchers are also people who have fears. Fears of losing the job they invested years in school studying to get, fears of being laughed at, and fears of being wrong in a social hierarchy defined by intelligence.

Obtaining tenure at major universities is also influenced by how many times their research is cited by other academics. If the assumptions underlying the personality type framework can’t be proven with today’s technology, publications also won’t be comfortable with publishing their research. If it supports an unpopular view, their work will also be cited less and can lead to missing out on promotions to other colleagues.

And why would they promote a tool that is copyrighted and exclusively licensed to one company, The Myers-Briggs Company? Professors and academics make a good living selling consulting work to corporations and institutions, effectively competing with the MBTI® with no ability to partake in monetizing their expertise.

And I don’t mean to cast doubt on Adam Grant’s intentions, because he does make some valid points, but it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t have a significant personal economic interest or isn’t simultaneously promoting himself among his core business audience on LinkedIn:

About

Recognized as Wharton's top-rated professor and one of the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers and Fortune's 40 under 40.

Author of three New York Times bestsellers that have sold over a million copies and been translated into 35 languages. ORIGINALS explores how individuals champion new ideas and leaders fight groupthink; it is a #1 bestseller praised by J.J. Abrams, Richard Branson, and Malcolm Gladwell. GIVE AND TAKE examines why helping others drives our success, and was named one of the best books of 2013 by Amazon, Apple, the Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal—as well as one of Oprah's riveting reads and Harvard Business Review's ideas that shaped management. OPTION B, with Sheryl Sandberg, is a #1 bestseller on facing adversity and building resilience.

TED talks on the surprising habits of original thinkers and the success of givers and takers have been named the best of 2016 and 2017 and racked up more than 10 million views in two years. Received a standing ovation at TED in 2016 and was voted the audience's favorite speaker in 2015 at The Nantucket Project. Host of WorkLife with Adam Grant, a TED original podcast. Speaking and consulting clients include Google and Facebook, the NBA, the Gates Foundation, and the U.S. Army and Navy. Profiled on the Today Show and in the New York Times magazine cover story, "Is giving the secret to getting ahead?" Contributing op-ed writer on work and psychology for the New York Times; articles on raising moral and creative children have each been shared over 300,000 times on social media.

For psychologists, and especially personality researchers, the MBTI® is taking away a good chunk of their biggest income source outside of their day jobs. And unfortunately, rarely is this conflict of interest disclosed.

Academics are disincentivized to research and promote the MBTI®, for valid reasons.

10. No empirical evidence

Critics like Adam Grant have said there is no “empirical evidence” to the 16 personalities. But this is often taken out of context.

What he really meant was that some studies have shown little or no correlation in how personality types are being applied to the results they’re trying to achieve with the tool. Like whether one person will do better in a job than another person just based on their type.

He’s not invalidating the framework as a meaningful segmentation and framework, only that it alone might not be enough to evaluate job performance and marriage satisfaction.

Our view is it really depends on how you use it. Even Adam Grant admits that the framework is a meaningful categorization that can predict a correlation between your type and areas of interest. To use it in screening job candidates would probably require more than just personality type. Factors like energy, enthusiasm, skillset, and attitude, are also very important elements, according to Jack Welch, one of the highest performing CEOs of this generation, that should probably be considered in junction with someone’s personality.

The research disassociating this relationship is also inconclusive. How would you define good job performance? Everyone will have their own angle and strengths brought to the table that it’s difficult to evaluate someone qualitatively. And most of the studies that have done this have just done it that way, through qualitative evaluations.

There are way too many variables that the studies aren’t accounting for, like the culture of the companies and what kind of behaviors are valued as good results; who the evaluating managers are, what they value, and how they think; and the specific roles and industries that require drastically different skillsets despite having the same titles, among countless other variables. Even those studies acknowledge that more research and “better research design” is needed in order to falsify any correlation between personality types and work performance.

Likewise, as many people in the typology community know, successful marriage depends not just on someone’s type, but whether they are “healthy” and well-balanced. There will be people within each type that you both like and dislike, and they will differ in emotional maturity and balance. Some may seem like they have leveraged their strengths while aware of and in control of their weaknesses, while others of the same type seem as bad as what they are portrayed as in the stereotypes and memes.

The studies often cited against the 16 personality types typically evaluate marriage satisfaction by qualitative ratings by existing couples. They don’t acknowledge how the couples studied already pre-selected for each other and how many relationships with other types of people did not even work out before being with their current partner.

Using the Myers Briggs is a highly valuable tool for the purposes mentioned above, but it comes with caveats and needs to be applied differently given different contexts. It also depends on the individuals.

Here’s actual evidence

But the most important thing is, is there actual evidence that the personality types and their segmentation are meaningful?

Most of this debate wouldn’t matter if you can be convinced that the personality types are actually a meaningful categorization of personality.

There is.

But it’s something best understood when you are familiar with all the types, and preferably have experience with each one.

• Chess: There’s a correlation between type and the most elite chess players spanning back to the 1800s.

• Marriage: There’s a correlation between types and who we decide to love and marry. It’s the reason why we started Boo, to help singles find their soulmates faster and more efficiently, and make the journey along the way much easier and enlightening. Ask your friends to take the test, ask your spouse, and ask your family. Odds are you’ll be surprised with how the patterns align with what we recommend on Boo. And even more surprised when you realize what you love about each other as well as your primary conflicts and points of tension can be predicted based on your types.

• Sports: Using our brains differently also entails being stimulated by different things. For some, it’s sports.

• Friendship: It also explains why LeBron James (ENFJ) seems to get along best with Dwayne Wade (ISFP) Anthony Davis (INFP), Chris Paul (ENTJ), Carmelo Anthony (ESFP), and Chris Bosh (INFP).

• Politics: There is a correlation between what your Myers Briggs type is and your political views and affiliation. It can also explain why certain world leaders naturally respect some more than others, like Donald Trump (ESTP) with Kim Jung Un (ESTJ), Boris Johnson (ENTP that’s close to ESTP), and his daughter Ivanka (ESTJ).

• Likelihood to Succeed in the Military: It’s been used by the U.S. Navy and other departments that have predicted the likelihood of churn.

• Financial Income: Lots of studies have been done on Myers Briggs types, the behaviors their personalities drive, and how that affects their financial success.

Even Adam Grant, professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, despite his criticisms, acknowledges that the 16 personality types framework can predict what fields certain personality types are likely drawn to.

Where criticism holds true

There are criticisms against the system, however, that is valid.

It’s not a system that’s perfect. It provides a highly useful general framework, but it doesn’t account for all the differences unique to each individual. It is still a far cry from the complex human behavioral algorithm we see in the HBO show, West World.

My guess is we will eventually need a further segmentation of the 16 types, as people within types can have different flavors.

And the actual framework that science will one day reveal may be a similar segmentation but structured entirely differently. And no, it’s not the Big Five. It might be the “Big 396.”

For those applying personality types to various industries, there will need to be a better framework for defining how amateur enthusiasts can use it in career and love.

Unfortunately, most critics don’t understand the system at all

But the sad reality is that most critics actually have no idea what they’re talking about.

The biggest problem with misunderstanding the personality type system is that most people don’t understand it well enough to make an educated conclusion. It’s hard to blame them— the personality types and all its evidence, theories, and frameworks are a lot to digest and require a lot of time, research, and experience to truly understand well.

The primary critics are ones that read one of the above points online in an article on the first page of Google, like this one from Vox, or even more common but more cringe, sources like this, and accept it as truth without actually looking into it themselves. It becomes a vicious cycle where nobody really knows what they’re talking about and the primary sources are a bunch of editorial commentators simply regurgitating other people’s talking points.

It’s human nature to doubt and reject ideas we don’t fully understand. Like coming to the conclusion that horoscopes, the concept that planetary alignment affects your personality, is absolute BS. It was a view I held until I realized I came to a quick conclusion about something I knew practically nothing about and didn’t put much effort into understanding.

Your personality type is correlated with how likely you are to love or reject the framework

How can there simultaneously be views that the 16 personality types are either the best things in the world or the most BS things to ever exist? And how can they both be equally convinced that they are each right? The answer is, everyone is wired to see things differently; it depends on who you talk to.

This, in my opinion, is the biggest reason why this remains highly controversial.

There are some types of personalities that weren’t hardwired to really care for or notice abstract concepts like personality. This tends to be whether or not you’re Intuitive or Sensing in the 16 personality types system. People with a sensing preference rely on that which can be perceived and are considered to be oriented toward that which is real, practical, traditional, and factual. People with an intuitive preference rely more on their nonobjective and unconscious perceptual processes, oriented towards possibilities, imagination, the abstract, and philosophy.

It’s like a bee and dog describing the world to each other, but one sees the world in ultraviolet while the other in grey.

And the evidence confirming this is overwhelming.

Despite over 50-60% of the human population being Sensors, regardless of country, the vast majority of personality enthusiasts are Intuitives.

If you look at the typology community population on Reddit, the ratio of Intuitives to Sensors is startling.

In my experience, as well as countless others that have pointed this out, with friends and acquaintances I test, it’s also always a Sensor, after testing, that would ask, do you really believe this? And usually always, with an Intuitive, that they would say this is really interesting. And if they were an Intuitive Feeler, they would be very interested.

How could a categorization be meaningless if it’s highly predictive of whether or not someone is likely to believe in something in the first place?

And in Big Five terms, academics would explain that some people are more “open” than others. Some require more evidence, facts, certainty, or institutional and societal support or backing for them to begin to start taking certain ideas seriously. Others are willing to accept the value of something relatively unproven and abstract concepts with what they feel like is enough evidence.

The beautiful thing about the framework is that it explains this quite well. Intuitives are people who perceive the world and pay attention to and are interested in the things we can’t see and don’t necessarily know for sure, like philosophy, abstract art, and personality.

It’s not to suggest Sensors are unintelligent, as the Big Five suggests by calling “Openness”, the factor that correlates with Intuition/Sensing, an indication of intelligence. But rather, Sensors are gifted in other areas, like detail orientation, practicality, living in and enjoying the present moment, fashion, objective analysis, and many more.

The result is Sensors, people with “S” in their personality type, just simply are less likely to pay attention to or care about personality as much as Intuitives do. They see a world and perceive it in a way that is entirely different than that of Intuitives, a detailed world of visuals, smells, touch, taste, and sound.

People were built to understand the world in different ways. It’s been a long accepted truth and well aware amongst teachers, that some children learn better when explained theory and abstract concepts, while others learn better by doing and engaging with their hands.

It’s what parents realize when their children exhibit gifts in different areas, some in language, arts, and humanities, and others in sports, science, and physical ability.

It’s a framework with a beautiful set of realistic and in-depth depictions that have been used by writers to create rich and accurate character representations and love interests in film and stories for years.

Stories like the Avengers, Game of Thrones, and many more shows, books, and characters that we have grown to love and relate to, all drew inspiration from character types: their strengths and weaknesses, personas, motivations, and thought processes.

Like Tony Stark, the ENTP bad-boy genius who spontaneously gets himself out of sticky situations he causes himself; Thanos, the ENTJ world conquerer who dominates in the name of efficiency and utilitarianism but has a soft side that he buries; Dr. Strange the know it all INTJ visionary who can see years into the future and craft a complicated long term plan to get there, executing each step of the way; Bruce Banner, the INTP mild-mannered genius; Thor, the ESTP character with the biggest big dick energy and second to none in a physical challenge, yet expectedly decides to skirt responsibility for more adventure when the time came to be King.

Or Jon Snow, the principled INFJ who acts on behalf of the greater good rather than in his self-interest, and Daenerys Targaryen, the ENFJ leader of the people that leads based on her principles and compassion (or at least, in the beginning). And the writers knew what they were doing as they were crafting the credibility of their romantic chemistry as an ENFJ - INFJ pairing. Unfortunately, they stopped knowing things after Season 5.

Even Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, is obsessed with the 16 personalities framework. He knows it’s not a popular view, but he uses it in how he manages people and Bridgewater and is quietly pioneering many of its applications in industry.

But the biggest reason for the personality type framework is simply because it works. Whether Adam Grant likes it or not, many of his friends and colleagues would probably identify him as similar to that of his proper type description.

It’s come to the point where its value is so completely obvious that it is almost crazy not to be ecstatic about it, and even more absurd to just call it useless, once you actually understand it and see the evidence in your lives.

And Adam Grant, to your article, “MBTI, If You Want Me Back, You Need to Change Too”, here’s, “MBTI responds to bitter ex with her side of the story. It’s not me, it’s you.”

We thought it was time someone created the end all be all resource to the debate. You can send us more links and sources to add to this resource at hello@boo.world.

Next time, just send this article to anyone who says that personality types are illegitimate.