Effortposting about MBTI, Enneagram, OCEAN, and other things. Mostly a compilation of other people's things and links -- not a lot of original thought. There's enough perspectives in the personality systems world that I needn't come up with some unique new take. I cover the systems in the order I discovered and learned about them.

Criticisms

Let's get these criticisms out of the way:

• Most personality systems are based off and bastardized from the fever dreams of a guy who lived over a hundred years ago.
• Psychological typology is mostly all essentially a pseudoscience. They're unproven.
• All of the personality systems are filled with copious doses of Barnum effect. The descriptions are fluffily written so that you can identify parts of yourself everywhere.
• Many humans operating in the modern space elevate their own interpretation and opinions to sell a product. They like it when you spend money for their personality assessments and guides for "how to succeed as XYZ type." You probably shouldn't pay for those things.
• People are pretty famously bad at self-reporting. Self-awareness is often severely lacking. Many people aren't very introspective and don't self-report behaviors, thoughts, etc. with much accuracy.

Does that about cover the critique? Good.

From here on out, we'll be working from the base assumption that those criticisms are very valid...

... and also that psychological typology is cool, useful for introspection, and has some deeply buried real spine under a meaty deluge of marketing and product salesmanship. People contain patterns and similarities, and it can be good and helpful to group and categorize people by their patterns. Identifying and forming vocabulary about the broad, general ways similar people act and think is immensely helpful.

Somewhat irrelevant aside: trying to use typology of any flavor to predict behavior is a losing proposition. People are people and the typology systems collapse individuals into very broad categorizations. For example, trying to predict how people will act based purely on their MBTI (again, their self-reported MBTI, which is also filtered through the biases and values of the test they took) is very silly. I don't recommend that.

Various Personality Systems

MBTI

The gist is that there are 16 basic personality types arising from four axes of personality:

• Introversion/Extroversion (I/E)
• Intuition/Sensing (N/S)
• Thinking/Feeling (T/F)
• Judging/Perceiving (J/P)

MBTI is a bastardized form of Jungian typology. Myers-Briggs essentially reformatted and reinterpreted Jung's cogntive functions into something easily mass-marketable. Distilling of introversion/extroversion, intuition/sensing, etc. into dichotomies and oppositional axes is a simplification -- but it's easy for most people to understand at first glance.

This is the system that's pretty widely used in businesses. I've been asked what my MBTI is in an interview for a company, for example. Company-sponsored MBTI testing is also totally a thing. Notably, there are conferences, typologist certifications, and a great deluge of general bullshit associated with MBTI in particular, out of most of the personality systems. It's marketing theory and business-astrology for the working world.

It's also worth briefly noting the names of the axes do have specific meanings that aren't readily parsed just from their name. Introversion/extroversion axis isn't social introversion/extroversion (how you derive energy: from recharging alone or with people). The cognitive function/MBTI meaning of introversion/extroversion is which direction the dominant cognitive function is pointed. You can be a social extrovert and an ISFP (dominant Introverted Feeling), or a social introvert and an ESTJ (dominant Extroverted Thinking).

Jung and Cognitive Functions

The underlying system that spurred MBTI is Jungian cognitive functions. Cognitive functions are the ways you think about stuff and tend to interact with (perceive and judge, particularly) the world.

The idea behind Jungian typology and the functions: we all have and use all eight cognitive functions, and they are arranged in a stack according to how we prefer to use them. Your actual type is determined by the order in which you generally prefer to use your functions. You have your top four functions in your conscious mind, and your bottom four functions in your unconscious mind. This is a good chart of function stacks. The "stacks" are -- similar to MBTI -- somewhat of a later bastardization of Jung's work. In Psychological Types (or at least the parts I read!) Jung essentially only talks about the dominant (first) function people use, and makes his categorizations based on that.

Carl Jung -- Jungian, get it? -- was the person behind these ideas. He was an early psychiatrist who studied and talked to many people over the course of his life, and was a sort of grandaddy to many psychological concepts -- some of which are still in use today, many of which formulated the basis for later research and discovery, and some of which were discarded as utter pseudoscientific bullshit. Jungian stuff gets real esoteric, real fast. There's all sorts of dream interpretation things, archetypes, the collective unconscious... parts of it are very woo-woo mysticism.

I read parts of Psychological Types by Carl Jung. Much of Psychological Types was gobbledegook gibberish to me -- it is a very difficult read -- but Chapter 10 was pretty cool. I started to get it ... after a couple of re-reads. Chapter 10 goes into a description of each psychological type and how their thought processes work. You can find Chapter 10 online for free, given it's out of copyright.

Conscious

• Dominant: The function you use most, occurring at the top of your stack. It's the most comfortable way you interact with the world. Often, especially for introverted functions, it's not even readily apparent to you that it's the way you interact with the world.
• Auxiliary: The function that supports the dominant function. It's a balance and counterweight to your dominant function.
• Tertiary: This function is called the "eternal child" -- it doesn't really develop until mid-life and remains somewhat weak and child-like. It's typically an area of weakness and sensitivity. E.g., an ENTP with an Extroverted Feeling tertiary function will be desirious of social contact, with some trouble actually putting it into practice and feelings of inadequacy if they do something like, for example, tell an off-color joke that offends other people.
• Inferior: This function is somewhat aspirational -- how you'd ideally like to be. It's another area of weakness -- you know you have it, it's in your conscious mind, but you also know you're kind of really bad at it. E.g., an INTJ with Extroverted Sensing inferior function will probably want to ideally interact with the world at a fast, real-time pace and not miss details, but it requires an unsustainably high level of work and application to actually do so.

The functions occur in a specific order. Introverted, Extroverted, Introverted, Extroverted (IEIE). Or the opposite: Extroverted, Introverted, Extroverted, Introverted (EIEI). There's conjecture and alternate systems and alternate Jungian interpretations that say the functions are actually Introverted, Introverted, Extroverted, Extroverted (IIEE), too.

For extrovert-dominant function humans, the first (dominant) function shows mostly clearly to others. E.g., an ESTJ with Extroverted Thinking dominant will mostly show this dominant function to the world. For introvert-dominant function humans, their auxiliary shows most clearly to the world. E.g., an ISTP with Extroverted Sensing will mostly show that to the world, seeming to be a very sensorily, sensation-oriented human living in the moment. Their dominant function, by virtue of being introverted, isn't the first face they show to the world, and isn't usually what other people would see most clearly in them.

Unconscious

The unconscious stuff is weaker, things you are not really aware that you're using. These are your Inferior Soul, Opposing Personality, Critical Parent, Trickster, and Demon. These all also have descriptions, as above, but we're skipping that for brevity.

OCEAN/Big 5

OCEAN/Big 5 is the closest to not-a-pseudoscience and is actually used on occasion by Real Scientists™, doing Real Science®.

• Openness: Imagination, curiosity, openness to ideas, lack of pragmatism and practicality
• Conscientiousness: Discipline, impulse control, reliability, purposefulness
• Extraversion: Social engagement, general energy levels
• Agreeableness: Concern for social harmony and conflict engagement/avoidance
• Neuroticism: Proneness to negative emotions (e.g., anxiety, anger, depression)

There's some correlation between some OCEAN measurements and MBTI types: e.g., high openness is correlated with intuitive types; high agreeableness is correlated with feeling types.

Enneagram

Enneagram is especially weird. It's a sort of esoteric theory arising from Christian mysticism. The idea is that there are nine essential personality types related to childhood wounding and ego state (how you deal with the wound). This results in nine roles:

• Enneagram 1: Reformer, Perfectionist
• Enneagram 2: Helper, Giver
• Enneagram 3: Achiever, Performer
• Enneagram 4: Individualist, Romantic
• Enneagram 5: Investigator, Observer
• Enneagram 6: Loyalist, Loyal Skeptic
• Enneagram 7: Enthusiast, Epicure
• Enneagram 8: Challenger, Protector
• Enneagram 9: Peacemaker, Mediator

You can have "wings" in Enneagram, e.g. 5 with a wing of 6. There are also nine states of health: for example a very healthy 5 at "Level 1" of the health states "makes pioneering discoveries" via a broad and penetrating understanding of the world. A very unhealthy 5 at "Level 9" of the health states seeks oblivion and self-destruction and can be delusionally suicidal. Those levels of health are, I believe, related to the nine circles of hell in The Divine Comedy (but don't quote me on that).

The system is really weird and occult-y, and quite neat.

There's some general correlation between Enneagram types and MBTI types, too. E.g., there are almost no ISFJ Enneagram 5s, but about half of all INTJs are Enneagram 5s. "In theory" anyone of any MBTI can be any Enneagram type... but in practice, there seem to be some pretty standard correlations.

Other Stuff

That's not all -- there are a large number of personality systems and temperament sorters: Socionics, DISC, Keirsey, personality color systems -- the list goes on and on and on. There are also tons of one-off systems created by YouTube content creators, all trying to sell their customized one-off understanding of a given system (e.g., there are probably 5,000 different interpretations of MBTI available on YouTube).

The Organization Man & Personality Tests

The Organization Man, written in 1956 by William H. Whyte, is an excellent book discussing the organization of business and how groups operate (and are designed to operate) within a given company. Chapters 14 and 15 go into personality tests in particular. Whyte essentially makes the arguments that non-scientific personality testing is often used as a tool by various organizations to exert control over workers sorry, ah: better understand workers. Some selected quotes of interest:

[The trouble is not] in failing to make the tests scientific enough ... it is, rather, in the central idea that the tests can be scientific. They cannot be, and I am going into quite some detail in this chapter to document the assertion. I do so because the tests are the best illustration of the underlying fallacies of scientism-and the underlying bias. As in all applications of scientism, it is society's values that are enshrined. The tests, essentially, are loyalty tests, or rather, tests of potential loyalty. Neither in the questions nor in the evaluation of them are the tests neutral; they are loaded with values, organization values, and the result is a set of yardsticks that reward the conformist, the pedestrian, the unimaginative-at the expense of the exceptional individual without whom no society, organization or otherwise, can flourish.

To jump from aptitude testing to personality testing, however, is to jump from the measurable to the immeasurable. What the personality testers are trying to do is to convert abstract traits into a concrete measure that can be placed on a linear scale, and it is on the assumption that this is a correct application of the scientific method that all else follows. But merely defining a trait is immensely difficult, let alone determining whether it can be measured as the opposite of another. Is "emotionalism," for example, the precise statistical opposite of "steadiness"? People are daily being fitted onto linear scales for such qualities, and if their dimensions don't fit they are punished, like those on Procrustes' bed, for their deviance.

Finally, let us suppose that the tests could in fact reveal the innermost self. Would they even then be justified? The moral basis of testing has been tabled in this discussion, but it is the paramount issue. Were the tests truly scientific, their effectiveness would make the ultimate questions more pressing, not less. Is the individual's innermost self any business of the organization's? He has some rights too.

I would like to think in the 70 years since this book was published, times have changed and personality tests really are what test aficionados claim them to be: broad, general measurements of understanding other people to collaborate and work better together. It does seem that the interpretation of the tests as scientific, real measurements has fallen out of favor, so that's great. Personality typology and systems aren't even close to science and they do encapsulate certain values of society -- they are not a good tool (at all) for predicting behavior and performance, but they are a pretty neat path toward better understanding of the self and -- often enough -- other people.

Links

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Reiterating the warning: many of these sites are selling a product or content. It's your money to spend, but I'd suggest spending it wisely (i.e., not on psychological typology).

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Personality System Tests

Mostly MBTI tests, but some others scattered in there.

• 16 Personalities - possibly the most popular test, with some issues. Namely, it's sort of a Big5 and not actually an MBTI -- the Assertive/Turbulent axis is a Big5 Neuroticism measurement. Some of the flak is almost certainly due to "popular, therefore bad" however. It's got cute graphics and some pretty detailed descriptions, so it's not that terrible.
• Michael Caloz - really unique questions and also gives fun graphs at the end with measurements, percentages, and actual data for your most likely types.
• sakinorva - gives a breakdown of the cognitive functions underlying MBTI and compares across a few different MBTI interpretations.
• PersonalityMax - excellent, lengthy PDF provided at the end that also goes into learning style and a couple of other personality factors.
• SimilarMinds - several flavors and varieties of test.
• keys2cognition
• Truity
• Aim to Know
• Open Psychometrics
• IDR Labs - not the best, but interesting all the same.
• Mistype Investigator - a bit "gotcha" in nature, and seems purposefully seeking mistypes (I mean, it's in the name).
• Jung Typology Test - very strange and unique, but kinda cool. More Jungian than MBTI.
• Reddit MBTI Analyzer - weird, seems inaccurate. Feeding it text yields a different result every time for me. 🤷‍♀️
• Cosmos Persona is a silly-adorable space-themed personality test. The results don't tell you what goofy cute space blob corresponds to which MBTI, but you can find it on the artist's Instagram.
• Fastest MBTI Test

Random Personality System Links & Stuff

Free Labors of Love

These links are totally free and not associated with sales or products -- they're someone's labor of love!

• MBTI Notes @ Tumblr contains some pretty detailed notes about MBTI typology.
• Akhromant subscribes to what is purportedly Jung's original function stacks: IIEE/EEII. MBTI function stacks are IEIE or EIEI. This blog says Jung originally intended for the stacking to occur with both introversion or both extroversion stacks first. So an INTJ in this blog's interpretation is not NiTeFiSe -- it's NiTiFeSe (which... actually sort of makes sense... Barnum effect detected!). A lot of this stuff is esoteric and difficult to understand, probably not great for beginners.
• INTJ vs INTP writing styles is a neat in-depth contrast between the writing styles between two superficially similar (INTx) but very different (totally different function stacks) MBTI types.
• Dominant-Tertiary Loops and Personality Disorders is a strange but neat forum post trying to correlate dominant-tertiary MBTI "loops" with certain personality disorders. Loops meaning, when a person bypasses their auxiliary function and gets stuck in a "loop" between their dominant and tertiary. E.g., for an ISTJ, they'd be trapped in a Si-Fi loop and much like a person with Avoidant Personality Disorder. That'd be one of the more esoteric conjectures of an already unscientific system. So it's nothing to take as gospel -- just a vaguely interesting comparison between malfunctioning cognitive functions and more standard scientific psychopathology of personality.
• Personality Database is weird and cool -- it uses crowdsourcing to type characters from fiction, famous figures, and similar. As with any other deeply-invested nerdy Internet community, tread carefully -- toxicity abounds. It's still incredibly fun to guess typology of various media characters then search them up on PDB (Dr. House is an all-time favorite, with long-running disagreements about whether he's INTJ or ENTP. I fall on team INTJ, but I can totally see the ENTP arguments -- probably more Barnum effect for you).

Sales-Driven Typology

Definitely selling a product, but still has some good information or insightful takes.

• TraitLab is kinda neat. They have blog posts comparing different systems (e.g., MBTI and Enneagram trait overlaps) and different types within a given system. One aspect of this site I really like: they have graphs showing overlap between MBIT and Big 5, Enneagram and MBTI, etc.
• Personality Junkie contains a wealth of good articles.
• Personality Hacker runs a decent podcast of several hundred episodes, and has some fun analogies about cognitive function stacks that make things easier to understand.

Other Neat Stuff

• University of Saskatchewan has some really neat PDFs. I can't find a single page with all of them, but here's ENTP, ISTJ, and INTJ. Presumably, the other MBTI would follow the same URL format.

"Science"?

As discussed, the scientific validity of personality typology is questionable, at best. But that hasn't stopped some from trying...

• ADHD and Jungian psychological type: this study says there's a significant correlation between xNxP and ADHD; this study specifically puts percentages of ADHD at 17% ENFP, 17% ENTP, and 13% INFP.
• The Dark Side of the MBTI is a neat and mildly infuriating study correlating "dark side" traits with MBTI traits. Dark side traits are "traits ... associated with measures of subclinical personality disorders or derailers." Which, if you ask my opinion, is a mild exercise in the pathologization of the normal human personality spectrum. I mean -- excitable, colorful, and skeptical as "dark" traits? Those are just part of the normal spectrum of human personality and should in no way be associated with any kind of "dark side." Reducing the scope of "normal" to a bland greyness so myopic, at the end of the day we'll wind up with precisely three "normal humans." This sort of contrasts with typology systems to me -- while the typology systems might be full of copium and barnum effect, they tend to present all the traits as balanced with positives and negatives.

How It Helped

Self

I have somewhat of a better self understanding. Prior to reading up on some of this personality typing stuff, I'd always felt like an odd duck. There has historically been a pretty pervasive "strange" quality to my interactions with others. It's been made pretty clear to me over the years that I don't exactly view or interact with the world in a standard way.

Personality systems help at least partially why I've felt like a space alien for my entire life. Since learning about them, I'm a little better able to identify, explain, and defend differences in the way I process and think about the world. I'm slightly less apt to categorize things about myself as pure-negative qualities. I have more examples of more positive things I can do.

I'm still totally an odd duck, but now I'm a slightly more self-assured odd duck. Quack.

Others

I also have a slightly better understanding of others. Obviously humans are all different, I didn't need to be told that, but it was incredibly useful for having a categorical system where I could broadly group people together. Having actual quick-references and language to describe some pretty beefy and complex behavioral and thought process concepts is pretty helpful.

I understand now why my ISTJ coworkers are detail-oriented and fixated on the correct process; I understand why I tend to piss them off by disregarding details in favor of the larger picture. There's more of a middle ground and I somewhat understand how to speak their language a little better. I have greater respect for their detail-orientation and I can see there are some pretty sweet opportunties for collaboration between a big-picture oriented thinker and a detail-oriented absolute machine of a workhorse.

I get why I have to couch things in terms of group feeling and engendering camaraderie for my Fe-dominant ExFJ coworkers. They're capable, they get stuff done, they motivate and congeal groups into togetherness. No one does social harmony quite like them. And it both itches and strikes me as manipulative trickery and is an awe-inducing skillset I will never possess, as someone with a Fe trickster.

These aren't hard and fast rules for interacting with or understanding other people -- but having very broad concepts in my head, and some shorthand descriptive language, is very helpful.

Type

I've gotten the same MBTI test result every time I've ever taken it, starting back when I was 15 -- when I immediately rolled my eyes and dismissed it as weird-ass pseudoscience, with the additional eye-rolling for my typing as a rarity. Summarized feedback, at the time: "ooo, rare bird, wow, much science, much proof."

I spent a pretty long time bouncing between thinking I'm my actual type, some oft-cited mistypes, and even the shadow of my type. I can still get into that questioning headspace occasionally: things that are sensible and extremely interesting, but ultimately have no true, absolute proof -- things like this are catnip.

The things that make me confident about my typing:

• I get the same result across every test, with rare exception only under times of stress.
• I have the best, most free-flowing, least-exhausting, excellent 1:1 conversations mostly with people who share my dominant function. I can't really explain it or put it into words, but the "feel" of these conversations is just vastly different. I still have a miniature-sized social battery, but it seems to run on power saving mode with these people.
• I critique things via judgment: "that's stupid." That'd be the Critical Parent function, Introverted Thinking, at work. This includes self-critique -- if I don't understand something or make a mistake, clearly I'm the dumbest garbage on the planet.
• Extroverted Feeling, the Trickster function, is straight up itchy. Fe-dominant humans are very strange to me.
• My typing is pretty consistent across several systems. OCEAN and Enneagram results are pretty close to standard correlations for my MBTI.

So what are my actual types? You're welcome to guess. 😛