Posted: September 16, 2024

Context: This introduction was originally intended for my aunt, who had no background in personality typing, but was already well-acquainted with astrology and used it in her life. I was explaining the basics of how the theory worked. I have edited certain sections for the sake of clarity.

That’s all you need to know—happy reading! :D

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Introduction

MBTI and OCEAN (Big Five)

MBTI is the most commonly known and widely used typology (personality theory), the one you may know as having sixteen distinct personality types. However, when people say they did a “test for MBTI” in the past, I suspect they actually usually mean 16Personalities, as this is the first one that pops up in the search engine when searching for “MBTI test.” Take note, however, that there are a couple of caveats regarding the results from it.

Google search for “MBTI test.”

First, I need to introduce another typology for context, called Big Five, or OCEAN, used in scientific circles. While other typologies are usually considered pseudoscience, scientists—in general—begrudgingly accept OCEAN as a valid measure for the metrics of someone's personality (meaning that it has reasonable predictive power that cannot be attributed to chance alone. In other words, from their studies, they have found the alpha levels to be nonnegligible).

OCEAN works by working on a dichotomy system—i.e., by listing five scales, from 0 to 100, with gradients that contain opposite adjectives on both ends. These five are (1) introvert/extrovert (extraversion), (2) sensor/intuitive (openness to experience), (3) thinker/feeler (agreeableness), (4) prospector/judger (conscientiousness), and (5) assertive/turbulent (neuroticism). They are usually known by the names in the parentheses when discussing OCEAN in an academic context, but 16Personalities has given them the names with links above in their services.

The scope of OCEAN ends here, meaning that it only takes these five scales independently and only then makes an assessment of the person. It does not create separate "archetypes" for each person depending on whether certain 0-100 gradients are less than or greater than 50, which is where scientists draw the line and begin to claim it pseudoscience.

However, this is a different story with the website called 16Personalities. It took, from MBTI, the four-letter system naming convention for different "archetypes," or categories, of people, and adapted it to the OCEAN model. These are the codes like ISTP, ENFJ, etc. (So yes, one could describe the 16Personalities website as being a hybrid of both OCEAN and MBTI). In addition, to incorporate the neuroticism scale, they created their own “assertive/turbulent” dichotomy, affixed to the end of the four letter code, such as INTJ-T (turbulent) or INTJ-A (assertive), resulting in 32 types of personalities—despite 16Personalities seeming to treat neuroticism as an afterthought.