MBTI vs Big Five: Which Personality Test Is Actually Accurate?

Millions of people know their four-letter Myers-Briggs type. Far fewer know their Big Five scores, even though the Big Five is the model personality researchers actually use. Here’s how the two compare, why scientists prefer one, and why the other is still everywhere.

The short version

• The Big Five measures five traits as scales. It’s well supported by research, stable when you retake it, and predicts real outcomes.
• The Myers-Briggs sorts you into one of 16 types from four either/or preferences. It’s memorable and easy to talk about, but it’s less reliable, and the evidence behind it is weaker.

Where each one came from

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was developed in the 1940s by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, building on Carl Jung’s 1921 book Psychological Types. Neither was a trained psychologist. Their goal was practical: to help people understand each other and find work that suited them.

The Big Five came from the opposite direction. Researchers collected thousands of words people use to describe personality and used statistics to see which ones cluster together. Five clusters kept appearing, in sample after sample, and those became the five traits. There’s more on that in our complete guide to the Big Five.

Types versus traits

This is the real difference.

The Myers-Briggs asks you to be one thing or the other on four dimensions:

• E or I: extraversion or introversion
• S or N: sensing or intuition
• T or F: thinking or feeling
• J or P: judging or perceiving

Put the letters together and you get a type, like INTJ or ESFP.

The Big Five just gives you a score on each trait. It doesn’t decide which side you’re on, because for most people there isn’t a side: scores bunch up in the middle, in a single hump. That’s true of the Myers-Briggs dimensions too, when you look at the underlying scores. There’s no natural gap between introverts and extraverts, so wherever you draw the line, you split a crowd of very similar people in two.

The consequence is that someone just over the line and someone just under it get different letters, even though they answered almost identically, while someone just over the line and someone at the far end get the same one.

Does it give the same answer twice?

A good test should give you roughly the same result if you take it again a few weeks later. This is where types struggle. Because so many people sit near the middle of at least one dimension, a small change in how you answer can flip a letter. Studies of the Myers-Briggs have found that a substantial share of people, in some studies as many as half, get a different type when retested within weeks.

Big Five scores move too, but a small change in answers means a small change in score, not a different category. They’re much more stable over time.

Does it predict anything?

Big Five scores relate to real outcomes. Conscientiousness predicts performance at school and work; neuroticism predicts anxiety and depression; agreeableness predicts relationship quality. These links are modest, but they show up in large studies again and again.

The Myers-Briggs types have much weaker evidence for predicting anything, which is why even The Myers-Briggs Company says the test shouldn’t be used to select people for jobs.

They’re closer than they look

Here’s the interesting part. When researchers compare the two, four of the Myers-Briggs scales line up with four of the Big Five traits:

• E versus I lines up with extraversion.
• N versus S lines up with openness.
• F versus T lines up with agreeableness.
• J versus P lines up with conscientiousness.

The one Big Five trait with no Myers-Briggs match is neuroticism, how strongly you feel negative emotions. It’s arguably the trait that matters most for wellbeing, and it’s the one type tests leave out, perhaps because nobody wants to be labelled “the anxious type”.

So the Myers-Briggs isn’t measuring nothing. It’s measuring four real traits, then throwing away information by turning each one into a letter.

Why the Myers-Briggs is still so popular

• Types are memorable. “I’m an INFJ” is an identity. “I’m 62 on openness” is a number.
• Every type sounds good. Type descriptions are written to be flattering, and there’s no type for “stressed and disorganised”.
• It gives people a shared language. Teams use it to talk about differences without it feeling personal.
• It’s been heavily marketed to companies for decades.

None of that is sinister. A framework can be useful for conversation without being accurate as measurement.

Which should you take?

• Take the Big Five if you want the most accurate picture, want to track change over time, or want to understand a specific pattern, like procrastination (conscientiousness) or worry (neuroticism).
• Take a 16-types test if you want a fun, memorable summary to talk about with friends, as long as you treat the letters lightly.

Or take both, and compare. Our 16 types test shows how close each of your letters was, rather than pretending every letter is certain, and it tells you which Big Five trait each one matches. Then the Big Five test gives you the fuller picture.