In Adam Conover’s latest effort to ruin everything you love, the webseries-turned-cable host takes down the personality test known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in his buzzkill show Adam Ruins Everything. In this segment he explains the very unscientific history of the test, founded by writer Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs in 1944.
The test assumes that there are 16 possible personality types that describe how people make decisions and perceive the world. Based on a questionnaire, people are put into categories with descriptors like “introvert,” “judgmental,” “intuition,” and other terms that describe a specific personality type.
Conover explains that the test is not based on any type of data or experimental findings, but on Briggs and Myers expanded interpretation of Carl Jung’s eight personality types founded in 1921.
The test is popular in business sectors because the personality types describe what kind of worker each type is, what environments they do best in, and what kind of communicator they are. It also describes how each type functions in romantic relationships and even as a parent. Conover’s debunking of this test is ruining our ability to take a 12-minute online questionnaire and learn everything we need to know about ourselves. Check out the video and be disappointed.
Man this guy is the worst.