the funny thing about mbti is that most of the stuff that people relate to comes from the introvert/extravert scale and just various interpretations of that, and thatās the only aspect of mbti thatās an actual scientifically validated personality trait
some people are more analytical and some are more emotional, but thatās literally not a dichotomy. most people relate more to one than the other and thatās where people can relate to that part of the types, but as soon as youāre around the same levels in both of them--whether high or low or in the middle--itās real easy to get confused about your type. similar situation with intuition and sensing; not a real dichotomy
i know mbti theory says that you do you all of them and youāre just stronger in some than others, but thatās only a result of people just generally not getting exactly equal scores on everything. of course most people will score differently on theĀ āoppositeā traits, but the negative correlation isnāt sound.
the appeal of mbti (over scientific personality measures like the big five) is that it categorises people into neat types. but theyāre literally meaningless!!!! of course thereās gonna be similar traits of people in these groups, but theyāre not stable or even typically correlational. it wasnt even developed by actual psychologists.
so much research has been done on personality traits and (in the west) five traits have emerged over and over of strongly correlated patterns of thought and behaviour, and they all exist on a SPECTRUM. there is absolutely no dichotomy in personality. you can always take each trait on a normal distribution or whatever, but in that case you only get a third of people who are significantly on one side or the other
like..yknow how the introversion/extraversion thing really works? the average level of extraversion (out of 100) is 60 (and, as a corollary, average introversion is 40), but any level of extraversion between 45 and 75 is considered average, and that accounts for 68% of people. i see mbti people get so upset about someone saying theyāre between types orĀ āim actually an ambivertā when technically like.......everyone is an ambivert. there might be the rare person whoāll score 0 or 100, but you cant just put someone into a box like that!!!!
but like i said; thatās the appeal of mbti. people like having a type; a box that they fit in that tells them who they are. for some people it does genuinely help them, but you cant take mbti as a science. im not denying itās fun and interesting; i enjoy it a lot! itās just not good science. using the big five isnt gonna give you a simple type. technically you could sort each trait into high, low, and average and end up with 243 types, but thatās completely useless. someone scoring 51 on extraversion doesnt make them an extravert
sometimes it just doesnt seem fun to go to all the effort of getting invested in a system if it doesnt give you something nice and simple to put in a profile, but if you actually want to know anything about yourself, take a big five quiz. the ipip-neo is the way to go imo; 300 questions and it also divides each trait into six facets. i havent found an online quiz yet that actually gives you your raw scores, though, but you can find the questions and how to score them, and you can scour research to find averages and SDs (hint: there was a study of 320,000 people thatās pretty robust)
idk im rambling now because i just really like the big five, but i just want people to understand that no matter how much fun youāre having with mbti, itās important to remember that it doesnt tell you a huge deal about yourself.
