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We like to categorize ourselves into social identities to satisfy core social needs.

The MBTI is a corporate and cultural phenomenon despite being unreliable and unscientific.

The MBTI's biggest scientific flaw—forcing complex human traits into categories—is what makes it so popular.

The Big Five test is much more reliable and more accurate at predicting major life outcomes.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is the most popular and well-known measure of personality. Fifty million people have taken the assessment and it has been used by 89% of Fortune 500 companies at some point to screen and evaluate employees, generating millions of dollars in annual revenue for the Myers-Briggs Company.

People put their Myers-Briggs category on their Tinder profiles, and several years ago funders even put up $1 million to develop an app matching couples based on their Myers-Briggs personality types. While the Myers-Briggs test is telling people who to hire and marry, scientists hate it. As Laith Al-Shawaf has noted, “Any psychologist will tell you, it’s mostly bulls**t.”

Then why is it so popular?

Primarily, it's because people are suckers for terrible psychology tests.

Let’s start with the MBTI. The test was developed during World War II by an American mother and daughter who were fascinated by Carl Jung’s 1921 book Psychological Types. They created a series of 93 questions, like, “Are you more (a) realistic than speculative or (b) speculative than realistic.”

After you complete the Myers-Briggs test, you get sorted into one of 16 categories. Each group is given an appealing name: the “logical pragmatist” or the........

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