The curious case of the distribution of Myers-Briggs types

The 16 personality types first defined by the personality test the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and based on Jungian psychology is by far the most popular personality framework. About half of the English speaking internet population are able to identify their type when asked [a], this is far higher than any other system. Despite being popular with people in general, Myers-Briggs/Jungian type theory is extremely unpopular in Academic psychology research. A representative example is Vox's "Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless". These have apparently done little to dent the popularity of the Myers-Briggs types. People have a natural objection to these arguments, which is 'how can you say personality type is meaningless when someone can tell me that they are e.g. INFP or ISTJ and I feel like I know what that means?'. And people do studies with And this is fair, many critics argue in the direction of Myers-Briggs being an arbitrary delusion which I don't think is a great approach to critizing as the Myers-Briggs types, because it does seem obviously wrong.

My position on the 16 types is that they are 16 new adjectives that can be useful in describing other people, and when people choose one of the types to identify as they do so for non-random reasons. I admit this won't satisfy Jungian enthusiasts, but my impression is that while 25%-50% of people are familiar enough with the 16 types to identify their type when asked, maybe only one tenth of those know the basics of Jungian cognitive theory. To most people, the essence of their type is the descriptive profile and the test questions that assigned them it.

Is everyone is an N type?

"All of my friends have decided that they are either INTP or INTJ, yet the report says those types are only 2% of the population each. It seems unlikely that this could happen by chance. So the Myers-Briggs types must be capturing something real about how my and my friends are different than other people". This argument has been most prominently made on the website WaitButWhy where he surveyed 5,944 of his readers, and noticed that frequency of types reported differed greatly from the US population norms reported by the Myers-Briggs publishers. The difference was largest along the S-N axis, where 26.7% of the US population is N (versus S) according to CAPT and 81.3% of WaitButWhy readers were. Which would imply that N types were 12 times more likely to end up as readers of WaitButWhy than S types. His interpertation of his results was that there is a specific type of person who is much more likely to end up reading his website than other people and that the MBTI captures this. And I have seen this cited on a number of occasions as definitive proof that the Myers-Briggs typology must be good, because "it is so predictive".

What I noticed though is that his graph of the distribution of the types looked very similar to the frequency of types people self-reported when I was collecting data to develop my Jungian type test. So I searched far and wide for samples of people self-reporting Myers-Briggs types and put the percentages of S vs N in the table below.

Sample	% N	% S	n
People who took my Myers-Briggs / Jungian test and provided a type [0]	86.6%	13.4%	30,440
People who took my 'What character are you?' test and provided a type [1]	83.6%	16.4%	491,897
Typology Central and Personality Cafe forum members [2]	87.8%	12.2%	4,702
Poll of astrology enthusiasts [3]	85.2%	14.8%	22,442
Members of the /r/mbti subreddit [4]	87.7%	12.3%	6,443
Twitter users with type in bio [5]	82.2%	17.8%	100,040
Instagram users with type in bio [6]	85.9%	14.1%	3,674
Poll of workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk [7]	67.0%	33.0%	487
OkCupid users [8]	85.1%	14.9%	105,637
Memberships of largest facebook group per type [9] (**difficult to interpret)	77.5%	22.5%	344,438
Google search traffic for the 16 types [10] (**difficult to interpret)	76.8%	23.2%	?

Taking a weighted average of the samples where type was explicity self-identified, 83.8% of people identified as an N type. This calls into question the argument made at WaitButWhy that the Myers-Briggs types must be useful because they capture how his readers are different from other people. It actually appears having 81% Ns is unremarkable.

What we see calls into question the argument that Myers-Briggs can successfully predict who will read WaitButWhy, because the percent of N's at WaitButWhy is not particularly different than at the largest most general social media websites.

the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) is a study where great care was taken to get a representative population sample. Add Health includes a personality measure that I also have collected data with on this website The tool is the Mini-IPIP, a measure of the big five personality traits with 4 questions per scale. Each item has 5 response options from strongly agree to strongly disagree, so possible scores range from a low of 4 to a high of 20. The average scores of Add Health participants and participants on my website are in the table below.

Scale	Add Health (n=5,015)		OSPP (n=1,013,099 )
	mean	sd	mean	sd	Effect size
Extraversion	13.2	3.1	11.3	4.1	-0.51
Openness to experience	14.5	2.4	16.2	3.1	0.61
Conscientiousness	14.6	2.7	12.7	3.6	-0.60
Agreeableness	15.2	2.4	15.5	3.4	0.07
Emotional stability	13.5	3.0	12.0	4.0	-0.44

The MBTI measures covers the same areas as the big five, just organized and interperted in different ways.

• The E (vs I) on the MBTI correlated r=0.74 with Extraversion on the NEO-PI-R. Web users scored lower for extraversion than the Add Health, so you would expect more Ixxx identities on the internet than the population statistics, and this is what we do see.
• The J (vs P) on the MBTI correlated r=0.49 with Conscientiousness on the NEO-PI-R. Web users scored lower for conscientiousness than the Add Health, so you would expect more xxxP identities on the internet than the population statistics, and this is what we do see.
• The F (vs T) on the MBTI correlated r=0.44 with Agreeableness on the NEO-PI-R. Web users scored about the same for agreeableness as Add Health, so you would expect not much difference between the internet and the population statistics for xxFx vs. xxTx identities, and this is what we do see.
• And finally, N (vs S) on the MBTI correlated r=0.72 with Openness on the NEO-PI-R. Web users scored higher for openness than the Add Health, so you would expect more xNxx identities, and this is what we do see.

So, maybe it looks like the theory that everyone you talk to on the internet is one of the xNxx types types because only someone who is xNxx would take an internet personality test is legit? To some extent yes, but I am still hung up on the size of the difference. It is just too big to be real.

Let's go back and look at extroversion-introversion. Here are the distributions

Data says N versus S is the least meaninful difference, and people seem to think the opposite

And here is the most popular type compatbility guide. If you look at the most popular type relationship compatability reference chart, the dominant theme is that N should pair with N and vice versa, every single one of its 62 most mismatched pairs are S-N.

We can try and guess, do differences in why

When I developed my test to predict Myers-Briggs types, I did so by surveying people with a known type and seeing what questions would discriminate the best. Each question was a 5 point bipolar adjective scale, and a question is good if the average score on it for one group is very different than the average score for another. And it was much harder to find questions for the S-N dichotomy where this was the case. The chart below shows the best question for each of the 4 dichotomies showing the largest group difference, out of questions 298 tested.

Dichotomy	Best question	Difference between group averages
I-E	gets worn out by parties <-----> gets fired up by parties	1.77
S-N	interested in realities <-----> interested in possibilities	0.75
F-T	values emotions <-----> uncomfortable with emotions	1.67
I-E	prepares <-----> improvises	1.43

I tried hard, but was never able to make my test very good a predicting self identified S or N. But perhaps I am just not good at coming up with the right questions? It is possible that maybe if someone who was just better than me were set on the task, they would have better results. Hard to say, but let's look at this some other ways.

Another way to look at is how well each can distinguish between different occupations. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was initially developed as a career counseling tool to assign people to different occupations, so this is something it should be suitable for. The dataset [1] I collected also contains self reported occupation. In it there are 76 occupations with at least 500 people reporting a Myers-Briggs / Jungian type. The table below shows the three occupations with either the highest or lowest prevalence of each end of the four dichotomies.

Least I	Least N	Least T	Least J
Actor (43.0%) Sales (45.5%) Consultant (46.4%)	Accountant (73.0%) Finance (76.8%) Nurse (76.9%)	Therapist (15.1%) Social Worker (15.3%) Nanny (18.5%)	Barista (36.9%) Artist (37.1%) Cashier (37.5%)
Most I	Most N	Most T	Most J
Editor (76.9%) Programmer (79.6%) Librarian (81.0%)	Actor (92.1%) Artist (92.4%) Writer (94.1%)	Scientist (57.8%) Engineer (64.0%) Programmer (66.2%)	Administrator (67.6%) Project manager (67.6%) Finance (67.9%)
Difference between most and least
34.2%	17.3%	46.4%	30.5%

You can see the there is much less variation between self reported S-N identification then on the other 3 axies. So the evidence is mounting that the S-N part of Myers-Briggs is significantly less meaningful or predictive than the other parts.

But, it could be argued that this apparent weakness of the S versus N dichotomy compared to its peers is an artifact of self-indentification. Maybe self-ID has a unique bias that is due to method and not theory, in which case observer reports or expert typings would be more meaningful? One way to look at this is how people type characters. The website personality-database.com (PDB) allows MBTI enthusiatsts to rate characters with what type they think describes that character. I have a similar dataset, but where each character was rated on 268 adjectives. Looking at how well character types on PDB can be predicted from my data I find that the correspondence between my data and PBD is again, substantially weakest for S-N. The table below contains the 5 adjectives in the dataset from this website that correlated with PDB verdict for each of the four dichotomies.

	I-E	S-N	F-T	J-P
extrovert-introvert	0.81	0.03	0.1	0.24
quiet-loud	0.76	0.1	0.04	0.31
playful-shy	0.68	0.09	0.05	0.34
gregarious-private	0.67	0.03	0.32	0.43
chatty-reserved	0.64	0.02	0.3	0.38
metaphorical-literal	0.05	0.5	0.27	0.09
philosophical-real	0.16	0.49	0.22	0.14
intellectual-physical	0.33	0.48	0.06	0.42
straightforward-cryptic	0.11	0.47	0.04	0.13
💪-🧠	0.3	0.46	0.03	0.37
vulnerable-armoured	0.09	0.02	0.65	0.3
hard-soft	0.02	0.04	0.64	0.29
domestic-industrial	0.01	0.21	0.63	0.03
trusting-suspicious	0.02	0.04	0.63	0.19
spiritual-skeptical	0.01	0.04	0.61	0.01
scheduled-spontaneous	0.38	0.04	0.18	0.73
neat-messy	0.27	0.04	0.08	0.7
studious-goof-off	0.44	0.05	0.18	0.7
disorganized-self-disciplined	0.39	0.05	0.25	0.66
eloquent-unpolished	0.15	0.25	0.05	0.66

Again, it is possible that this could be due to adjectives that describe the S-N difference just not being sampled (but I don't think so, there were 268 of them and they effort was taken to make sure they were diverse). Taken all together it does seem pretty clear that the S-N differences stands out as being the least meaningful and useful of the 4 by a large margin.

How I can say this when yo. The thing that makes a question good for psychological is not, 'will participants answer this question in a way that make sense to them?'. It is, 'are the reasons why one person might answer yes to this question the same as the reason why other people answer yes to this question?'. In the case MBTI types, at this moment almost everyone who gets involved with Myers-Briggs ends up identifying as an N type with a small slice of people who end up identifying as an S type for reasons / interpretations with some diversity.

Here are some quotes, each taken from the introductory paragraph of of 16Personalities' descriptions for the 4 NT types:

It can be lonely at the top.[...] It can be difficult for Architects to find people who can keep up with their non-stop analysis of things

Logicians pride themselves on their inventiveness and creativity, their unique perspective and vigorous intellect.

Commanders are also characterized by an often ruthless level of rationality, using their drive, determination and sharp minds to achieve whatever end they've set for themselves.

their effortlessly quick wit, broad accumulated knowledge base, and capacity for connecting disparate ideas

I am wondering whether I am a smart ISTJ or INTJ? It seems that I could be either as I have gotten both INTJ and ISTJ. I have read that apparently a smart ISTJ can be mistaken for an INTJ.

I am wondering whether I am a smart ISTJ or INTJ? It seems that I could be either as I have gotten both INTJ and ISTJ. I have read that apparently a smart ISTJ can be mistaken for an INTJ.

Since S types get such a bad rep in the MBTI community (not saying this one, but y'know), to prevent getting lynched, people may think that THEY are Ns

All of these descriptions tell the taker that they are the super smart personality type.

And, I'm not the first person to notice this. If you search for "Sensors" on the /r/mbti subreddit, a top result is this meme:

And complaints about how various different on-line tests give out "too many" N results are pretty common on the various different internet forums. These complaints are usually rely on the frame of "mistyping", claiming that some people really are fundamentally N and other people really are fundamentally S and that self identity roughly tracks this but due to bias or stereotyping many people who are fundamentally S end up indentifing as N. And I guess I agree with a weak version of this claim: if you take scores on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^TMTM®^TM as the ground truth for what Jungian types mean, then yes there are way more N identities than there should be. But if Jungian type is a scientific theory then, appealing to the first person to have ever thought of it as the authority makes no sense. Modern day physicists don't judge their theories of gravity by how similar to they are to Newton's understanding.

The best that can be said for the cognitive functions is that they are metaphors for what thinking can feel like.

And here

So its similar two why all the top ranked IQ tests on Google give out lots of high scores. If you made an IQ test that did not give out high scores, it wouldn't ever get popular. A part of the reason why 16Personalities is the most popular Jungian test on the internet is that 16Personalities is one of the most aggressive at telling people that they way they are makes them a high IQ super genius.

The Myers-Briggs type can function as a lot of different types of things, but most of the time people use them as identities. And identeties are not real, they are just memes. And the popularity of memes go up and down. We can see this by looking at the Google search volume for each of the 16 types over time. People can search for a specific type for a lot of other reasons aside from identifying as that type, so this is a little bit hard to intrepret. But it does let you get a feeling for how much interest their are in the different types.

First you see that total interest in the Myers-Briggs types has been increasing recently, and then you see that the relative popularity of the types has been shifting arround too. Relevant to what this article has covered so far, the graph below shows what percent of search traffic has been for N types.

Most of search traffic has always been for N types, but its increased recently as well from about 71% N traffic before 2010 to 76% N traffic today.

It's popularity may have receeded somewhat, but being a self diagnosed autistic person used to be a major meme on the internet. People were attracted to the identity because it was useful for them....... One of the top Google results for 'austic special interests' is a blogpost by an autistic woman who

> For example, when I took up running, I didn’t just go out and jog a few times a week. I read books about training for marathons. I found workout plans online and joined a training site to get personalized drills. I learned about Fartlek and track workouts and running technique. I signed up for road races. Ten years later, I spend more on running clothes and shoes than on everyday clothes. I use a heart rate monitor and a distance tracker to record my workouts. If I go on vacation, I pack all of running stuff. I don’t just like to run occasionally; running is an integral part of my life. It fills a very specific need.

I think the question of 'could we come up with a set of adjectives for describing personality that are more useful and complete than the ones we have inherited from natual language?' is an interesting one that could have a valuble answer. Any proposed solution is going to come under idealogical pressure

The other big thing

So far I have talked about how the idea of the distribution of Myers-Briggs types is not very well specified, because it depends on what standards your using and standards change over time and fall preasure to ideaology.

But there is another big issue, and that is that the context under which the type identification is done matters. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was created to be used as a career counseling tool, but has been most successful for use in team-building exercises in a corporate setting. Allmost all test administrations that became part of CAPT's statistics were done in an office with adults. When the internet came, and on-line analogs to the MBTI became widely availible on it, that changed. Now most people first encounter the Myers-Briggs types when they are very young.

The graph below uses data once again from my "Which Character" test and it shows what percent of people of each age identified a type.

We see the percentage who know their type increases fastest at the youngest ages, reaches a peak at 23, then declines somwhat. At most 54% of people know their type, but by age thirteen 30% of people already know their type. So people are coming to identify their type at very young ages. Which makes sense, young people have always been most interested in questions of identity.

Notes

[a]

Estimated from the graph in Aghion, P., Akcigit, U., Hyytinen, A., & Toivanen, O. (2017). The social origins of inventors (No. w24110).

[0]

People who took the Myers-Briggs / Jungian test on this website were asked to provide their type if they already knew it to validate the test.

Type	Count
INTP	3,982
INTJ	4,431
ENTP	1,676
ENTJ	1,123
ISTP	660
ISTJ	796
ESTP	273
ESTJ	335
INFP	5,513
INFJ	5,533
ENFP	2,726
ENFJ	1,384
ISFP	592
ISFJ	746
ESFP	326
ESFJ	344

[1]

People who took the Statistical "Which Character" Personality Quiz were asked if they would be willing to complete an additional research section. In that section, people were asked to provide their Myers-Briggs/Jungian type if they knew it. The numbers of people indicating each type as of 30 June 2020 are in the table below.

Type	Count
INTP	42,106
INTJ	51,486
ENTP	23,682
ENTJ	19,612
ISTP	9,180
ISTJ	12,776
ESTP	5,360
ESTJ	7,313
INFP	92,139
INFJ	83,839
ENFP	60,411
ENFJ	37,986
ISFP	10,803
ISFJ	15,633
ESFP	10,272
ESFJ	9,299

[2]

TypologyCentral.com and PersonalityCafe.com are two large forums used to discuss personality and are dominated the by Jungian/Myers-Briggs typology. They both allow you to set your type in a special field on a user profile. A user named "Highlander" combined these numbers for his analysis at https://www.typologycentral.com/wiki/index.php?title=Enneagram_and_MBTI_Correlation&oldid=1547. I have taken his counts and put them in the table below.

Type	Number of profiles
INTP	726
INTJ	575
ENTP	310
ENTJ	132
ISTP	129
ISTJ	105
ESTP	59
ESTJ	25
INFP	970
INFJ	820
ENFP	476
ENFJ	118
ISFP	124
ISFJ	74
ESFP	38
ESFJ	21

[3]

Astroligion.com is a website the offers astrology related content. On their page at https://astroligion.com/poll-what-is-your-myers-briggs-zodiac-sign-combo/ they host a poll asking people to indicate their Jungian/Myers-Briggs type and Zodiac sign. I aggregated the poll results on 29 June 2020 by 4 letter type code, and the counts are in the table below.

Search string	Number of hits
INTP	3015
INTJ	2421
ENTP	987
ENTJ	852
ISTP	446
ISTJ	703
ESTP	467
ESTJ	353
INFP	3071
INFJ	6607
ENFP	1620
ENFJ	553
ISFP	350
ISFJ	381
ESFP	342
ESFJ	274

[4]

/r/mbti user flairs.

User flair	Number of accounts
INTP	1191
INTJ	936
ENTP	729
ENTJ	247
ISTP	238
ISTJ	109
ESTP	108
ESTJ	39
INFP	1078
INFJ	718
ENFP	609
ENFJ	140
ISFP	128
ISFJ	76
ESFP	65
ESFJ	32

[5]

The search tool at https://followerwonk.com/bio allows you to search twitter bios for words, and will return all it can find. It was used to search for the 4 letter type codes of all the sixteen types, and the number of hits for each was recorded. The searches were done on 29 June 2020, and the number of hits for each code are in the table below. When I reviewed some of the bios, inclusion of the 4 letter type codes were always used for self identification in the ones I looked at. It is possible that their are some cases where this is not true, or the account does not represent an individual, by these must be rare.

Search string	Number of hits
INTP	12,583
INTJ	15,548
ENTP	5,908
ENTJ	4,098
ISTP	3,130
ISTJ	3,372
ESTP	1,538
ESTJ	1,693
INFP	22,867
INFJ	22,731
ENFP	11,224
ENFJ	5,081
ISFP	3,669
ISFJ	4,332
ESFP	2,012
ESFJ	1,878

[6]

The search tool at https://www.searchmy.bio allows you to search instagram bios for words, and will return all it can find. It was used to search for the 4 letter type codes of all the sixteen types, and the number of hits for each was recorded. The searches were done on 29 June 2020, and the number of hits for each code are in the table below. When I reviewed some of the bios, inclusion of the 4 letter type codes were always used for self identification in the ones I looked at. It is possible that their are some cases where this is not true, or the account does not represent an individual, by these must be rare.

Search string	Number of hits
INTP	204
INTJ	412
ENTP	170
ENTJ	174
ISTP	28
ISTJ	68
ESTP	50
ESTJ	53
INFP	722
INFJ	1,052
ENFP	613
ENFJ	327
ISFP	86
ISFJ	128
ESFP	103
ESFJ	87

[7]

Type	Count
INTP	64
INTJ	85
ENTP	12
ENTJ	10
ISTP	17
ISTJ	45
ESTP	3
ESTJ	22
INFP	50
INFJ	78
ENFP	13
ENFJ	14
ISFP	23
ISFJ	34
ESFP	9
ESFJ	8

[8]

In May 2018 a reddit users counted up users on the dating site OkCupid who mentioned a type. I have taken their numbers from https://www.reddit.com/r/mbti/comments/8iq6a2/okcupid_users_who_listed_their_mbti_type_oc/ and reproduced them in the table below.

Type	Count
INTP	13,788
INTJ	20,705
ENTP	6,867
ENTJ	5,928
ISTP	2,331
ISTJ	3,869
ESTP	1,672
ESTJ	1,817
INFP	17,552
INFJ	20,053
ENFP	13,610
ENFJ	7,134
ISFP	2,021
ISFJ	3,403
ESFP	1,554
ESFJ	1,883

[9]

I went through and found the facebook group with the largest membership that I could find on 30 June 2020 for each of the 16 types. There are lots of obvious reasons why trying to infer a distribution of individuals from groups is problematic, but relative group size probably does not mean nothing.

Type	Most popular group	Membership
INTP	https://www.facebook.com/groups/OfficialINTP	30,500
INTJ	https://www.facebook.com/groups/MainINTJ/	38,438
ENTP	https://www.facebook.com/groups/2222795904	29,100
ENTJ	https://www.facebook.com/groups/entjgroup	13,400
ISTP	https://www.facebook.com/groups/2217683405	9,000
ISTJ	https://www.facebook.com/groups/2221750715	14,400
ESTP	https://www.facebook.com/groups/2214200886	6,700
ESTJ	https://www.facebook.com/groups/2213543106	7,400
INFP	https://www.facebook.com/groups/2221426348	57,100
INFJ	https://www.facebook.com/groups/infjthecounselor	29,000
ENFP	https://www.facebook.com/groups/ENFPOfficial	48,000
ENFJ	https://www.facebook.com/groups/2215620874	21,400
ISFP	https://www.facebook.com/groups/2214404283	12,500
ISFJ	https://www.facebook.com/groups/2214455397	12,400
ESFP	https://www.facebook.com/groups/2218538663	8,900
ESFJ	https://www.facebook.com/groups/2215581049	6,200