Personality Type is a Misnomer

Yup, you read that right. This whole personality type nonsense is a complete and utter case of mistaken definition. Not to throw you guys for a loop or anything, but the whole of MBTI and personality theory going back to Jung himself is NOT about your personality. Unfortunately, the propagation of this false information has led to tons of incorrect assumptions inside of this community. The main false assumption that this has caused is that everyone of the same type will be basically identical to each other. This, of course, is laughably false and absurd. If that were true, you, for the whole of your life, would only be interacting with 16 different preset options.

So, if all my claims are true, what does this mean for personality theory as a whole? Should we all just give it up and call it pseudoscience like the scientific community so gleefully likes to do? I would argue not. I believe things just need to be defined more clearly, and more accurate information needs to be spread to the community as a whole. So, let’s start from the beginning and look at what personality theory REALLY is and what the implications of that are.

1. “Personality theory” really refers to one’s thinking/reasoning preferences

Personality Theory, MBTI, or whatever other name you want to call it by, really should only be defining a type’s mentality and nothing more. You can already see hints to this when you look back to Jung’s work and the COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS. That alone points to it referring to how one thinks rather than their personality as a whole. One need only look to the definitions of the words personality and mentality to see that this is true.

men·tal·i·ty
/menˈtalədē/
noun
noun: mentality; plural noun: mentalities
1.
derogatory
the characteristic attitude of mind or way of thinking of a person or group.
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/mentality

per·son·al·i·ty
/ˌpərsəˈnalədē/
noun
noun: personality; plural noun: personalities
1.
the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character.
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/personality

Seeing both definitions side by side makes it fairly evident that mentality fits much more closely to what personality theory speaks to. The definition for personality speaks to a combination of characteristics that would include your mentality, but also go beyond it including other qualities including, as it says, distinctive character, which is why everyone’s personalities are distinct and different from one another. However, as the definitions state, a person or group can all hold the same mentality to one another, which fits much better with the way that we group people into 16 categories of like minded reasoning/thinking.

1 ½. The term “Personality Theory” should be changed, but that’s never going to happen.

All of this is to say we really should be calling them the 16 mentalities rather than the 16 personality types. Unfortunately, to get the whole community to shift to this more accurate definition would be hopeless. However, this doesn’t change the fact that we should keep in mind what the cognitive functions and 4 letter type codes are actually speaking to.

We ended up with this incorrect terminology courtesy of an attempt to simplify information that someone clearly did not understand, and the subsequent string of offshoots to follow. Jung much more accurately labeled them originally as the Psychological Types, referring to that of the mind rather than attributing it to being your personality as a whole. Unfortunately, the simplified and incorrectly termed information is what gained mass popularity. So here we are with the incorrect terms. Forever stuck with them…..

2. All people of the same type will (within reason) have similar ways of coming to a conclusion

So, what do these cognitive mentalities actually tell us about a person? Well, anyone who has a good grasp on each of the cognitive functions and what they do should have a pretty good idea of this already, but I’ll try to condense and simplify. What ‘personality theory’ actually tells us is what someone’s reasoning preferences are. They should, loosely speaking, ‘think’ similarly. It shows what types of information one prioritizes and what judgments they prioritize. All members of the same type should be able to agree on what mental processes they use to reach a conclusion, even if they end up reaching different conclusions due to different experiences or other external factors. All ISTP’s, for instance, should be able to look at another ISTP and understand how they reached a conclusion and what line of reasoning and logic led them to a specific action or conclusion. This is the real thread that ties all of the same type together. They all share very similar processes of reasoning and all value the same types of information. A majority of them may come to very similar conclusions or life choices/preferences because of that, but being only a small part of a person’s overall personality, this is not a guarantee.

This is why we try to stress on this blog that it is not about what a person does. It’s about why they did it, how they did it, and what led up to that decision. What line of reasoning led to that conclusion? What was the motivation?

3. People of different types can look the same due to different parts of their personality being similar

The next implication of this is that people of different ‘Personality Types’ (as defined by MBTI etc.) can look the same due to other parts of their personality being similar. For instance, both an ISTJ and ENTP could be classified as a worrier. This common trait can make both of these types look the same given certain scenarios, but these similarities are due to a different part of one’s personality that has nothing to do with how one thinks and the types of information they prioritize etc. Ergo, it has nothing to do with your 4 letter type. However, this tends to trip people up as they will insist that an ENTP shouldn’t be a worrier, and blah blah blah. They fail to know what to attribute to type and what to attribute to other parts of one’s personality. This leads to rampant mistypes as they then base your cognitive preferences off of irrelevant or erroneous information.

4. Personality theory would probably be more scientifically verifiable if it focused on what it actually defined instead of trying to focus on personality as a whole

This is also why the scientific community views personality theory in such a bad light.

1. No one can seem to get on the same page since they are trying to, in some way or the other, attribute every last part of personality to a four letter type. This leads to broadened and oftentimes far too vague definitions and nothing concrete or consistent.

2. This makes the claims verifiably false as we have very easily proved in this article. To claim that this theory covers all of one’s personality is preposterous. No wonder people think that it has no value. However, I do think this theory has merit, personally, and that it could be scientifically verifiable if we were to focus on what it actually covers instead of trying to pull everything and the kitchen sink into it.

In conclusion…

We should focus on what personality theory is actually good for and stop trying to force it to cover a person’s entire personality. If we can manage that, the credibility of the entire theory would improve, and not only that, but a bunch of the stupid arguments would eventually die out. It is unfortunate that we are stuck with inaccurate labels, but hopefully we can reveal the true meanings and values of this theory in spite of it being fraught with bad terminology.