Big Five vs MBTI: What the Research Shows

At a glance

Where each one came from

The MBTI: theory first

Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers built the MBTI in the 1940s from Carl Jung’s Psychological Types (1921). Jung described attitudes (extraversion and introversion) and functions (sensing, intuition, thinking, feeling). Briggs and Myers added the judging-perceiving scale to work out which function dominates. Educational Testing Service published the instrument for research in 1962; it is now owned by The Myers-Briggs Company.

The design assumes each preference is either-or, the way most people are either right- or left-handed. That assumption is where most of the criticism lands.

The Big Five: data first

The Big Five started with the idea that important personality differences end up encoded in language. Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert (1936) listed roughly 18,000 English words describing people. Raymond Cattell reduced them to clusters; Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal (1961), analyzing US Air Force rating data, found five factors; Warren Norman (1963) and Lewis Goldberg (1990) confirmed the structure; and Paul Costa and Robert McCrae built the NEO questionnaires around it. No one decided in advance that there should be five.

Reliability: does the result hold still?

David Pittenger’s reviews (1993, 2005) reported that as many as half of people received a different MBTI type when retested after about five weeks. That sounds damning, but the underlying scale scores are fairly consistent: Robert and Mary Margaret Capraro’s 2002 reliability generalization study found acceptable reliability for the continuous MBTI scales in most samples.

The instability comes from the cut-off. Someone one point on the introverted side who retests one point on the extraverted side changes type completely, though their score barely moved. A trait score just reports the small move.

Big Five scores are stable over weeks and grow more stable with age. Brent Roberts and Wendy DelVecchio’s 2000 meta-analysis found rank-order consistency rising from about 0.31 in childhood to about 0.54 in the college years and around 0.74 between ages 50 and 70.

Are people really types?

If types were real, scores on each MBTI scale should cluster in two humps with a dip in the middle. Kevin Bess and Robert Harvey (2002) examined large MBTI datasets and found single-humped distributions: most people score near the middle, with fewer at each end. Robert Arnau and colleagues (2003) used taxometric methods, which are designed to detect hidden categories, and found the MBTI scales behaved as dimensions.

So the question is how much of a trait you have. A type label hides that, and a trait score shows it.

Validity: how they connect, and what each predicts

The two systems measure much of the same ground. Robert McCrae and Paul Costa (1989) gave both questionnaires to the same adults and found:

• Extraversion-Introversion lined up with Big Five Extraversion.
• Sensing-Intuition lined up with Openness.
• Thinking-Feeling lined up with Agreeableness.
• Judging-Perceiving lined up with Conscientiousness.
• Nothing in the MBTI lined up with Neuroticism.

The correlations were moderate to strong, roughly 0.4 to 0.7. The MBTI is, in effect, a coarse reading of four Big Five traits that leaves out the fifth.

That missing trait matters. Benjamin Lahey (2009) reviewed evidence that Neuroticism predicts a wide range of mental and physical health problems, and John Malouff and colleagues’ 2010 meta-analysis linked a partner’s higher Neuroticism to lower relationship satisfaction.

On outcomes, the Big Five record is deep. Murray Barrick and Michael Mount (1991) found Conscientiousness predicted job performance across occupations. Brent Roberts and colleagues (2007) found traits predicted mortality, divorce and career attainment about as well as socioeconomic status and cognitive ability. Christopher Soto (2019) replicated 87% of 78 published trait-outcome links. The MBTI has far less peer-reviewed predictive evidence, and its own publisher states it should not be used to select job candidates.

Where the MBTI is still useful

The MBTI frames every type as a set of preferences with strengths, and no type comes out as worse than another. That makes it a low-threat way into team conversations about how people like to communicate, decide and plan. A Big Five profile that reports high Neuroticism or low Agreeableness can feel like a verdict if nobody explains that both ends of every trait have costs and benefits.

The letters are also familiar. If your team already speaks MBTI, the shared vocabulary has value. The mistake is treating a type as fixed or using it to decide who to hire.

Which should you use?

For a fuller list of tests, see 16Personalities alternatives. For using either system with clients, see the guide for coaches; for partners, the couples guide.

How Depth Profile handles both

Depth Profile scores you on the Big Five using IPIP-style items. The same free assessment includes 16 MBTI-style questions, four per letter, so your profile can carry an estimated four-letter type as a bridge for people who already think in MBTI terms. The report treats that type as an approximation, because it is one. You can add an attachment style test and a RIASEC career test, and the optional $19 report interprets your scores together, with percentile context for each trait. If you have a specific problem rather than a general question, start with the free Why You’re Stuck exercise.