16 personality types vs the Big Five: what your type really tells you

Four letters such as INTJ or ESFP are probably the best-known shorthand in pop psychology. People put them in dating profiles, team introductions and social media bios. Personality researchers, however, mostly work with a different system: the Big Five.

This guide explains where the 16 types come from, what the research says about them, and how they relate to the Big Five. It also shows how our free 16 personality types test is built, and why we ask you to look at your percentiles rather than just your letters.

Where the 16 types come from

Jung’s psychological types

The idea of personality “types” goes back to the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. In Psychological Types, first published in German in 1921, he described two attitudes, introversion and extraversion, and four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition (Jung, 1971). Jung built his theory from clinical observation and reflection, not from questionnaires or statistics.

From Jung to a four-letter code

In the mid-twentieth century, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers turned Jung’s ideas into a questionnaire. It sorted people on four pairs of preferences: Extraversion–Introversion (E/I), Sensing–Intuition (S/N), Thinking–Feeling (T/F) and Judging–Perceiving (J/P). The fourth pair was their own addition to Jung’s scheme. Combining one letter from each pair gives 16 possible types (Stein & Swan, 2019).

That questionnaire became the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which is widely used in workplaces and coaching (Stein & Swan, 2019). “MBTI” and “Myers-Briggs” are registered trademarks of The Myers & Briggs Foundation. Mind Examination’s test is not affiliated with The Myers & Briggs Foundation or The Myers-Briggs Company, and it does not use their questions.

What researchers criticize about type models

Type models are easy to remember, and many people find their type description recognizable. The main criticisms are about measurement, not about whether the descriptions sound pleasant.

People are not split into two camps

A type system assumes that people fall into two distinct groups on each dimension: you are either an introvert or an extravert. If that were true, scores would pile up in two humps with a gap in the middle (a “bimodal” distribution).

That is not what the data show. In a study of several hundred adults, McCrae and Costa (1989) found no support for the view that the questionnaire measures truly dichotomous preferences or qualitatively distinct types. Instead, scores behaved like four fairly independent continuous dimensions. Most people sit somewhere near the middle, with fewer at the extremes, much like height.

Types are less stable than they look

When a continuous score is cut into two halves, everyone close to the cut-off is only a few answers away from the other letter. A slightly different mood on the day of testing can flip one letter, and with four letters, the chance that at least one flips adds up quickly.

Reviews of the evidence have found that a sizeable share of people receive a different four-letter type when they retake the test, even after a short interval (Pittenger, 2005). The underlying scores tend to be more stable than the letters, which is exactly what you would expect if the letters are cuts through a continuum. Pittenger (2005) also concluded that the instrument may not yet be able to support the claims its promoters make, and that inferences from the four-letter type call for considerable caution.

Two people with the same type can differ a lot

Someone who only just scored on the “E” side and someone who is far more outgoing than nearly everyone both get an E. Their four letters may match while their actual scores differ more than those of two people with opposite letters who both sat near the middle. The letter hides that information.

The Big Five: the research standard

Where it came from

The Big Five, or five-factor model, grew out of decades of research on how people describe each other. When researchers collected large sets of personality adjectives and analyzed which ones tend to go together, the same five broad dimensions kept appearing (Goldberg, 1992; McCrae & John, 1992):

• Extraversion: sociable, talkative and energetic versus quiet and reserved
• Agreeableness: warm, trusting and cooperative versus blunt and skeptical
• Conscientiousness: organized, dependable and goal-directed versus flexible and spontaneous
• Emotional stability (the opposite pole is called neuroticism): calm and even-tempered versus prone to worry and mood swings
• Openness to experience (sometimes called intellect or imagination): curious and imaginative versus practical and conventional

McCrae and John (1992) summarized evidence that the five factors appear both in everyday language and in questionnaires built from theory, and that they hold up across different raters and cultures. Goldberg (1992) developed sets of simple markers for measuring them, which later became the starting point for free item pools.

What the Big Five predicts

Unlike types, Big Five traits are scored on a continuum, so each trait can be related to real-world outcomes. A large review found that personality traits predicted mortality, divorce and occupational attainment about as well as socioeconomic status and cognitive ability did (Roberts et al., 2007). Conscientiousness, for example, was linked to longer life and better work outcomes.

These links have also been tested for replicability. Soto (2019) attempted preregistered replications of 78 published associations between Big Five traits and life outcomes, in samples totaling more than 6,000 adults. About 87% of the replication attempts succeeded, but the effects were typically weaker than first reported, at roughly three-quarters of the original strength. That is a useful reminder: traits shift the odds a little; they do not decide anyone’s life.

How type letters map onto the Big Five

The two systems are not as far apart as they might seem. McCrae and Costa (1989) gave the same people both the four-letter questionnaire and a Big Five inventory, and found clear correspondences:

• E/I lines up with Extraversion
• S/N lines up with Openness: people scoring toward N tended to be more open to experience
• T/F lines up with Agreeableness: people scoring toward F tended to be more agreeable
• J/P lines up with Conscientiousness: people scoring toward J tended to be more conscientious

The type system has no dimension for the fifth factor, emotional stability (McCrae & Costa, 1989). That is a notable gap, because how easily someone is thrown by stress is one of the most informative things a personality measure can capture. McCrae and Costa’s conclusion was that the type questionnaire is best understood as measuring four of the five Big Five dimensions, rather than sorting people into distinct types.

Why public-domain items matter

Most well-known commercial personality questionnaires are copyrighted. You usually pay to take them, and researchers cannot freely inspect, translate or adapt the questions.

The International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) was set up to change that. It offers thousands of personality items, and scales built from them, in the public domain, so anyone can use them without permission or fees (Goldberg et al., 2006). Because the items are open, independent researchers can check how well they work, and a free test site can use well-studied questions instead of writing untested ones.

Why percentiles beat letters

A percentile tells you what share of people score below you. “64th percentile on extraversion” means you described yourself as more extraverted than about 64% of people, so slightly above the middle. A letter only tells you which side of the middle you fell on.

Percentiles have three practical advantages:

• They show how strong a tendency is. The 51st and 99th percentiles are very different, but both produce the same letter.
• They make flips easy to understand. If you are near the 50th percentile, a different letter on a retest is no surprise and says little about who you are.
• They match the research. Since personality traits are continuous (McCrae & Costa, 1989), a continuous score describes them more faithfully than a binary label.

How our 16 personality types test works

Our test combines the familiar type format with Big Five measurement. Here is exactly what it does:

• The questions. You rate 50 short statements, such as “Am always prepared”, on a five-point scale from “Very inaccurate” to “Very accurate”. These are the public-domain IPIP items that represent Goldberg’s (1992) Big Five markers, ten per trait.
• The four letters. Each letter comes from one Big Five trait, following the correspondences reported by McCrae and Costa (1989): extraversion gives E or I, openness gives N or S, agreeableness gives F or T, and conscientiousness gives J or P.
• Where the line is drawn. Your average on each trait is compared with a provisional population median, not with the middle of the answer scale. This keeps the letters balanced: the median we use for agreeableness, for example, is 3.9 on the 1–5 scale, well above the scale midpoint of 3. These medians are working estimates, not norms from a large representative sample, so treat your percentiles as approximate.
• The fifth letter. Because the four-letter system leaves out emotional stability, we add it as a fifth letter: C (composed) if you described yourself as relatively calm under stress, or R (reactive) if you described yourself as quicker to feel worry or frustration. A result might read INFP-R or ESTJ-C.
• The percentiles. For each of the five axes, you see an estimated percentile and a note when you are close to the middle. Each type also comes with a short descriptive name and summary to make it easier to remember.

The result is meant for self-reflection, not for hiring, clinical assessment or major life decisions. Your answers describe how you see yourself today, and self-descriptions can shift with mood, context and time.

Frequently asked questions

Is the 16 personality types test scientifically valid?

It depends on how it is built. Classic type questionnaires have been criticized for treating continuous traits as either/or categories and for types that change on retest (Pittenger, 2005). Our test uses research-based Big Five items and shows percentiles alongside the letters, which addresses part of that problem. The letters are still a simplification, so read the percentiles first.

Why did I get a different type when I retook the test?

Most likely you are close to the median on at least one axis. If a percentile sits between roughly 40 and 60, a few different answers can flip the letter. Your underlying trait has probably not changed much; check whether the percentiles moved, not just the letters.

Is this the same as the Myers-Briggs test?

No. Our test is not affiliated with The Myers & Briggs Foundation or The Myers-Briggs Company and does not use their questions. It uses public-domain IPIP items that measure the Big Five, then expresses four of those traits in the familiar four-letter format.

Which is better, type or Big Five?

For research and prediction, the Big Five is the better-supported model (McCrae & John, 1992; Roberts et al., 2007). Types can still be a friendly way to start a conversation about personality. Our test gives you both: a memorable code and the trait percentiles behind it.