Myers-Briggs Goes to China
Culturally drifting the night away
The first time I realized the Myers-Briggs personality test was a thing in East Asia was during my first week of school in Korea. As my co-teacher explained to me the pitfall of leaving at 4:29 p.m. instead of the contractually mandated 4:30 p.m., she probed a bit at my background—who, why, how, etc.
Then she asked me about my MBTI. I was taken aback—Myers-Briggs, here in a port city of the hermit kingdom? Though port cities are veritably hubs of cultural exchange, I thought maybe this was a ruse to connect with a narcissistic American.
But then I started looking at meetup apps and social media, and again, there Myers-Briggs was, interspersed with walls of hangul. In the pop culture sphere, I found idols discussing their MBTIs with fans. (Other rebellious stars declared the framework a bore.) Kakao, the Korean software company known for its messaging, maps, and ride-sharing services, introduced T-shirts bearing each of the 16 MBTI personality types. They sold out promptly. Before his recent disgrace, President Yoon tried to connect with the youth by boasting about his MBTI during his campaign (which one is the planner again?). Apparently, Korean youths now criticize each other for being Ts—overly analytical thinkers.
This was Korea. But when I visited Taiwan, it was the same story—traditional Chinese characters straining each pixel in their inscrutable umpteen strokes, interspersed with the odd “INTJ.” Sometimes, people’s opening question on meetup apps was “Are you an introvert or extrovert?” Beyond informal settings, employers in mainland China are now using it to screen job applicants, one example of what some worry is a growing “obsession.”
This is mildly amusing if only because the Myers-Briggs is not so scientific. For a bit of background, the test derives from two women, Katharine Cook Briggs, and Isabel Briggs Myers, who wanted to translate Carl Jung’s 1921 book Psychological Types into a usable framework. If the mark of success is influence, they certainly succeeded. Empirical research, however, suggests their Jungian framework is mostly bunk. (Because you read a platform home to so many disagreeable, mildly autistic men, you probably already knew this.)
But I think the more intriguing thing about Myers-Briggs’s rise in East Asia is what it might say about evolving attitudes toward psychology. Underlying the Myers-Briggs is indeed a particular vision of human psychology—namely that people have innate, fixed personality traits.
Those assumptions are quite secure in the West, but social psychologists have long claimed they are less so in the East. East Asians, the story goes, are more “high-context,” i.e., more likely to understand people and things in terms of their relationships, circumstances, or obligations than innate qualities. On tests of “Who am I?,” for example, Koreans and Japanese are supposedly more likely to mention things like being a brother or a student. Americans, by contrast, are keen to note MBTI-like qualities such as creativity, supposedly because they wish to “maintain their independence from others by attending to the self and by discovering and expressing their unique inner attributes.”
In the Geography of Thought, Richard Nisbett outlines all the studies suggesting a divide in Western and Eastern psychology. One practical example of the divide in contextual understanding is the coverage of school shootings. In the Western papers examined, the journalists talk about the shooter’s inborn traits—in short, he was just a weird, messed-up dude. (I’d venture to guess his MBIT started with an “I.”) But the Chinese newspapers talk about all the ways his circumstances might have motivated him to commit the atrocity—stress, poor grades, etc. Notions of fixed personality traits are strikingly absent.
That was then. But at this rate, it sounds like a Chinese newspaper might include a Myers-Brigg personality assessment for the shooter. What gives? And why don’t Taiwanese social media users just brag about how they’re a good sibling or something?
One consideration is that social psychology research is just not very good. Given it was published before the replication crisis, I imagine that lots of the studies in Geography of Thought don’t replicate. Even if they do, it is not clear that they “generalize.” Basically, when I read about studies that draw broad conclusions about how Japanese people think based on how they respond to questionnaires about a picture of a fish tank or something, I’m a bit skeptical. Chinese zodiacs already make lots of claims about people’s personality traits based on the year they are born, which does not seem to uphold the context narrative so much. Japanese people also used to link blood type to personality traits.
Nisbett is quick to note that for all the broad brushwork, East Asians seem to mostly think of psychological traits the same way as Westerners. He recounts being in China in the early 1980s and mostly finding that people talk about each other’s dispositions just as Americans do—Liu is a liar; Lee is a lecher. (Is this a triumph of the humanities over social science?) He also points to research that East Asians have essentially the same Big-5 psychology framework as Westerners, with the notable addition of interpersonal relatedness, which includes qualities like face-saving, filial piety, and rénqíng (人情).
It could also just be true that the affinity for the MBTI coincides with more flexible conceptions of personality. (In that case, are East Asians more likely to take the test multiple times?) Part of the appeal of the MBTI might be its sheer novelty and the fact that so many other people are taking it. The MBTI also has the potential to emphasize one’s relationship with others within cleanly delineated categories, so it is not just an individualizing tool.
But maybe we are just seeing a generational shift in psychology. It is, after all, the youngest generation with which the MBTI is most popular, and there is certainly evidence of large-scale behavioral changes in young people across East Asia (and many regions). If we take Nisbett’s work seriously, this kind of psychology can be quite malleable. Research suggests, for example, that Japanese people see a boost in self-esteem when they live in the US. Would they not see similar changes if Japanese corporate culture, education, etc. steadily moved toward Western norms?
Perhaps East Asians just increasingly find themselves navigating contexts where lower-context individuation is required. Social media, hiring (and now even firing) employees, and talking to your narcissistic Western co-workers, all come to mind.
I am a big fan of Robin Hanson’s notion of cultural drift, which suggests we are seeing a global convergence with (sometimes maladaptive) Western elite norms in the absence of selection pressures. One of the side effects of this drift appears to be lower fertility rates. Others might include a changing sense of self.