Korea goes crazy for MBTI

Last week in class, one of my students mentioned how Koreans her age (the so-called MZ Generation) are seriously into MBTI – the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality assessment test. As I soon discovered on trawling the Internet, MBTI is practically an obsession amongst the young here in Korea.

So, what is MBTI? It was devised in 1943 in the United States by a mother-daugher team, Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs-Myers.   They were inspired by Carl Jung’s analytic psychology, but neither had professional training in psychology. This didn’t stop their personality assessment questionnaire taking off. It appealed to anyone who wanted simple answers to very complex questions, a clear map to the wilderness of the human mind.  MBTI was therefore appealing to huge corporations and confused teenagers.  

These are the basics personalities you can choose from:

The eight basic types combine to produce 16 composites, ranging from ISFP (Introvert-Sensing-Feeling-Perceiving) which make you kind, spontaneous, and accommodating,  to ENTJ (Extravert-INtuitive-Thinking-Judging), which means you are confident, innovative, and logical.   Of the latter, the website Truity, which has the by-line ‘Understand who you truly are’,  says that it ‘indicates a person who is energized by time spent with others (Extraverted), who focuses on ideas and concepts rather than facts and details (iNtuitive), who makes decisions based on logic and reason (Thinking) and who prefers to be planned and organized rather than spontaneous and flexible (Judging). ENTJs are sometimes referred to as Commander personalities because of their innate drive to lead others.’

Here is the full menu:

If only it was so damn simple! Jung must be turning in his grave.  He is on record as saying that MBTI profoundly misunderstood his analysis of personality. First of all, the assumption of MBTI is that you have a stable, fixed personality that is fully accessible to conscious self-reflection, that we are objective in our appraisal of our own personality traits. Secondly, you will note that according to Myers-Briggs, everyone’s personality is basically comprised of positive traits. This is very far from the thinking of the man who urged us to descend deep into the murky darkness of our consciousness, where we must face our ‘shadow’. As Jung wrote: ‘Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself to wants to be.’  It is also obviously very different from the prognosis of Jung’s mentor and then rival, Sigmund Freud, concerning human nature (think, Oedipus Complex, the ID, and the Death Instinct).

MBTI is a sanitized, feel-good bowdlerization of very complex modern, but now dated, insights into the human psyche. In fact, if it wasn’t such an influential test, one might dismiss it as innocent fun, like astrology.  And now, eighty years after it was first devised, and on the other side of the world, MBTI has been especially adopted by South Koreans. They are far and away the most avid adopters of the test, and the MBTI categories are routinely used in formal and informal social situations, and as a dating tool.  Why?

There are several obvious reasons. Above all, perhaps, there is the influence of Korea’s collectivist social structure.  This inclines individuals to seek to identify themselves not as independent, unique, selves but as members of clearly defined groups. In other words, as I noted in a previous post, when considering their identity, Koreans tend to struggle to associate their private self with a publicly recognizable self. But MBTI facilitates this by providing sixteen clear personality types. As Sarah Chea writes in the Korea JoongAng Daily: ‘Koreans tend to easily feel anxious when they think they don’t belong to any groups, so they push themselves to be involved so they can belong somewhere. They like to feel the sense of community from being with others in the same group, and feel relief when they feel they are not alone.’   

Then there is the fact that Covid-19 pandemic accentuated people’s sense of isolation, making young Koreans even more desirous of connecting with others through explicit shared criteria concerning identity.  Social media made this possible, but also required radical simplification.  It’s much, much easier to say ‘I’m ESFJ’ than to struggle with the vague and shifting reality of one’s personality. But only, of course, if one is confident whoever is reading knows what you mean. MBTI therefore also serves to establish clear in-group/out-group boundaries not just within the 16 different personality types but in relation to assessing people in terms of those who have adopted the MBTI vision as a whole and those who have not.

This desire to share one’s personality with others is surely motivated by the need to feel less alone, but also by the fact that we now live in a culture in which self-realization is highly valued. The era we are now living through has radically altered how we think about ourselves, making the private self a ‘bankable’ commodity. But as the philosopher Han Byung-Chul notes, the deepest problem for people in the developed world is excessively positive attitudes  which lead to a pervasive failure to manage negative experiences. This is surely another reason why MBTI is appealing. It allows us to gesture towards the interiority required of the fully contemporary identity while seeing ourselves only in relation to positive personality traits.

If we look at MBTI historically, we can recognize that it was born during a period in the United States when there was a drive towards the instrumentalization and rationalization of society in the service of the bureaucratic thinking central to a managerial capitalism, and tied to the immediate need to optimize efficiency for the war effort.  As noted by the Frankfurt School thinkers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer  – who when Myers and Briggs-Myers devised MBTI were living in the United States in exile from Nazi Germany – instrumental reason privileges the objective at the expense of the subjective, and obscures the fact that so-called ‘reason’ is always a mix of the rational and the irrational, the subjective and the objective. As a result, the objective is viewed as unchanging, eternal, and universal.

This is precisely what MBTI does in relation to personality and identity. Which means Koreans are placing the need for ‘efficiency ‘ in relation to achieving their ends above all other possible motives and desires. They are coping with the hyper-novelty, stresses and strains of accelerated modernization and westernization in their country by resorting to a blatant example of objective, instrumental reason, deployed in relation to the intimate and vulnerable region of their inner experiences - their personalities where, in reality, subjective experience reigns. This will surely inhibit any genuine exploration of identity. As Jung wrote: ‘The darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams.’

By channeling the desire to present one’s private self in public without risk, through sanitized publicly accessible categories, MBTI is certainly a useful tool of social conformity. It is a million miles away from the profound crisis of identity evident in the West’s preoccupation with gender dysphoria. So, perhaps I am being too negative. In this cultural light, perhaps MBTI is a valid means of ensuring social stability.

Or perhaps most young Koreans think of MBTI as just a fun way of referring to each other, a game, and take it all with a big pinch of salt.

SOURCES:

The MBTI tables are from: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/22/asia/south-korea-mbti-personality-test-dating-briggs-myers-intl-hnk-dst/index.html

Truity quote: https://www.truity.com/personality-type/ENTJ

Korea JoongAng Daily quote: https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2022/04/16/why/korea-mbti-blood-types/20220416070206510.html

Han Byung-Chul’s views can be found, for example, in The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press, 2013)

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s ideas concerning ‘instrumental reason’ can be found in Critique of Instrumental Reason (Verso, 2013)

Carl Jung’s writings are voluminous. A good place to start is Modern Man in Search of A Soul (1936) which is available in a new edition from Routledge. The Amazon blurb is telling: ‘One of his most famous books, it perfectly captures the feelings of confusion that many sense today. Generation X might be a recent concept, but Jung spotted its forerunner over half a century ago. For anyone seeking meaning in today's world, Modern Man in Search of a Soul is a must.’