Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2024: Week 22
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality typology developed in 1943. There are sixteen types consisting of a combination of one trait from four binary sets: introversion/extroversion (I/E), intuition/sensing (N/S), thinking/feeling (T/F), and judging/perceiving (J/P). This system is widely popular but has faced criticism from the scientific community as pseudoscience.
MBTI types have attained prominence in fannish spaces alongside more whimsical fiction-based systems such as Hogwarts Houses and the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system. Typing characters and celebrities is a common activity, inspiring memes, metas, and dedicated blogs. Some acafans have conducted demographic surveys and found that introverted-intuitive MBTI types – less common in the general population – have more representation in fandom.
The MBTI-inspired website 16Personalities.com has generated a fandom centered on the anthromorphized characters it uses to represent each of the types.