I am almost thirty years older than one of my best friends, whom I will call Ada.
When people see us together,
they assume we are mother and daughter
.
We have fun and
sometimes we pretend those roles
, although thanks to this friendship I have privileged access to
certain obsessions and knowledge of Gen Z
that, I believe, some parents do not have.
When we first met, Ada informed me that
my personality was that of an ENTJ
.
This is how I learned about a common obsession among twenty-something kids: looking at the world according to the Myers Briggs test, which divides all of humanity into just sixteen psychological types.
It sounded like pseudoscience
to me
, so a long discussion ensued with Ada in which she argued that if other generations were out there talking about astral signs, centennials had every right to have fun with this test.
Who wouldn't like a questionnaire to explain why certain things make them anxious or the reason why they disliked that co-worker from the first minute?
So I indulged Ada and took an online questionnaire.
I turned out to be what she had predicted.
We have all succumbed to the promise of
quick fixes in tests
, from those that measure intelligence to those that swear to unravel your vocation.
Before they came in frivolous magazines, today they flood the web.
But in a country where psychoanalytic therapy is dominant, almost no one from my generation heard of this classification created by two Americans (Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers) in the 1940s.
To some of Carl Jung's ideas (such as the concepts of “introvert” and “extravert”), this mother and daughter added their intuitions and created their own indicator, which most experts consider at least questionable.
A few months after this talk with Ada, I had medical exams for a new job, the kind of scrutiny that takes an entire morning and includes blood tests, urine samples, and x-rays.
What I didn't know is that my employer had included a set of psychological tests in that worry exam.
I had to draw little pictures, copy geometric shapes and draw a ship in the storm, all on an empty stomach and, therefore, in the worst of moods.
It turned out that the last test…was the MBTI questionnaire.
I filled it quickly and went to eat:
I knew that an ENTJ fits well as a university professor.
Myers and Briggs created these indicators at a time when women were entering the workforce en masse due to the war.
They assumed that it would help them know
which tasks they would feel most comfortable with
, since many had never worked outside the home.
Perhaps this made some sense in the 40s, especially if we think that psychology was taking its first steps.
What do labor consultants who continue to use the MBTI indicator 80 years later believe they are measuring?