"MBTI: Don't Hire These Types of People"…Late Stir in Japan

MBTI Personality Type Test Trending in Japan
'Certain Types Not Hired' SNS Posts Spread
"Fine for Fun, but Validity is Questionable"

The online MBTI test, which gained tremendous popularity in Korea, is also becoming a trend in Japan, but some controversies have arisen. On the 2nd, the Asahi Shimbun reported, "As the MBTI test becomes popular and its results are even used in employee recruitment, experts are raising doubts about its scientific basis." The MBTI test pointed out by the media is a free MBTI testing service called ‘16Personalities’.

The MBTI vending machine located in Dongdaemun, Seoul. Photo by Jo Yongjun jun21@

Associate Professor Kengo Nawata, a social psychologist at the Faculty of Humanities, Fukuoka University, told the newspaper, "I first heard about MBTI from students about two years ago," adding, "When I asked 200 students again in an introductory psychology lecture this April, about 90% said they had heard of MBTI." Although later than in Korea, MBTI is also popular among young people in Japan. In fact, according to Google Trends, which shows internet search frequency, the popularity of MBTI in Japan has increased dozens of times compared to three years ago, greatly surpassing horoscope fortunes.

Because it can show personality types, the MBTI test is also understood to be used in the job market. In June, Toyama Prefecture in Japan introduced ‘16Personalities’ as a means to understand one's personality in an online seminar for working adults considering job changes. This is a service mostly used in Korea as well, where answering multiple-choice questions for about 10 minutes results in a classification into 16 personality types. In Japan, there are reportedly recruitment sites that use these results to reduce ‘mismatches’ between hiring companies and job seekers.

Because of this, on social networking services (SNS), posts saying "People with certain personality types are not hired at workplaces" are spreading. In Korea, in 2022, ‘MBTI hiring’ such as "We hire candidates with E (extroverted) tendencies" emerged and caused controversy. The Asahi Shimbun reported, "Such ‘discrimination’ also appeared in personality diagnoses based on blood types in the past. Since the 1990s, people with blood types B and AB heard the phrase ‘I don’t want to live next to them’ more often than other blood types," and now MBTI has followed that trend.

However, the Japan MBTI Association claims that the ‘16Personalities’ service "has not been validated for reliability" and "imitates MBTI but is completely different." The original MBTI is a self-report personality type assessment tool developed in 1944. It classifies test takers into one of 16 psychological types based on four dichotomies: Introversion (I) vs. Extraversion (E), Intuition (N) vs. Sensing (S), Feeling (F) vs. Thinking (T), and Perceiving (P) vs. Judging (J). The association’s test is conducted by qualified professionals over more than four hours, with 93 questions where the test taker chooses one of two options for each.

However, questions have also been raised about the validity of the MBTI test itself. Asako Miura, a social psychologist at Osaka University, said, "MBTI is used as a tool to ‘intentionally see others vaguely,’ similar to the blood type diagnoses that were popular in the past." She pointed out, "It is difficult to deeply explore the reasons when you don’t get along with someone, so people rely on superficial typologies. It’s fine if it’s just for fun, but at important moments that decide the future, such as employment, shouldn’t we rather increase the resolution?"

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.