Personality tests are having another moment. The MBTI fills TikTok feeds with "INFP vs ENFP" memes. 16Personalities has been one of the most-visited personality sites on the internet for years. The Enneagram keeps showing up in podcast banter and dating profiles. The Big Five — quieter, more rigorous, less viral — is starting to follow them into the mainstream too.
This is the third or fourth major wave the personality test world has been through since the MBTI was first commercialized in the 1940s. Each wave looks a little different, but the underlying pull is the same: when the culture around someone gets noisy, the demand for a clean explanation of who they are goes up. Personality tests sell that explanation.
Here is what is driving the current wave, what previous waves can tell us about it, and why some of the demand is healthy and some of it is exactly what the research warns about.
The first wave: corporate training, 1940s–1980s
The MBTI was not built for self-discovery. Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers built it during World War II to help women entering wartime industrial jobs find work that suited them 1. After the war, it was picked up by corporate trainers and HR departments, and by the 1980s it was being used in offices across the United States for team-building and management workshops.
That commercial adoption is mostly what kept the MBTI alive academically. Most of the early validation studies were funded by the same organization that publishes the test 2. The scientific consensus has been skeptical for decades, but the corporate revenue kept the cultural footprint large enough that the next generation of readers grew up already knowing their four letters.
The first wave taught a key lesson: a personality test does not need to be scientifically rigorous to become culturally dominant. It needs a good distribution channel. The MBTI's distribution channel was the corporate training market, and it was extraordinary.
The second wave: the early internet, 1990s–2010s
The second wave was free online tests. By the late 1990s, you could take a passable MBTI knockoff in ten minutes without paying anyone, and the official MBTI's commercial moat started to erode.
What changed in this wave was the audience. Corporate trainees were a captive audience taking the test because their company paid for it. Online quiz-takers were taking it because they wanted to. The motivation shifted from professional development to self-discovery, and the descriptions evolved to match — more flattering, more identity-focused, less management-focused 3.
This is the era when 16Personalities became dominant. The site uses an MBTI-style four-letter typology with descriptions written more like horoscope readings than psychometric reports. The combination — familiar typology, free access, identity-flattering writeups — was extremely effective. The Big Five existed in academic journals during this entire period and barely registered with the public.
The current wave: short-form video, identity, and uncertainty
The current wave looks different from the first two for three reasons.
First, the format. TikTok and Instagram do not reward long, careful explanations of personality theory. They reward 30-second clips with sharp characters and clean labels. The MBTI's four-letter format fits that medium almost perfectly. The Big Five's continuous percentile scores do not — at least not yet.
Second, the audience. The current wave is largely Gen Z, the most online generation, coming of age in a period of unusually high uncertainty about work, relationships, and identity 3. Personality tests offer a fast, free version of self-knowledge in a format the algorithm rewards. The demand is real and the supply is endless.
Third, the role. In earlier waves, personality tests were a curiosity or a corporate workshop activity. In the current wave, they are showing up in dating profiles, friend groups, and identity discourse. People are using them as primary self-descriptors, not as occasional reference points. That intensifies both the upside (people are thinking carefully about how they are wired) and the downside (some are treating four letters as a fixed identity).
What the research says about the underlying need
The pull toward personality tests is not new and not silly. The need it serves is real.
Several decades of research on identity and well-being find that people who can articulate a clear, coherent self-concept tend to handle stress better, make decisions faster, and report higher life satisfaction 4. The technical term is "self-concept clarity," and the people who score higher on it do measurably better on a lot of life outcomes.
Personality tests offer a shortcut to self-concept clarity. They give you language to describe how you are wired. Some of that language is rigorous (Big Five percentile scores) and some of it is shaky (four-letter MBTI types), but the cognitive need being served is real either way. People are looking for a workable model of themselves, and the test is the easiest place to find one.
The problem is when the model is too rigid or too simple to bear the weight people put on it 2. A four-letter type that flips on retest cannot really anchor a life decision. A continuous trait score can, within limits.
The healthy and the unhealthy versions of the current wave
The healthy version of the current personality-test boom looks like this: people use a test result as a vocabulary for thinking about themselves and the people around them. They hold the result lightly. They notice the patterns the test names without treating those patterns as a fixed identity.
The unhealthy version looks like this: people use a test result as a primary self-definition. They explain everything about their life through the lens of their type. They use it to opt out of behaviors they could change ("I'm an introvert, so I can't network"). They treat compatibility with another type as a deal-breaker. The four letters become a small prison.
The research backs the first read and warns against the second. Trait scores are real and useful. They are also probabilistic, continuous, and changeable. Holding them at the right grip is most of the game 5.
Why the Big Five wave may be next
The current wave will eventually move on, and the most likely successor is the Big Five — or something built on top of it — for two reasons.
First, the underlying measurement is better. The four traits the MBTI captures are real, but the Big Five captures the same four plus Neuroticism, and reports them as continuous scores instead of either/or labels 1.
Second, the format constraints that favored four-letter types are starting to ease. Personality tools that show percentile scores, distribution patterns, and trait combinations are getting better at telling clear stories — short enough to share, rigorous enough to hold up.
The pull toward personality tests is not going away. The question is whether the next wave gets a measurement that matches the size of the demand.
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References
Footnotes
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McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1989). Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from the perspective of the five-factor model of personality. Journal of Personality, 57(1), 17–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1989.tb00759.x ↩ ↩2
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Pittenger, D. J. (1993). The utility of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Review of Educational Research, 63(4), 467–488. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543063004467 ↩ ↩2
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Stein, R., & Swan, A. B. (2019). Evaluating the validity of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator theory. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 13(2), e12434. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12434 ↩ ↩2
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Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative "description of personality": The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(6), 1216–1229. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.59.6.1216 ↩
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Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.1.1 ↩