Big Five vs MBTI: what the difference is

What is the Big Five?

The Big Five is a description of the broad dimensions along which people reliably differ: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism, the last often reported the other way up as Emotional Stability. The initials give the mnemonic OCEAN. Each dimension summarises many narrower habits that travel together, and each is continuous, so a result places you relative to other people rather than sorting you into a kind.

It was assembled from two lines of measurement that met in the middle. One took the trait words out of the dictionary and looked at which of them moved together in large samples; five broad clusters kept reappearing, and the model survived repeated attempts to replace it (Goldberg, 1993). The other built questionnaire scales and found the same structure underneath. When adjective ratings and questionnaire scales, and self-reports and ratings by people who know you, all point at the same five dimensions, the structure is unlikely to be an artefact of one method (McCrae & Costa, 1987).

Modern inventories also report facets beneath each dimension, which carry information the broad score does not: the BFI-2 specifies fifteen facets nested inside the five domains and shows that they add predictive power over the domains alone (Soto & John, 2017). The full explainer takes each dimension in turn.

What is the MBTI?

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers from Carl Jung's writing about psychological types, first published in the 1940s. It scores four dichotomies, Extraversion or Introversion, Sensing or Intuition, Thinking or Feeling, and Judging or Perceiving, and combines the letters into one of sixteen types such as INFJ or ESTP, each with a written description.

Its theory is where it differs most. Jung's account proposed qualitatively distinct preferences, ways of taking in information and reaching decisions that a person favours by disposition. The instrument was built to identify which of each pair a person prefers, so the output is a category by design rather than by rounding. That design is also what makes it easy to use: sixteen names are memorable and portable in a way that five percentile scores are not.

The official instrument is paid and usually delivered through a certified practitioner, and the publisher advises that it should not be used to select people for jobs. Most people who know their four letters took a free imitation instead, which uses the same naming style with a model of its own.

How do the two models compare?

The row that matters most in practice is the third. A type reports which side of a boundary you fell on; a trait score reports how far from the middle you are. Someone at the 52nd percentile on Extraversion and someone at the 95th are living quite different social lives, and both receive an E.

What does the evidence say about the relationship between them?

The two have been measured in the same people, which makes this one of the better-evidenced comparisons in personality assessment. In a study of 468 adults using self-reports and peer ratings on a five-factor inventory, the four MBTI indices measured aspects of four of the five major dimensions, and the scales behaved as relatively independent continuous dimensions. There was no support for the view that the instrument measures truly dichotomous preferences or qualitatively distinct types, and the authors proposed the five-factor model as an alternative interpretive framework (McCrae & Costa, 1989).

A later study gave both the MBTI and a NEO five-factor inventory to 160 adults and found the same pattern. Inventory extraversion correlated strongly with the extraversion-introversion scale, openness correlated with all four MBTI scales and most closely with sensing-intuition, agreeableness correlated with thinking-feeling, and conscientiousness with both thinking-feeling and judging-perceiving. Neuroticism was not related to any MBTI scale (Furnham, 1996).

The practical consequence was drawn in a review for practitioners, which concluded that the instrument, for all its intuitive appeal, may not support the claims made for it, and that considerable caution is warranted before drawing inferences from a four-letter type (Pittenger, 2005). Read together, the three papers say something specific: the MBTI measures real traits, in roughly the right places, and then discards the degree. The letters are not empty; they are compressed.

When is each one useful?

• The MBTI as vocabulary. Sixteen names give people a word for something they had noticed about themselves but never had to describe. That is a real contribution, and it is why type language spreads through teams and friendships without any marketing.
• The Big Five as measurement. If you want to know how far from average you sit, which facet is driving a broad score, or what research links a position to, you need a continuous scale. Traits reported this way are what the published literature on prediction and change is built on.
• Anything with a decision attached. Neither is built for selecting people, and the MBTI publisher says so about its own instrument. Compression makes a type especially fragile here, because the many people near a boundary can receive either letter (Pittenger, 2005).

The comparison is not a contest between a good model and a bad one. It is the difference between a naming system and a measuring system, and most disagreements about the two come from expecting one of them to do the other's job.

How do you translate between them?

Roughly, and only in one direction with confidence. The letters can be read as the direction of four trait positions, without saying how far out any of them is.

• E or I corresponds to Extraversion, with E toward the higher end.
• S or N corresponds to Openness to Experience, with N toward the higher end.
• T or F corresponds to Agreeableness, with F toward the higher end.
• J or P corresponds to Conscientiousness, with J toward the higher end.
• Nothing at all corresponds to Emotional Stability, the gap the translation cannot fill (Furnham, 1996).

Going the other way, from five scores to four letters, throws information away and is best avoided, because the letters cannot be recovered honestly from a percentile near the middle, which is where most people sit. INFJ personality works one type through in detail, and types of personality links the rest of the sixteen along with the other systems that cut the same ground.

One more caution about treating a type as a stable fact. Rank-order consistency on measured traits rises with age, from about .31 in childhood to a plateau near .74 in later midlife (Roberts & DelVecchio, 2000), so people mostly keep their relative standing while still shifting. A letter can flip on a much smaller shift, because the scale underneath it is continuous (McCrae & Costa, 1989).

How does Wellington measure this?

Wellington is a science-based personality assessment from Therabot Labs LLC. It measures personality as continuous traits, built on the Big Five and HEXACO models, and writes the results back as a personal report rather than a type.

The free Snapshot asks 60 questions, takes about 7 minutes and scores 6 continuous dimensions: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Openness to Experience and Honesty-Humility, the Big Five plus Honesty-Humility from the HEXACO model. Each is the average of several statements on a five-point accuracy scale, placed against a reference sample as a percentile and reported in one of three bands: Quiet below the 30th percentile, Balanced to the 70th, High above it. Norms are provisional while the norming sample is completed, and the methods page says so. The bands and the Portrait names exist to make the result easier to talk about; the percentile is the measurement, and it is always shown alongside. You answer the first ten questions before anything is asked; after question ten you sign in with an email so answers are saved and results can be shown.

In the written report, every dimension has three pages, one per band, prepared in advance by the writing and psychology team, and your answers decide which you read. That is the part a type test does well and most trait inventories do badly: a table of percentiles is accurate and hard to use. The Wellington Membership, $4.99 a month, adds 336 questions across 4 chapters to reach 90 traits and reaches 255 traits across eight domains. Wellington is a wellness tool for reflection, not a medical or psychological diagnosis, and it does not replace care from a qualified professional. It is not designed for hiring, and you can export or delete your data at any time.

Questions people ask

Is the Big Five more accurate than the MBTI?

As a measurement, yes, for a structural reason. The Big Five reports how far from average you sit, while a type reports which side of a boundary you landed on, so the same answers carry more information in trait form. The MBTI scales do track four real dimensions (Furnham, 1996), but a four-letter formula supports fewer inferences than its users usually draw (Pittenger, 2005).

Can I convert my MBTI type to Big Five scores?

Only as a direction. E points toward higher Extraversion, N toward higher Openness, F toward higher Agreeableness and J toward higher Conscientiousness (McCrae & Costa, 1989). What the letters cannot tell you is how far from the middle you are, and no letter corresponds to Emotional Stability, so part of the picture is simply absent.

Why does the MBTI not measure Neuroticism?

Because it was built from a theory about preferences in perceiving and judging, not from a survey of how people differ overall. Studies that scored both instruments in the same people found no MBTI scale related to Neuroticism (Furnham, 1996; McCrae & Costa, 1989). That leaves out the dimension most closely tied to how steady a person feels under pressure.

Are the sixteen types real categories?

The evidence does not support reading them that way. Scored alongside a five-factor inventory in 468 adults, the four MBTI scales behaved as continuous dimensions, with no support for truly dichotomous preferences or qualitatively distinct types (McCrae & Costa, 1989). The types are a convenient way of naming regions of a continuous space, which is useful and different from a natural kind.