MBTI in Korea

I made several posts in the past about being a fan of K-Pop, mostly female soloists, and groups. Here is a page from my Spotify 2021 review thing:

I also watch a lot of Korean variety shows, which feature many K-Celebrities. I have noticed a lot of them talking about their MBTI type, especially younger people. This was not a thing until recently. MBTI stands for Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator. From the Wikipedia article:

In personality typology, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self-report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. The test attempts to assign four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving. One letter from each category is taken to produce a four-letter test result, such as “INFJ” or “ENFP”.

Though the MBTI resembles some psychological theories, it has been criticized as pseudoscience and is not widely endorsed by academic researchers in the field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator

My first introduction to MBTI was during MBA school orientation. It was more of an ice-breaker exercise, and no-one talked about it afterwards, except whether they were E (extrovert) or I (introvert). My guess is that most people in the US do not know or care about their MBTI type, and it is seen as pseudoscience entertainment, like astrology or Tarot cards.

However, MBTI is very popular in Korea. I have seen the cast of many variety shows discuss their type on-air, like their obsession with blood types. It is probably just for fun, but like every attempt to label people, it become bad if used by government or companies to set policy or make employment decisions.

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A quick search on YouTube for “Amazing Saturday MBTI” returns a bunch of video clips. This is the episode I just watched that prompted this post. Sorry, no English subtitles. If you have never watched this show, it is really funny. Moreso if you speak Korean or can find subtitles.

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Since it was so long ago when I did my first MBTI test, I went online to try again. The first Google search result for “MBTI” produces this link to 16Personalities. I answered their long list of questions and it said my type was ISTJ-T. I guess there is a bit of science in pseudoscience since some of the descriptions agree with my self-assessment, but that is also how fortune-telling works. The career portion was most “accurate” since I do work in a field that is mentioned in the resulting report.