MBTI vs Big Five: how the 16 types map onto the scientific model

What is the Big Five?

The Big Five came from the lexical approach: the idea that important personality differences end up encoded as words in everyday language. When researchers collected the thousands of English adjectives that describe people and analysed how self- and peer-ratings on them cluster, five broad factors kept emerging. Lewis Goldberg’s work on this structure produced a widely used set of public-domain markers for the five factors.^[3]

Each trait is a continuum. Most people score somewhere in the middle, and a score only means something relative to other people, usually expressed as a percentile.

The mapping: which MBTI letter is which Big Five trait

In 1989 McCrae and Costa gave 468 adults both the MBTI and the NEO Personality Inventory, a standard Big Five measure, and also collected ratings from people who knew them. Each MBTI scale correlated mainly with one Big Five trait.^[1] Adrian Furnham later found the same broad pattern in a separate sample.^[2]

A few things follow from this table.

• E/I is the best-measured MBTI letter. It is close to the same construct as Big Five Extraversion. Our introvert vs extrovert guide covers what that trait does and does not mean.
• S/N is mostly about Openness, that is, curiosity, imagination and interest in abstract ideas. “Intuition” in MBTI language is not a sixth sense.
• T/F is only partly Agreeableness. “Thinking” does not mean more intelligent or logical. A T simply tends to be more direct and less accommodating; an F tends to be warmer and more conflict-averse.
• J/P is only partly Conscientiousness. McCrae and Costa specifically questioned the interpretation of the J/P index.^[1] In practice J leans organised and planful and P leans spontaneous and flexible.
• The fifth trait is missing. How you handle stress, worry and setbacks is one of the most consequential dimensions of personality,^[4][5] and a four-letter type says nothing about it.

Five key differences

1. Scores vs categories

The Big Five reports where you fall on each continuum. The MBTI reports which side of a midpoint you fall on. Because scores on both instruments cluster near the middle,^[6] categories discard the most information exactly where most people are.

2. Coverage

The Big Five covers Neuroticism; the MBTI does not.^[1] Neither model directly captures Honesty-Humility, the sixth factor identified in later cross-language studies.^[7]

3. Detail underneath

Each Big Five trait can be split into narrower facets. For example, the public-domain IPIP-NEO-120 measures 30 facets with four items each,^[8] so two people with the same broad score can be distinguished, say, by anxiety versus anger within Neuroticism.

4. Evidence for real-world outcomes

Most outcome research uses trait measures. A major review concluded that Big Five traits predict mortality, divorce and occupational attainment about as well as socioeconomic status and cognitive ability do.^[9] A large preregistered replication project found that 87% of 78 published trait–outcome links replicated, though typically at about 77% of the original effect size.^[10]

5. Language and appeal

The MBTI wins on friendliness. Four letters are memorable, the descriptions are positive and non-judgemental, and the framework gives people a shared vocabulary. The Big Five’s label “Neuroticism” is less flattering, which is one reason many tools, including ours, use the term emotional stability for the opposite pole.

How to translate your MBTI type into Big Five terms

You can turn a four-letter type into an approximate Big Five profile using the mapping above. Remember that the result is only as good as the distance of each score from the midpoint, and that Neuroticism is unknown.

Beyond the Big Five: the sixth factor

The Big Five is not the last word either. When the lexical studies that produced it were repeated in other languages, a six-factor structure kept appearing, with a sixth dimension, Honesty-Humility, covering sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance and modesty.^[7] The resulting HEXACO model also rearranges some content: anger sits with low Agreeableness rather than with Neuroticism.^[7][11]

Honesty-Humility predicts outcomes such as workplace deviance better than any Big Five trait,^[12] so a profile that leaves it out misses something important about how people treat others when nobody is checking. That is why 64 Types adds it as the sixth letter. See What is the HEXACO model?

Which model should you use?

• For research, selection or anything with stakes: a validated Big Five (or HEXACO) measure. That is where the predictive evidence lies.^[13][9]
• For team conversations and self-reflection: type language can be a friendly entry point, as long as nobody treats the label as fixed or uses it to make decisions about people.
• For the best of both: use trait scores, and translate them into letters only as a summary.

That last option is the approach of 64 Types. We measure the four MBTI-like dimensions as Big Five traits with public-domain items,^[3] add emotional stability (C/R) and Honesty-Humility (M/A),^[14] and give you a percentile for every trait. Your code, for example INTJ-CM, is a summary of six scores rather than a box. See how the test works.

Frequently asked questions