May 12, 2021
17th MBTI Type (And Other Fun Facts)
What type can we expect as a result if we only click the middle option in the 16 personalities test? And what’s the mysterious 17th type? This and more coming up in this new episode of Deconstructing 16 Personalities. Just kidding.
MBTI as a discipline is a bottomless pit that pulls many people in. it all starts with taking an innocent personality test on 16personalities.com, which is a modified version of an MBTI test.
Then some people might start googling their type, and looking at memes featuring their type, and joining communities, and following MBTI accounts on instagram, and before they know it, they are in too deep.
On a scale from 1 to 10, how much of an MBTI nerd are you? Have you just taken the test, or do you know all Carl Jung books by heart?
Let’s get to some fun facts.
Fun fact #1: The 17th type.
Did you know that there is a 17th type? Me neither. But on Reddit there’s a lot of talk about that mysterious additional type. Apparently 16 types are not enough boxes to put billions of people in. We need just one more box.
Look at this cute little guy. He’s not green or purple like the other avatars on the 16 personalities page. This is the 17th personality type and his name is AIUG. Which is an abbreviation that’s also used for other things. Like Armenian Internet Users Group.
Do you have a theory about what AIUG might mean for that personality type?
One of the comments I liked most under the AIUG profile was this one:
The AIUG personality is confident of itself, making decisions that it does not regret, they can be intelligent and strategic, but on the other hand they can be vindictive and they can have a lot of remorse. AIUG’s TeFi makes them lovers of their projects, unfortunately this can also cause a lot of confusion and cause them to get confused with INTJs and ISFPs at the same time, this happens together with a great creativity (Ne) to create new projects, who knows, create inventions, utensils or even new social networks. AIUG, unlike other types, are always naturally intelligent with very high IQs. Examples include: Carl Jung, Tyler Durden and God.
Inspired by this passionate speech, I made my own AIUG avatar. And there will be new merch featuring this perfect and most intelligent type of all types.
Another fun fact
What’s also a thing, even though it’s not an official part of the MBTI, is the ANFP. The A stands for ambivert.
I would say I’m an ambivert, because I keep scoring in the middle of the extravert/introvert scale. Since we’re dealing with a spectrum, you can be located anywhere on that scale. So ANFJ would also be a possible option.
If we consider cognitive functions, which are always a combination of extraverted and introverted, this could mean that your first two functions are working as one team.
But this article is supposed to be much less of a deep dive than that, so let’s forget about cognitive functions for a minute. If we suddenly have letter A in the type names, we should have 8 additional types. I’m not all that good at math, but I think it should be 8, which are: ASFP, ASFJ, ASTP, ASTJ, ANFP, ANFJ, ANTJ, and ANTP.
So all in all we end up with 24 types. Well, technically it’s still 16, because the MBTI is based on binary values. But I still like the idea of the ambivert.
I hope you’re not too confused yet, because I have one more fun fact.
One more fun fact
Carl Jung was probably an INFJ. Now, I’m not saying that I’m a typing expert, but it is very likely that he, the person who started all this, was an INFJ.
Then came Isabel Briggs-Myers and her mom Katharine Briggs. They had no background in psychology whatsoever, but at least they had several physicians in the family.
And now here we are in 21st century.
Finally, the most interesting part of this article is me testing the 16 personalities test. I’m gonna click the neutral option for all questions to see what comes out. Watch it here, I made a video out of this:
I’m going to spoil the result right now: It’s ISTP. That’s interesting. Even though I had only clicked the middle option, none of the scores were an even 50% on the four scales. I think that’s weird. If you have a theory about how this result came up, please let me know in the comments.
