Is There a Smartest MBTI Type? What Personality Research Shows

Why No Type Wins

The question assumes two things: that the 16 types are real categories, and that one of them holds more intelligence. Research undercuts the first assumption and offers only a faint signal on the second.

The Myers & Briggs Foundation, which promotes the instrument, states plainly that the assessment "does not measure ability, competence, or skill" and is not designed for hiring. An instrument built to sort preferences cannot rank minds. Any article that names a smartest type as fact is reporting a guess.

What research can do is ask a narrower question: do people who lean one way on an MBTI scale score slightly higher, on average, on ability tests? The answer runs through the Big Five model of personality, the framework most researchers use today.

What the MBTI Measures

Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers built the indicator during the Second World War, drawing on Carl Jung's Psychological Types, first published in German in 1921. The Educational Testing Service backed the first manual in 1962, and Consulting Psychologists Press took over publication in 1975. For Jung's own ideas, see our Carl Jung profile.

The questionnaire scores four preferences: Extraversion or Introversion, Sensing or Intuition, Thinking or Feeling, Judging or Perceiving. The letters combine into 16 types, such as INTJ or ESFP. Each letter describes how a person prefers to direct attention, take in information, make decisions or organize life. None describes how well that person reasons.

The Reliability Problem

A useful test gives the same answer twice. The MBTI often does not. David Pittenger reported in 1993 that between 39 and 76 percent of respondents received a different type when retested about five weeks later. Writing in Fortune in 2013, Roman Krznaric put the chance of a different category on a five-week retest at around 50 percent. On the older Form G, about half of people kept the same type within nine months, and about a third over longer intervals; the publisher reports better figures for the newer Form M.

The deeper problem is structural. Robert McCrae and Paul Costa tested the instrument against the five-factor model in 1989, with 267 men and 201 women. They found no support for "truly dichotomous preferences or qualitatively distinct types." The scales behave like continuous traits, so anyone near a midpoint can flip a letter with a small change in answers. A 1991 National Academy of Sciences committee found strong validity only for the Extraversion–Introversion scale.

The One Real Link: Intuition and Openness

McCrae and Costa showed that each MBTI scale captures part of a Big Five trait. Sensing–Intuition lines up with Openness to Experience; Furnham, Moutafi and Crump replicated the link in 900 adults in 2003. Openness is the one Big Five trait with a consistent tie to intelligence.

The largest synthesis, a 2022 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin by Jeromy Anglim and colleagues, pooled 272 samples and 162,636 people. The table shows how each trait relates to intelligence and which MBTI scale tracks it.

Read across the rows and the pattern is clear. In the meta-analysis, three of the four MBTI scales track traits with essentially zero relation to intelligence. Only Intuition carries a signal, and it is borrowed from Openness. A separate 2003 study by Moutafi, Furnham and Crump, using reasoning tests and both personality inventories on 900 people, found intelligence most consistently predicted by high Openness and low Neuroticism, a trait the MBTI does not measure at all.

What a Correlation of .20 Means

A correlation of .20 explains about 4 percent of the variation in test scores. The other 96 percent lies elsewhere. If you lined up a thousand intuitive types and a thousand sensing types by IQ, the two distributions would overlap almost completely. Many sensing types would outscore most intuitive types.

The edge also comes from a specific part of Openness. Anglim's team found the NEO Ideas facet and the Intellect aspect correlated with intelligence at about .25, above Openness as a whole, and their abstract singles out intellectual engagement and unconventionality as the facets that matter most. Enjoying abstract argument relates to test scores more than Openness in general does.

So the defensible statement is narrow: people who prefer Intuition may average slightly higher on ability tests, because Intuition overlaps with intellectual curiosity. That is a tendency across large groups, not a property of a type.

Why the Internet Crowns INTJ and INTP

Lists that name INTJ or INTP as the smartest type usually rest on self-reported IQ scores collected in online polls and forums. Those samples select themselves, the scores come from unverified tests, and the type labels come from free quizzes that are not the official instrument. Each step adds error, and together they produce a confident answer to a question the data cannot settle.

The labels also flatter. "Intuitive thinker" sounds like a description of a clever person, so people who see themselves that way may choose those answers. A typology that rewards self-image cannot double as a measure of ability.

A Better Way to Ask the Question

If you want to know about ability, test ability. A licensed psychologist can give a full-scale battery such as the WAIS-IV; see WAIS-IV explained. Our free IQ test is a practice screener, and what an IQ of 100 means sets out the scale. If you want to know about personality, the Big Five offers more stable scores than four-letter types.

For the traits that do track intelligence, read signs of high intelligence. For abilities beyond one number, see Gardner's types of intelligence and emotional intelligence tests. Every guide is collected in IQ guides.

Editorial standard: IQ figures for historical figures are retrospective estimates and are labeled as such; scores for living people appear only when the person disclosed them or a reputable outlet reported them. Corrections: contact the editors.