Raymond San Diego’s first encounter with MBTI was as a college student at his campus career center about 20 years ago. The associate professor of instruction in Asian American Studies filled out the questionnaire, hoping that the test might tell him what job best suited his personality.

Decades later, his students use the same test to talk about love, explore friendship and seek identity, he says. MBTI, or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, is a self-reported questionnaire designed to indicate different psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions, according to Myers & Briggs Foundation. In recent years, the personality categorizer has evolved from a niche psychological tool into a cultural phenomenon, appearing in Instagram bios, TikTok For You pages and even club application questions. Among Asian and Asian American youth, this fascination is not just another online Gen Z trend, but something that reveals a deeper, long-standing cultural interest in personality and fate analysis.

Weinberg first-year Abigail Chang first encountered MBTI in middle school, when her friend introduced her to a more advanced, scientific version of it called Cognitive Functions.

The Cognitive Functions theory reveals an individual’s thought patterns, biases and decision-making processes through four binary sets of dichotomies: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling and judging or perceiving. This arrangement categorizes people into 16 personality types and produces a four-letter test result such as ENTP, ISFP or INTJ.

Chang says she mainly views MBTI as a fun icebreaker.

“I think it’s like Hogwarts Houses,” she says. “It’s just a cute way to sort people.”

Chang recognizes the limitations of the test as a personality measure, saying that individuals cannot and should not be expected to perfectly fit into a fixed archetype.

For Chang, a fascinating aspect of MBTI is its connection with the traditional beliefs she and her family grew up with. Centuries before this Western psychological concept arose, Asian cultures had their own ways of classifying people’s traits through zodiac signs, horoscopes and blood types.

“In Asian cultures, there’s a lot of categorizing you off of birth circumstances,” Chang says, referring to “bāzì,” or the Four Pillars of Destiny, a traditional Chinese fortune-telling system that her older relatives are “big fans” of. Like MBTI, bāzì interprets a person’s destiny and fate using four “pillars” represented by pairs of Chinese characters from the sexagenary cycle assigned to their birth year, month, day and hour.

A similar cultural resonance exists in South Korea. McCormick second-year Yuna Song noticed how MBTI has become deeply embedded in Korean social life.

“[In] Korea during blind dates, one of the first questions they ask is, ‘What’s your MBTI?’” Song says.

Song links the test’s popularity in East Asia to the region’s Confucian heritage: Many Asian cultures have traditionally understood themselves through social roles and relationships within families and communities. In contrast, Song adds that American society often values individuality and autonomy over collective identity.

San Diego believes that exposure to Asian media and literature also plays a role in MBTI’s enduring appeal. He says many popular child-oriented media familiarize children with systems of categorization from an early age, citing Pokemon as an example in which each character is identified by a particular type or magical power. This, he says, may encourage kids’ interests in personal assessment at the age when they develop a strong desire to understand who they are and how they fit into the world around them.

Ultimately, San Diego sees MBTI’s surging popularity as a result of its ability to help people connect. He says MBTI gives them a framework to bond with others.

“It’s about figuring out a way to relate to people,” San Diego says.