MBTI gegen Enneagramm

Der Myers-Briggs-Typ-Indikator

MBTI started as a mother-daughter project in the 1940s — Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers trying to make Carl Jung's dense theories useful for everyday people. It stuck. Today it is the most widely taken personality test on the planet, used by roughly 88% of Fortune 500 companies. It sorts you into one of 16 types across four dimensions:

• Introversion (I) vs Extraversion (E): Where you get your energy — from solitude or from people
• Sensing (S) vs Intuition (N): How you take in information — concrete details or patterns and possibilities
• Thinking (T) vs Feeling (F): How you make decisions — by logic or by values
• Judging (J) vs Perceiving (P): How you structure your life — planned or spontaneous

This gives you a four-letter code — INFJ, ESTP, ENFP, and so on. Each combination describes a different pattern of thinking, communicating, and relating to the world. If you have ever taken an online personality quiz, there is a good chance it was this one.

What MBTI gets right

For dating, MBTI captures things that matter on a daily basis. It tells you whether someone needs alone time to recharge or gets restless without social contact. It predicts how they handle disagreements — a Thinking type will want to solve the problem; a Feeling type will want to feel heard first. It flags whether they plan vacations six months ahead or book a flight the night before.

These are not trivial differences. An ISTJ and an ENFP can absolutely love each other, but if neither understands why the other operates the way they do, every weekend becomes a negotiation. MBTI gives couples a shared vocabulary for those negotiations.

What MBTI gets wrong

Here is the part the MBTI community tends to gloss over. The test has a well-documented test-retest reliability problem. A 1993 review by David Pittenger in the Journal of Career Planning and Employment found that as many as 50% of people get a different type when they retake the test five weeks later. You take it on a Tuesday and you are an INFJ. You take it again on a Thursday and you are an ENFP. The underlying traits are real, but the forced binary — you are either Introverted or Extraverted, with no middle ground — does not reflect how personality actually works.

Most personality researchers prefer the Big Five model (also called OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) because it measures traits on a spectrum rather than sorting you into a box. You are not simply "Introverted" or "Extraverted." You fall somewhere on a continuum, and that position might shift depending on context. The Big Five has decades of peer-reviewed validation behind it (McCrae & Costa, 1997) and significantly better test-retest reliability.

Does this mean MBTI is useless? No. It means you should hold your type lightly. Think of it as a rough sketch, not a photograph. If you and your partner use it as a starting point for understanding each other, it works. If you use it to explain away every conflict ('well, I'm a Thinker, so I can't help being blunt'), it becomes a cage.

Das Enneagramm

The Enneagram takes a different approach entirely. Instead of sorting you by how you think, it sorts you by what scares you. Nine types, each organized around a core fear and a core desire. MBTI will tell you that you prefer planning over spontaneity. The Enneagram will tell you that you plan obsessively because you are terrified of losing control.

A Type 2 (The Helper) gives compulsively because they fear being unlovable. A Type 5 (The Investigator) hoards knowledge and privacy because they fear being overwhelmed by the world. A Type 8 (The Challenger) dominates because they fear being controlled. The system also maps how each type behaves under stress and in growth, which adds nuance that MBTI lacks.

What the Enneagram gets right

People who use the Enneagram for relationship work tend to find it uncomfortably accurate. It names the patterns you suspected about yourself but never articulated. It explains why a Type 3 (The Achiever) keeps choosing partners who are impressed by their resume instead of partners who actually know them. It explains why a Type 9 (The Peacemaker) swallows every grievance until it erupts as a seemingly irrational outburst six months later.

For couples, the Enneagram is strongest at explaining recurring conflicts. If you keep having the same fight in every relationship, the Enneagram will probably tell you why. It digs into the motivational layer that MBTI does not touch.

What the Enneagram gets wrong

The Enneagram's biggest problem is the one its enthusiasts least want to hear: it has almost no peer-reviewed scientific validation. Its origins are murky — variously attributed to ancient Sufi traditions, a Bolivian mystic named Oscar Ichazo, and a Chilean psychiatrist named Claudio Naranjo, depending on who is telling the story. The modern system was largely formalized in the 1970s.

Unlike MBTI, which at least has the MBTI Manual with published reliability and validity data, the Enneagram lacks a standardized test instrument. The Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator (RHETI) is the most commonly used version, and a 2021 study by Thapa, Lama & Vankova found internal consistency ranging from acceptable to good (Cronbach's alpha 0.72–0.87). But peer-reviewed studies on its predictive validity — does knowing someone's Enneagram type actually predict how they behave? — are thin. There is no equivalent to the decades of Big Five research.

The Enneagram also tends to shift. Your core type is supposed to be stable, but your wing (the adjacent type that flavors your personality) and your stress/growth directions can change depending on what is happening in your life. This makes the Enneagram rich for self-reflection but unreliable as a matching variable. It is hard to build an algorithm on a foundation that moves.

MBTI vs Enneagram: The Honest Comparison

MBTI is not trash, but it is not a crystal ball either. The Enneagram digs into motivation better than almost anything else, but good luck getting two experts to agree on your type. Use both if you want, but know what each one misses — because the gap between what a test says about you and how you actually show up in a relationship at 11pm on a Tuesday is where the real work happens.

The Elephant in the Room: Why No Personality Test Is Enough

Here is the deeper problem with using any personality framework as the basis for a matching algorithm: personality tests measure what you tell them. They measure your self-concept, which is not always the same as your actual behavior.

An introvert who grew up in an extraverted family might test as more extraverted than they actually are, because they have learned to perform extraversion so well that they half-believe it themselves. A conflict-avoidant person might score as a Thinker because they associate logic with strength and do not want to admit how much they lead with emotion. We are unreliable narrators of ourselves, and every self-report personality test inherits that unreliability.

On top of that, personality explains some of compatibility but not all of it. Research on relationship satisfaction consistently shows that personality similarity accounts for only a modest portion of the variance. Shared values, life goals, attachment style, communication patterns, and even biological factors like immune system complementarity all play a role.

How DNA Romance Addresses These Limits

We built DNA Romance knowing that every personality system has gaps. Our approach is not to pick a winner between MBTI and Enneagram. It is to treat personality as one signal among several, and to compensate for psychometric limitations with biological data that does not depend on self-report.

Here is how the layers work:

1. Personality compatibility. We use a Myers-Briggs-based assessment as our personality layer because, despite its limitations, MBTI captures day-to-day behavioral patterns that matter in relationships: communication style, conflict resolution approach, energy management, and lifestyle preferences. We treat it as a behavioral map, not a destiny label.
2. Genetic compatibility. This is the layer that personality tests cannot reach. MHC (Major Histocompatibility Complex) genes play a role in physical attraction through scent and immune system complementarity. Research by Santos et al. (2005) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B found that people tend to be attracted to the scent of individuals whose MHC genes differ from their own — an evolutionary mechanism that promotes immune diversity in offspring. Your body has a compatibility signal operating entirely below conscious awareness, and it does not care what your MBTI type is.
3. Combined scoring. Our algorithm weights both layers. Two people who share personality compatibility but lack genetic complementarity will score differently from two people who have both. This multi-signal approach means the system does not collapse if one layer is noisy — and personality data is inherently noisy.

The point is not that personality frameworks are useless. It is that they are incomplete. MBTI tells you how someone will load a dishwasher. The Enneagram tells you why they get upset when you reload it. MHC compatibility tells you whether your body recognizes them as a biological fit. You need more than one signal to find a relationship that works.

Using Personality Types Without Being Used by Them

If you are going to use MBTI or the Enneagram in your dating life, here are some ground rules that will keep you from falling into the usual traps:

• Hold your type loosely. Take the test. Read the description. Notice what resonates. Then put it down. If you find yourself rejecting potential partners because they are the wrong type, the framework is hurting you more than helping you.
• Use it as a conversation starter, not a verdict. "I'm an INFJ" is a starting point. "I'm an INFJ so I need a lot of alone time" is useful information. "I'm an INFJ so we're incompatible" is astrology with extra steps.
• Pay attention to the dimensions, not the label. The I/E and T/F dimensions carry the most weight in relationship dynamics. An INFJ and an INFP are only one letter apart but may handle conflict very differently. Focus on the specific traits that affect your daily life.
• Use the Enneagram for self-work, not screening. The Enneagram is at its best when it helps you understand your own patterns. If you keep choosing emotionally unavailable partners, knowing you are a Type 2 who fears rejection might explain the pattern. Use that insight on yourself, not as a filter for others.
• Stack your signals. Personality. Values. Life goals. Physical attraction. Attachment style. The couples who last tend to align on multiple dimensions, not just one. No single test captures all of them.

The Bottom Line

If we had to pick one: MBTI is more useful for the early months of dating, when you are figuring out logistics (does this person need alone time or constant contact? do they plan ahead or wing it?). The Enneagram is more useful after year one, when the deeper patterns surface and you need to understand why the same argument keeps happening.

But honestly, neither system should be the reason you swipe left on someone. Use them to understand yourself and your partner better. Do not use them as a sorting hat. And if you want a matching system that goes beyond what you think you know about yourself, add some data that does not depend on self-report.

That is what we built DNA Romance to do: combine personality signals with genetic compatibility so the algorithm is not limited by what you think you know about yourself. Because sometimes the best match is not the one that looks right on paper. It is the one your body already recognizes.