'They become dangerous tools": the dark side of personality tests Lisa Wong Macabasco Scrolling dating apps in 2015, Tim Travers Hawkins didn’t know who his type was. He didn’t even know what a type was. Hawkins, a British film-maker then new to New York, “noticed something that was very different to people’s profiles in the UK and that was the use of these four letters,” he said to the Guardian. Curious, he looked it up. “I was like, ‘Huh, that’s different’.” The four letters issue from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the world’s most well-known personality quiz, which categorizes everyone into 16 distinct types gleaned from four binaries: people are either introverted or extroverted, sensing (relying on evidence from one’s senses) or intuitive, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving.