1. Their content is usually based on stereotypes of personality types rather than any observations based on reality. This makes for “fun” consumable content that is usually directed towards amateur MBTI followers, who are merely just looking for feel good content. But feel-good content is not nearly as valuable as understanding true results associated with your MBTI type. If you understand all facets of the strengths and limitations of your MBTI type, you serve to benefit much more.
2. MBTI has evolved to the point where we now understand that each type is based on cognitive functions. Most sites won’t tell you anything about that and will just give you feel good stereotypes about each MBTI type without actually giving you information on how those tendencies emerge as a result of cognitive functions. Basically, they are treating you like the sheep they expect you to be. They could tell you anything and you’d believe it, even if you don’t understand the theory. You need a theoretical explanation behind what they are telling you or you need to check with your own experiences of what makes sense without falling into a confirmation bias trap.
3. If you look at some of these personality typing sites, they give most of their “famous people” type profiling very weak thought and are usually typed based on some quotes they said. This is a terrible way to type people and citing these types of sites as a resource makes no sense especially if you do a google search and find that the website has listed the same person as a different type more than once. (And no, you can not be more than one type)
4. Some sites actually try making observations based on online polls, but this is flawed since they have no idea what is required to make the data a statistically legitimate resource. If you were to delve into the data of these online MBTI polls, you would likely be highly prone to finding that there is large selection bias present from those who consume content on that website, strange outliers that skew the data (and aren’t accounted for) and unvalidated data. For example, some people claim they are a certain type but they have no idea what they are really, and this is a case that happens much more often than most realize.
In short, if an MBTI resource is going to be basing their findings on online polls, before you start accepting its findings, you need to look at the methodology of how they reach their conclusions, so you can atleast understand the limits of the realizations you can derive from the data. Unless you had a serious study that would account for all sorts of statistical issues, you are better off looking at findings based on empirical evidence such as analyzing the people and interactions you see in real life.
If you want to see recommended sites that aren’t filled with incorrect information, check out the resources page.
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