Q: Are the Big Five (OCEAN) personality traits correlated with MBTI types?

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A: Yes, to some extent — but Big Five and MBTI® are not the same system and shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable.

Most of the confusion stems from 16Personalities, which quietly repackages Big Five traits as “MBTI” and then adds the –A / –T suffix. In doing so, it swaps constructs and creates false equivalences. A common example: it implicitly equates Agreeableness with F and Disagreeableness with T. That doesn’t hold. There are many agreeable people with T>F processing and many disagreeable people with F>T processing. Different dimensions, different questions.

Once that’s cleared up, the actual correlations are fairly straightforward:

• Openness (Big Five): Strongly overlapped with N/S. High openness tends to align with N preferences. Low openness tends to align with S preferences.
• Conscientiousness (Big Five): Shows a moderate correlation with J/P, though closer to the lower bound of that range. J/P is about preference for closed-ended vs open-ended in execution, not how “organized” someone looks from the outside. An MBTI J with ADHD may score low on Big 5’s conscientiousness while still strongly preferring closure.
• Extraversion (Big Five): Strongly correlated with MBTI® E/I. This is the cleanest overlap between the two models.
• Agreeableness (Big Five): Only weakly correlated with F/T. Agreeableness tracks interpersonal warmth and cooperativeness, not decision-making criteria.
• Neuroticism (Big Five): Not measured by MBTI® at all as it was intentionally left out.

Bottom line: Big Five measures trait distributions and current psychological state. MBTI® measures preference across external dichotomies, originally designed for business contexts. They intersect, but they do not substitute for one another.

And yes — if you want anything resembling actual MBTI®, avoid 16Personalities. If you’re testing MBTI® dichotomies, **Humanmetrics** is a much better option.