The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment is a psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions.[1]:1 These preferences were extrapolated from the typological theories proposed by Carl Gustav Jung and first published in his 1921 book Psychological Types (English edition, 1923).[2] The original developers of the personality inventory were Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. They began creating the indicator during World War II, believing that a knowledge of personality preferences would help women who were entering the industrial workforce for the first time to identify the sort of war-time jobs where they would be "most comfortable and effective".[1]:xiii The initial questionnaire grew into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which was first published in 1962. The MBTI focuses on normal populations and emphasizes the value of naturally occurring differences.[3] Show
CPP Inc., the publisher of the MBTI instrument, calls it "the world's most widely used personality assessment",[4] with as many as two million assessments administered annually. Some academic psychologists have criticized the MBTI instrument, claiming that it "lacks convincing validity data".[5][6][7][8] Proponents of the test, however, cite reports of individual behavior[9] and have found that the indicator meets or exceeds the reliability of other psychological instruments.[10] Some studies have found strong support for construct validity, internal consistency, and test-retest reliability, although variation was observed.[11][12][13] The definitive published source of reference for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is The Manual produced by CPP.[14] However, the registered trademark rights to the terms Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and MBTI have been assigned from the publisher to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Trust.[15] ConceptsAs the MBTI Manual states, the indicator "is designed to implement a theory; therefore the theory must be understood to understand the MBTI".[16]:1 Fundamental to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the theory of psychological type as originally developed by Carl Jung.[1]:xiii Jung proposed the existence of two dichotomous pairs of cognitive functions:
Jung went on to suggest that these functions are expressed in either an introverted or extraverted form.[1]:17 From Jung's original concepts, Briggs and Myers developed their own theory of psychological type, described below, on which the MBTI is based. TypeJung's typological model regards psychological type as similar to left or right handedness: individuals are either born with, or develop, certain preferred ways of thinking and acting. The MBTI sorts some of these psychological differences into four opposite pairs, or dichotomies, with a resulting 16 possible psychological types. None of these types are better or worse; however, Briggs and Myers theorized that individuals naturally prefer one overall combination of type differences.[1]:9 In the same way that writing with the left hand is hard work for a right-hander, so people tend to find using their opposite psychological preferences more difficult, even if they can become more proficient (and therefore behaviorally flexible) with practice and development. The 16 types are typically referred to by an abbreviation of four letters—the initial letters of each of their four type preferences (except in the case of intuition, which uses the abbreviation N to distinguish it from Introversion). For instance:
And so on for all 16 possible type combinations. Four dichotomiesThe four pairs of preferences or dichotomies are shown in the table to the right. Note that the terms used for each dichotomy have specific technical meanings relating to the MBTI which differ from their everyday usage. For example, people who prefer judgment over perception are not necessarily more judgmental or less perceptive. Nor does the MBTI instrument measure aptitude; it simply indicates for one preference over another.[16]:3 Someone reporting a high score for extraversion over introversion cannot be correctly described as more extraverted: they simply have a clear preference. Point scores on each of the dichotomies can vary considerably from person to person, even among those with the same type. However, Isabel Myers considered the direction of the preference (for example, E vs. I) to be more important than the degree of the preference (for example, very clear vs. slight).[14] The expression of a person's psychological type is more than the sum of the four individual preferences. The preferences interact through type dynamics and type development. |