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Concept
Myers–Briggs Type Indicator
Summary
In personality typology, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self-report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. It enjoys popularity despite being widely regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community. The test attempts to assign a binary value to each of four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. One letter from each category is taken to produce a four-letter test result, such as "ISTJ" or "ENFP".
The MBTI was constructed by two Americans: Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, who were inspired by the book Psychological Types by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Isabel Myers was particularly fascinated by the concept of introversion and she typed herself as an INFP. However, she felt the book was too complex for the general public, and therefore she tried to organize the Jungian cognitive functions to make it more accessible.
Most of the research supporting the MBTI's validity has been produced by the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, an organization run by the Myers–Briggs Foundation, and published in the center's own journal, the Journal of Psychological Type (JPT), raising questions of independence, bias, and conflict of interest. Though the MBTI resembles some psychological theories, it has been criticized as pseudoscience and is not widely endorsed by academic researchers in the psychology field. The indicator exhibits significant scientific (psychometric) deficiencies, including poor validity, poor reliability, measuring categories that are not independent, and not being comprehensive.
Briggs began her research into personality in 1917. Upon meeting her future son-in-law, she observed marked differences between his personality and that of other family members. Briggs embarked on a project of reading biographies, and subsequently developed a typology wherein she proposed four temperaments: meditative (or thoughtful), spontaneous, executive, and social.
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Related publications (2)
Related concepts (1)
Psychological Types
Psychological Types (Psychologische Typen) is a book by Carl Jung that was originally published in German by Rascher Verlag in 1921, and translated into English in 1923, becoming volume 6 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. In the book, Jung proposes four main functions of consciousness: two perceiving or non-rational functions (Sensation and Intuition), and two judging or rational functions (Thinking and Feeling). These functions are modified by two main attitude types: extraversion and introversion.