Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a questionnaire designed to make Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types understandable and useful in everyday life.
MBTI results identify valuable differences between normal, healthy people, but they are differences that can be the source of much misunderstanding and miscommunication.
The authors of the MBTI, Katharine Cook Briggs (1875-1968) and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers (1897-1980), were keen observers of differences in human personality. They studied and elaborated the ideas of Jung, and applied them to understanding people around them.
Carl Jung’s psychological types
- People develop different patterns of behaviour
Jung observed that when people’s minds are active, they are either involved in:
- taking in information (perceiving); or
- organising information and coming to conclusions (judging).
He proposed that there were two opposite ways people perceived, which he called sensing and intuition, and two opposite ways that people judged, which he called thinking and feeling.
Jung also observed that individuals tended to be either:
- energised more by the external world of people, experience, and activity; or
- energised more by the internal world of ideas, memories, and emotions.
He called these two types of energy extraversion (acting in the outer world) and introversion (reflecting in the inner world).
By combining the mental processes of sensing, intuition, thinking and feeling, with extraversion and introversion, Jung came up with the following eight fundamental patterns of mental activity:
- extraverted sensation
- introverted sensation
- extraverted intuition
- introverted intuition
- extraverted thinking
- introverted thinking
- extraverted feeling
- introverted feeling.
While these eight patterns are available to, and used by everyone, Jung believed that people were innately different in what they preferred.
Jung focused on accurately describing the eight dominant functions he identified, but he also noted that people used the other functions in a hierarchy of preference. The terms he used to describe the order of use for an individual type were:
- dominant function – the first, most used mental process
- auxiliary function – the second preference
- tertiary function – the third preference
- inferior function – the fourth, or least preferred mental process.
Cook Briggs and Briggs Myers developed Jung’s idea of the auxiliary function and included it in the MBTI, which resulted in 16 personality types.
MBTI today
After more than 50 years of research and development, the MBTI continues to help people improve how they learn, work and communicate.
It is the most widely used instrument in the world for understanding normal personality differences. Each year more than 2 million people use it, and it has been translated into more than 30 languages.
- NZ Association for Psychological Type website - find out more about MBTI
- NZ Council for Educational Research website - psychological test centre
Source
- Briggs Myers, I, 'Introduction to Type' (sixth edition), California: CPP Inc, 1998.
