Hi everyone. How are we halfway through the month already? Time certainly flies! For my letter M post in the #AtoZChallenge, I’d like to talk about the Myers-Briggs personality types or MBTI.
MBTI, for clarity’s sake, stands for Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and it is a specific test to determine your personality type according to Myers and Briggs. It is not the same as tests you’ll find online like at 16Personalities.com. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I’d like to talk about the origins of the Myers-Briggs personality types.
The MBTI was first developed during World War II by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. The creators drew inspiration from Carl Jung’s 1921 book Psychological Types.
The MBTI in its original form is a dichotomous system in which you are either one or the other on four different dimensions: introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuition, feeling/thinking and judging/perceiving. This then creates a four-letter acronym for your score, such as INFJ (introverted, intuiting, feeling, judging).
The first time I took an MBTI-based online test back in 2004 or 2005, all questions were either/or and there was no sliding scale.
Like with most topics I’ve covered so far in this challenge, the MBTI has little scientific basis, especially because it is a dichotomous system. Back in college, I learned that, when doing the MBTI several times with a month or so inbetween, people could easily switch types. This makes sense, since, although I usually (but not always!) score as introverted and intuiting, I have scored as INTJ, INFJ and INFP.
There is a theory about each personality type using four out of eight cognitive functions. The cognitive functions are extraverted feeling, extraverted thinking, introverted feeling, introverted thinking, extraverted intuition, extraverted sensing, introverted intuition and introverted sensing. The theory claims that, though everyone uses all eight functions, four of them are the main ones and these create a stack that determines your type. For example, the stack for INFJ is introverted intuition, extraverted feeling, introverted thinking and extraverted sensing. The INFP type, though in the dichotomous Myers-Briggs system it differs only on one aspect from the INFJ, is said to be comprised of the four other functions. Proponents of cognitive functions believe these make the MBTI more reliable. However, it confuses me, because I for one don’t fall neatly into one of the different stacks. And of course it doesn’t account for confirmation bias, ie. the fact that people get the result they want.
So what is my type, you might ask? I mentioned 16Personalities before and that’s the test most people will direct you to if you want a quick answer. For a cognitive functions test, try the Mistype.Investigator. And just for a little chuckle, I saw a meme once that claimed everyone wants to be an INFJ except for INFJs. That probably indicates I’m an INTJ.
A Multitude of Musings 