Know Your Strengths & Weaknesses: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

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.

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 early forms of their questionnaires eventually developed 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.

Fundamental to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the theory of psychological type, the existence of two dichotomous pairs of cognitive functions:

• The "rational" (judging) functions: thinking and feeling
• The "irrational" (perceiving) functions: sensing and intuition

Individuals are either born with, or develop preferred ways of thinking and acting. The MBTI sorts some of these psychological differences into 4 dichotomies, resulting to 16 possible psychological types. 

Attitudes: Extraversion (E)/Introversion (I) Characteristics

• Extraverts are action oriented, while introverts are thought oriented.
• Extraverts seek breadth of knowledge and influence, while introverts seek depth of knowledge and influence.
• Extraverts often prefer more frequent interaction, while introverts prefer more substantial interaction.
• Extraverts recharge and get their energy from spending time with people, while introverts recharge and get their energy from spending time alone

Functions: Sensing (S)/Intuition (N) and Thinking (T)/Feeling (F)

There  two pairs of psychological functions:

• The two perceiving functions, sensing and intuition
• The two judging functions, thinking and feeling

Sensing and intuition are the information-gathering (perceiving) functions. They describe how new information is understood and interpreted. Individuals who prefer sensing are more likely to trust information that is in the present, tangible and concrete: that is, information that can be understood by the five senses. They tend to distrust hunches, which seem to come "out of nowhere." They prefer to look for details and facts. For them, the meaning is in the data. On the other hand, those who prefer intuition tend to trust information that is more abstract or theoretical, that can be associated with other information (either remembered or discovered by seeking a wider context or pattern). They may be more interested in future possibilities. They tend to trust those flashes of insight that seem to bubble up from the unconscious mind. The meaning is in how the data relates to the pattern or theory.

Lifestyle: Judgment (J)/Perception (P)

Myers and Briggs added another dimension to Jung's typological model by identifying that people also have a preference for using either the judging function (thinking or feeling) or their perceiving function (sensing or intuition) when relating to the outside world (extraversion).  For extraverts, the J or P indicates their dominant function; for introverts, the J or P indicates their auxiliary function. Introverts tend to show their dominant function outwardly only in matters "important to their inner worlds.