Myers–Briggs Type Indicator


The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator is a self-report questionnaire that makes pseudoscientific claims to categorize individuals into 16 distinct "personality types". The test assigns a binary letter value to each of four dichotomous categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. This produces a four-letter test result such as "INTJ" or "ESFP", representing one of 16 possible types.
The MBTI was constructed during World War II by Americans Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, inspired by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung's 1921 book Psychological Types. 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.
The perceived accuracy of test results relies on the Barnum effect, flattery, and confirmation bias, leading participants to personally identify with descriptions that are somewhat desirable, vague, and widely applicable. As a psychometric indicator, the test exhibits significant deficiencies, including poor validity, poor reliability, measuring supposedly dichotomous categories that are not independent, and not being comprehensive. 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 , raising questions of independence, bias and conflict of interest.
Psychology regards the MBTI as useless, since it lacks predictive power. According to University of Pennsylvania professor Adam Grant, "There is no evidence behind it. The traits measured by the test have almost no predictive power when it comes to how happy you'll be in a given situation, how well you'll perform at your job, or how satisfied you'll be in your marriage." Despite controversies over validity, the instrument has demonstrated widespread influence since its adoption by the Educational Testing Service in 1962. It is estimated that 50 million people have taken the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator and that 10,000 businesses, 2,500 colleges and universities, and 200 government agencies in the United States use the MBTI.

History

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, spontaneous, executive, and social.
After the publication in 1923 of an English translation of Carl Jung's book Psychological Types, Briggs recognized that Jung's theory resembled, but went far beyond, her own. Briggs's four types were later identified as corresponding to the IXXXs, EXXPs, EXTJs and EXFJs. Her first publications were two articles describing Jung's theory, in The New Republic, "Meet Yourself Using the Personality Paint Box" and "Up From Barbarism". After extensively studying the work of Jung, Briggs and her daughter extended their interest in human behavior into efforts to turn the theory of psychological types to practical use.
Although Myers graduated from Swarthmore College in political science in 1919, neither Myers nor Briggs were formally educated in the discipline of psychology, and both were self-taught in the field of psychometric testing. Myers therefore apprenticed herself to Edward N. Hay, the head personnel officer for a large Philadelphia bank. From Hay, Myers learned rudimentary test construction, scoring, validation, and statistical methods.
Briggs and Myers began creating their indicator during World War II in the belief that a knowledge of personality preferences would help women entering the industrial workforce for the first time to identify the sorts of war-time jobs that would be the "most comfortable and effective" for them. The Briggs Myers Type Indicator Handbook, published in 1944, was re-published as "Myers–Briggs Type Indicator" in 1956.
Myers' work attracted the attention of Henry Chauncey, head of the Educational Testing Service, a private assessment organization. Under these auspices, the first MBTI "manual" was published, in 1962. The MBTI received further support from Donald W. MacKinnon, head of the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley; W. Harold Grant, a professor at Michigan State University and Auburn University; and Mary H. McCaulley of the University of Florida. The publication of the MBTI was transferred to Consulting Psychologists Press in 1975, and the Center for Applications of Psychological Type was founded as a research laboratory.
After Myers' death in May 1980, Mary McCaulley updated the MBTI manual, and the second edition was published in 1985. The third edition appeared in 1998.

Format and administration

In 1987, an advanced scoring-system was developed for the MBTI. From this was developed the Type Differentiation Indicator, which is a scoring system for the longer MBTI, Form J, which includes the 290 items written by Myers that had survived her previous item analyses. It yields 20 subscales, plus seven additional subscales for a new "comfort-discomfort" factor. This factor's scales indicate a sense of overall comfort and confidence versus discomfort and anxiety. They also load onto one of the four type-dimensions:
  • guarded-optimistic,
  • defiant-compliant,
  • carefree-worried,
  • decisive-ambivalent,
  • intrepid-inhibited,
  • leader-follower, and
  • proactive-distractible.
Also included is a composite of these called "strain". There are also scales for type-scale consistency and comfort-scale consistency. Reliability of 23 of the 27 TDI subscales is greater than 0.50, "an acceptable result given the brevity of the subscales".
In 1989, a scoring system was developed for only the 20 subscales for the original four dichotomies. This was initially known as "Form K" or "the Expanded Analysis Report". This tool is now called the MBTI Step II.
Form J or the TDI included the items necessary to score what became known as Step III. Step III was developed in a joint project involving the following organizations: the Myers–Briggs Company, the publisher of all the MBTI works; the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, which holds all of Myers' and McCaulley's original work; and the MBTI Trust headed by Katharine and Peter Myers. CAPT advertised Step III as addressing type development and the use of "perception and judgment" by respondents.

Concepts

The MBTI is based on the theory of psychological types proposed by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in 1921, which was partially based on the four elements of classical cosmology. Jung speculated that people experience the world using four principal psychological functions—sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking—and that one of these four functions is dominant in an individual, a majority of the time. In MBTI theory, the four categories are introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. According to the MBTI, each person is said to have one preferred quality from each category, producing 16 unique types.
The MBTI Manual states that the indicator "is designed to implement a theory; therefore, the theory must be understood to understand the MBTI". Fundamental to the MBTI is the hypothesis of psychological types as originally developed by Carl Jung. Jung proposed the existence of two dichotomous pairs of cognitive functions:
  • The "rational" functions: thinking and feeling.
  • The "irrational" functions: sensation and intuition.
Jung believed that for every person, each of the functions is expressed primarily in either an introverted or extraverted form. Based on Jung's original concepts, Briggs and Myers developed their own theory of psychological type, described below, on which the MBTI is based. According to psychologist Hans Eysenck writing in 1995 the 16 personality types used in MBTI are incomplete, as Jung's theory used 32 types, 16 of which could not be measured by questionnaire. Per Eysenck, it was unfair to Jung to claim the scale accurately measured Jungian concepts. Both Jung's original model and the simplified MBTI remain hypothetical, with no controlled scientific studies supporting either.

Differences from Jung

Jung did not see the type preferences as dualistic, but rather as tendencies: both are innate and have the potential to balance.
Jung's typology theories postulated a sequence of four cognitive functions, each having one of two polar tendencies, giving a total of eight dominant functions. The MBTI is based on these eight hypothetical functions. While the Jungian model proposes the first three dichotomies, Myers and Briggs added the judgment-perception preference. According to Myers' and Briggs', J or P indicates a person's most preferred extraverted function, which is the dominant function for extraverted types and the auxiliary function for introverted types.

Type dynamics and development

The MBTI sorts some psychological differences into four sets of opposite pairs, or "dichotomies", with a resulting 16 possible psychological types. None of these are considered to be "better" or "worse"; however, Briggs and Myers theorized that people innately "prefer" one overall combination of type differences.
The 16 types are typically referred to by an abbreviation of four lettersthe initial letters of each of their four type preferences. For instance:
  • ENTJ: extraversion, intuition, thinking, judgment
  • ISFP: introversion, sensing, feeling, perception
These abbreviations are applied to all 16 types.
The interaction of two, three, or four preferences is known as "type dynamics". Type dynamics has received little or no empirical support to substantiate its viability as a scientific theory. Myers and Briggs asserted that for each of the 16 four-preference types, one function is the most dominant and is likely to be evident earliest in life. A secondary or auxiliary function typically becomes more evident during teenage years and provides balance to the dominant. In normal development, individuals tend to become more fluent with a third, tertiary function during mid-life, while the fourth, inferior function remains least consciously developed. The inferior function is purportedly associated with the unconscious, and is most evident in situations such as high stress.
The use of type dynamics is disputed: in the conclusion of various studies on the subject of type dynamics, psychologist James H. Reynierse writes, "Type dynamics has persistent logical problems and is fundamentally based on a series of category mistakes; it provides, at best, a limited and incomplete account of type related phenomena"; and "type dynamics relies on anecdotal evidence, fails most efficacy tests, and does not fit the empirical facts". His studies gave the clear result that the descriptions and workings of type dynamics do not fit the real behavior of people. He suggests getting completely rid of type dynamics, because it does not help, but hinders understanding of personality. The presumed order of functions 1 to 4 did only occur in one out of 540 test results.