Personality Types - Myers and Briggs

4: Myers and Briggs

In 1958, Isabel Myers and her mother Katheryn Briggs wrote a paper titled Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI for short), in which they proposed that there are actually sixteen different human personality types.

Ms. Myers had been reading various obscure psychology textbooks when she stumbled across Psychological Types. Being intelligent and perceptive, she immediately realized that here was a masterpiece of psychological thought, written by one of the greatest geniuses in human history. She read the book cover to cover, and thought long about how to expand Jung's ideas into a complete model of human personality.

Ms. Myers came to realize three things:

That everyone chooses not only a first-choice or "Primary" function, but also a second-choice or "auxiliary" function.

That if the primary function is judgmental, then the auxiliary function will be perceptive, and vice versa.

That if the primary function is introverted, then the auxiliary function will be extraverted.

In this system, then, a person has 2 choices for orientation, introvert (I) or extravert (E); two choices for method of information intake, sensing (S) or intuition (N); two choices for method of judgment, thinking (T) or feeling (F); and two choices as to which function is used in the outer world, judgment (J) or perception (P). Hence there are 2x2x2x2=16 different MBTI personality types, as shown in this chart: 

ISFJ	ISTJ	INFJ	INTJ
ISFP	ISTP	INFP	INTP
ESFJ	ESTJ	ENFJ	ENTJ
ESFP	ESTP	ENFP	ENTP

Tests were created to help determine which of the sixteen types the test taker was, and after a time, when many people had taken these MBTI tests, personality "profiles" (correspondences between MBTI type and the personalities of individual people) emerged. When one examines these profiles and compares them with the "temperaments" of Hippocrates, a clear correspondence emerges: