Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
| The Sixteen Types | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| US Population Breakdown | |||
| The table organizing the sixteen types was created by Isabel Myers (an INFP person). | |||
|
ISTJ 11–14% |
ISFJ 9–14% |
INFJ 1–3% |
INTJ 2–4% |
|
ISTP 4–6% |
ISFP 5–9% |
INFP 4–5% |
INTP 3–5% |
|
ESTP 4–5% |
ESFP 4–9% |
ENFP 6–8% |
ENTP 2–5% |
|
ESTJ 8–12% |
ESFJ 9–13% |
ENFJ 2–5% |
ENTJ 2–5% |
| Estimated percentages of the 16 types in the United States population. | |||
The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self-report questionnaire designed to indicate psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions.
The MBTI was constructed by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers. It is based on the typological theory proposed by Carl Jung, who had speculated that there are four principal psychological functions by which humans experience the world – sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking – and that one of these four functions is dominant for a person most of the time. The MBTI was constructed for normal populations and emphasizes the value of naturally occurring differences. "The underlying assumption of the MBTI is that we all have specific preferences in the way we construe our experiences, and these preferences underlie our interests, needs, values, and motivation."
Although popular in the business sector, the MBTI exhibits significant psychometric deficiencies, notably including poor validity (i.e. not measuring what it purports to measure) and poor reliability (giving different results for the same person on different occasions). The four scales used in the MBTI have some correlation with four of the Big Five personality traits, which are a more commonly accepted framework.
Katharine Cook 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 (or thoughtful), spontaneous, executive, and social.
After the English translation of Jung's book Psychological Types was published in 1923 (first published in German in 1921), she recognized that Jung's theory was similar to, but went far beyond, her own. Briggs's four types were later identified as corresponding to the Is, EPs, ETJs and EFJs. Her first publications were two articles describing Jung's theory, in the journal New Republic in 1926 ("Meet Yourself Using the Personality Paint Box") and 1928 ("Up From Barbarism"). After extensively studying the work of Jung, they turned their interest in human behavior into efforts to turn the theory of psychological types to practical use.
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