Myers Briggs Type Indicator / MBTI

 

The assessment commonly referred to as the MBTI purports to measure psychological preferences and personality type based upon how people make decisions and view the world.

 

The developers of the inventory were Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers who created the model in the 1940’s and had based their work on the research and work of Jung in the 1920’s. 

 

The questionnaire that they developed was first released in 1962 and was intended to measure the naturally occurring differences in how people different preferences for how they frame and reference experiences and thus express our different needs, motivations and values.

 

To use MBTI effectively the entire theoretical basis behind it must be thoroughly understood.  This incorporates the proposed existence of two dichotomous pairing of cognitive functions…

 

• The Rational / Judging functions of  “Thinking” and “Feeling”

• The Irrational / Perceiving functions of “Sensation and Intuition”

 

Jung’s initial work was based on functions being primarily in either an “Introverted” or an “Extroverted” form, and it was Briggs and Myers who really developed their own theories of psychological type that became the MBTI.

 

For more information visit: www.myersbriggs.org