The Influence Of The Myers-Briggs Test

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On the 15th of May, 3013 an article was featured in Fortune Magazine that was titled “Have we all been duped by the Myers-Briggs Test?” The Myers-Briggs Test or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality assessment test created by Katherine Briggs & her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, based on psychologist Carl Jung’s type theory. Jung’s theory focused on the cognitive aspects of personality and classified people into types based on how they performed two functions: Taking in information (perception) and making decisions. People perceive things either through their senses or through their intuitions (Sensing V/s Intuition) and they make decisions either through logic and reason or based purely on their emotions (Thinking V/s Feeling). …show more content…

Based on the four functions and the two ways in which they were expressed, Jung proposed eight personality types (For ex: Extraverted Sensing). Briggs and Myers expanded on this theory by proposing the four as separate dichotomies i.e. Judging V/s Perceiving (J v/s P), Thinking V/s Feeling (T v/s F), Sensing V/s Intuition (S v/s N) and Extraversion V/s Introversion (E v/s I) like binary switches. They decided that every single person probably combined the elements and any combination was allowed which meant that there were sixteen possible combinations (For ex: ISFJ). They reasoned that each personality type corresponded to one of the sixteen …show more content…

In fact, the test did not resonate well with the American Psychological Association. There are many reasons for the sceptical approach regarding the MBTI. One of the most important is the fact that the test relies on the dichotomies. A person is either an extravert or an introvert, a judger or a perceiver and so on. Concepts like ambiversion are not accounted for in the test even though the reality is that most of the people tend fall in the middle of the scale. The test leads us to believe that if a graph was to be drawn, it would be a bimodal distribution (it would look like two bell shaped curve) but empirical evidence suggests that the curve is actually more like a normal distribution (a single bell shaped curve). This counters the MBTI’s assumption that people naturally separate into clear cut groups and this problem is compounded four times because there are four categories. Ironically Jung himself said "There is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic

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