Myers And Briggs

654 Words3 Pages
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, called MBTI for short, more properly owes the bulk of its credit to the great Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Jung. In 1921, Jung published his book Psychological Types, in which he laid out all the same concepts found in the MBTI, but he had them organized quite differently. Jung had everyone categorized as either a "perceiver" or a" judger". Perceivers fell into one of two groups: sensation and intuition; while judgers also fall into two groups: thinking and feeling. So everyone fits into one of those four buckets. Finally, each bucket is divided into two attitude types: introversion and extraversion. Thus, the scale proposed by Jung divided us all into one of eight basic psychological types. An American woman, Katherine Briggs, bought Jung's book and was fascinated by it. She recommended it to her married daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, who had a degree in political science. The two of them got hooked on the idea of psychological metrics. Together they sat down and codified their own interpretation of Carl Jung, making a few important changes of their own. Jung had everyone fitting into one of four basic buckets. Myers and Briggs decided that each person probably combined elements, so they modified Jung's system and made it a little more complex, ending up with four dichotomies, like binary switches. Any combination of the four switches is allowed, and Myers and Briggs reasoned that just about every personality type could be well described by one of the sixteen possible ways for those switches to be set. Basically, according to Myers and Briggs, we're all represented by a four-digit binary number. •The first dichotomy is called your Attitude, and according to the MBTI, you're either an E for Extravert or an I for Introvert. Extraverts prefer action, frequent interaction, focus outward, and are most relaxed when interacting
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