Myers Briggs Type Indicator

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is one of the most widely-used personality batteries out there. It is used in workplaces, amongst friends, but probably mostly by people like me who love to use it to understand the people around them (whether real or in a movie or book).

The MBTI was created by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers who based it on the work of the psychologist Carl Jung. Jung was the founder of analytical psychology which includes terms such as Archetypes, Shadow Self, Introversion, Extraversion, etc (most/all of which are related to the MBTI).

The battery consists of 16 personality types based on the unique combinations of four binary personality traits: Introversion vs Extraversion, Sensing vs Intuition, Thinking vs Feeling, and Judgment vs Perception. There are further ways to organize the 16 types by breaking them into four temperaments based on two-trait combinations: SJ (Guardians), NT (Rational), SP (Artisan), and NF (Idealist). These four temperaments harken back to Jung's thoughts on archetypes.

There is a lot of discourse regarding the accuracy or even utility of this test/sorting given the rigidness of the dichotomies and the difficulty to relate the results to any other personality tests.

I like the MBTI because it provides the greatest number of resulting types and therefore, seemingly, the greatest amount of variety and diversity (everyone can feel special :D). I read somewhere that the test is only 75% accurate and that over time, each person grows out of one trait and into another, changing their overall type. The four types I have gotten over the years are INTJ, ISTJ, ESTJ, and ENTJ. My father, an ENFP, loves to say that he is like every type and has every trait (typical ENFP hating to be boxed into anything), but maybe based on my results there is some truth to his words.

I will say that I am typically very accurate in guessing other people's MBTI results shortly after meeting them (don't worry, I only attempt if it is clear they would be amenable to it, or are even familiar with it for that matter). I will likely use the MBTI as the main categorizer on this website, with perhaps a nice sprinkling of the Enneagram and perhaps the Big Five, two batteries as similar as they are similarly named.