Detailed Report On MBTI Test Support Center

Contact Us

Detailed Report On MBTI {Myers–Briggs Type Indicator} Test

In personality typology, the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self-report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. The test attempts to assign a value to each of four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. One letter from each category is taken to produce a four-letter test result, such as "INTJ" or "ESFP".

The MBTI was constructed by two Americans, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, who were inspired by the book Psychological Types by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Isabel Myers was particularly fascinated by the concept of introversion and she typed herself as an INFP. However, she felt the book was too complex for the general public, and therefore she tried to organize the Jungian cognitive functions to make it more accessible.

Most of the research supporting the MBTI's validity has been produced by the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, an organization run by the Myers-Briggs Foundation, and published in the center's own journal, the Journal of Psychological Type (JPT), raising questions of independence, bias, and conflict of interest. Though the MBTI resembles some psychological theories, it has been criticized as pseudoscience and is not widely endorsed by academic researchers in the psychology field. The indicator exhibits significant scientific (psychometric) deficiencies, including poor validity, poor reliability, measuring categories that are not independent, and not being comprehensive.

History of MBTI Test

Concept of MBTI Test

The MBTI is based on the influential theory of psychological types proposed by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in 1921, who had speculated that people experience the world using four principal psychological functions—sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking—and that one of these four functions is dominant for a person most of the time. The four categories are introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, judging/perceiving. Each person is said to have one preferred quality from each category, producing 16 unique types.

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."

The MBTI Manual states that the indicator "is designed to implement a theory; therefore, the theory must be understood to understand the MBTI". Fundamental to the MBTI is the theory of psychological type as originally developed by Carl Jung. Jung proposed the existence of two dichotomous pairs of cognitive functions:

Jung believed that for every person, each of the functions is expressed primarily in either an introverted or extraverted form. Based on Jung's original concepts, Briggs and Myers developed their own theory of psychological type, described below, on which the MBTI is based. However, although psychologist Hans Eysenck called the MBTI a moderately successful quantification of Jung's original principles as outlined in Psychological Types, he also said, "[The MBTI] creates 16 personality types which are said to be similar to Jung's theoretical concepts. I have always found difficulties with this identification, which omits one half of Jung's theory (he had 32 types, by asserting that for every conscious combination of traits there was an opposite unconscious one). Obviously, the latter half of his theory does not admit of questionnaire measurement, but to leave it out and pretend that the scales measure Jungian concepts is hardly fair to Jung."  In any event, both models remain hypothetical, with no controlled scientific studies supporting either Jung's original concept of type or the Myers–Briggs variation.

Differences from Jung [MBTI Tester]

Jung did not see the types (such as intra- and extraversion) as dualistic, but rather as tendencies: humans have both and some people are balanced.

Jung's typology theories postulated a sequence of four cognitive functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition), each having one of two polar tendencies (extraversion or introversion), giving a total of eight dominant functions. The MBTI is based on these eight hypothetical functions, although with some differences in expression from Jung's model. While the Jungian model offers empirical evidence for the first three dichotomies, whether the Briggs had evidence for the J-P preference is unclear.

The most notable addition of Myers' and Briggs' ideas to Jung's original thought is their concept that a given type's fourth letter (J or P) indicates a person's most preferred extraverted function, which is the dominant function for extraverted types and the auxiliary function for introverted types.

Jung theorized that the dominant function acts alone in its preferred world: exterior for extraverts and interior for introverts. The remaining three functions, he suggested, operate in the opposite orientation. Some MBTI practitioners, however, place doubt on this concept as being a category error with next to no empirical evidence backing it relative to other findings with correlation evidence, yet as a theory it still remains part of Myers' and Briggs' extrapolation of their original theory despite being discounted.

Jung's theory goes as such: if the dominant cognitive function is introverted then the other functions are extraverted and vice versa. The MBTI Manual summarizes Jung's work of balance in psychological type as follows: "There are several references in Jung's writing to the three remaining functions having an opposite attitudinal character. For example, in writing about introverts with thinking dominant ... Jung commented that the counterbalancing functions have an extraverted character." Using the INTP type as an example, the orientation according to Jung would be as follows:

Type dynamics and development


Jung's typological model regards psychological type as similar to left or right handedness: people are either born with, or develop, certain preferred ways of perceiving and deciding. The MBTI sorts some of these psychological differences into four opposite pairs, or "dichotomies", with a resulting 16 possible psychological types. None of these types is "better" or "worse"; however, Briggs and Myers theorized that people innately "prefer" one overall combination of type differences. In the same way that writing with the left hand is difficult for a right-hander, so people tend to find using their opposite psychological preferences more difficult, though they can become more proficient (and therefore behaviorally flexible) with practice and development.

The 16 types are typically referred to by an abbreviation of four letters—the initial letters of each of their four type preferences (except in the case of intuition, which uses the abbreviation "N" to distinguish it from introversion). For instance:

These abbreviations are applied to all 16 types.

The interaction of two, three, or four preferences is known as "type dynamics". Although type dynamics has received little or no empirical support to substantiate its viability as a scientific theory, Myers and Briggs asserted that for each of the 16 four-preference types, one function is the most dominant and is likely to be evident earliest in life. A secondary or auxiliary function typically becomes more evident (differentiated) during teenaged years and provides balance to the dominant. In normal development, individuals tend to become more fluent with a third, tertiary function during mid-life, while the fourth, inferior function remains least consciously developed. The inferior function is often considered to be more associated with the unconscious, being most evident in situations such as high stress (sometimes referred to as being "in the grip" of the inferior function).

However, the use of type dynamics is disputed: in the conclusion of various studies on the subject of type dynamics, James H. Reynierse writes, "Type dynamics has persistent logical problems and is fundamentally based on a series of category mistakes; it provides, at best, a limited and incomplete account of type related phenomena"; and "type dynamics relies on anecdotal evidence, fails most efficacy tests, and does not fit the empirical facts". His studies gave the clear result that the descriptions and workings of type dynamics do not fit the real behavior of people. He suggests getting completely rid of type dynamics, because it does not help, but hinders understanding of personality. The presumed order of functions 1 to 4 did only occur in one out of 540 test results.


Big Five Role In MBTI 

McCrae and Costa based their Five Factor Model (FFM) on Goldberg's Big Five theory. McCrae and Costa present correlations between the MBTI scales and the Big Five personality constructs measured, for example, by the NEO-PI-R. The five purported personality constructs have been labeled: extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism (emotional instability), although there is not universal agreement on the Big Five theory and the related Five-Factor Model (FFM). The following correlations are based on the results from 267 men and 201 women as part of a longitudinal study of aging.



Ex­tra­ver­sion
Open­nessAgree­able­nessCon­sci­en­tious­nessNeu­rot­i­cism
E–I−0.740.03−0.030.080.16
S–N0.100.720.04−0.15−0.06
T–F0.190.020.44−0.150.06
J–P0.150.30−0.06−0.490.11

The closer the number is to 1.0 or −1.0, the higher the degree of correlation.

These correlations refer to the second letter shown, i.e., the table shows that I and P have negative correlations with extraversion and conscientiousness, respectively, while F and N have positive correlations with agreeableness and openness, respectively. These results suggest that the four MBTI scales can be incorporated within the Big Five personality trait constructs, but that the MBTI lacks a measure for emotional stability dimension of the Big Five (though the TDI, discussed above, has addressed that dimension). Emotional stability (or neuroticism) is a predictor of depression and anxiety disorders.

These findings led McCrae and Costa to conclude that, "correlational analyses showed that the four MBTI indices did measure aspects of four of the five major dimensions of normal personality. The five-factor model provides an alternative basis for interpreting MBTI findings within a broader, more commonly shared conceptual framework." However, "there was no support for the view that the MBTI measures truly dichotomous preferences or qualitatively distinct types, instead, the instrument measures four relatively independent dimensions."