Understanding The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator And Its Application

You will have to take a Myers-Briggs personality test to understand your personality profile as well as communication style. Work with your class mates to identify three personality types that are compatible with you and three personality types that are very different to yours. Highlight the areas of compatibility and areas of differences. 

The Concept Behind the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

The Meyers-Briggs Type indicator is a psycho analysis tool that helps in understanding the various types of personalities that are existing among individuals and understand the kind of person an individual is. The tool is based on the conceptual theory proposed by eminent psychologist Carl Jung and have been further developed by the mother and daughter duo Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. The theory was first developed in an around 1944 and was published as the Briggs Meyer type Indicator Handbook. This was later modified into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or simply the MBTI. The first recorded publication of the MBIT in the form of a manual was done in 1956 under the patronage of the Educational Testing Service. The report will be self analysis of the personality type and its analysis will be done with as per the MBIT. The identification of the type will be compared with the contrasting types of personalities. Though this analysis of personality is based on a questionnaire the results derived out of the interview identifies only the type of the personality and does not compare one type to another. The MBTI basically categorizes individuals into a set of different personality types trying to identify the differences in them (Furnham, 2017).

The Meyer-Briggs Type indicator is developed upon the Jungian Theory of Conceptual psychology and is largely based on the two distinct pair of cognitive functions. These are namely,

• The rational or judging functions; these are mostly guided by the thinking and feeling.
• The irrational or perceiving functions; these are mostly guided by sensation and intuition.

The MBTI identifies Judging as Inductive functions and Perception as Deductive functions, which is just a variant of the terms used by Carl Jung. The usage of the terms in analyzing the types has got references to psychological terminology. The theory however is sustained more on assumption and concept rather than being scientifically approved. Since the indicator is based on theory of Carl Jung, it also categorises individuals on the basis of extraversion and introversion. It does not however identify the degree of extraversion or introversion. It simply recognizes the inclination of individual in being either introvert or extrovert. These are again judged on the 16 typical sets of functions defining human cognitive behaviour (Tananchai, 2017).

The Types: Since the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator is based on the theory of Carl Jung, it is highly categorized in the pattern of distinct choices. It is assumed that people are either born with certain ways of perceiving the external world, or they might develop the various adaptations in perceiving and reacting to the outer world. The MBTI differentiates these types into sixteen different pairs of opposite or contrasting traits which have been reduced from 32 of the Jungian theory.

The Types: Categorizing Individuals into Personality Types

The behaviour or attitudes are expressed in abbreviated forms of the behaviours. These can be summed as follows,

• E- Extraversion
• S- sensing
• T- Thinking
• J- Judgment
• The contrasting to this set is the INFP as follows
• I- Introversion
• N- Intuition
• F- Feeling
• P- Perception

These four pair of types is measured on a scale based on set of forced questions type patterns. The answers derived are then analysed to understand the preferences and thereby the qualitative type of an individual in categorized on the basis of their preferences and are arranged accordingly to determine the type of the individual.

The Attitudes:  The preferences of being extravert or introvert are termed as Attitudes. Individuals who are extrovert in nature are believed to be highly active in their surrounding and their sole source of motivation remains in their activity. Being inactive for a considerable time makes them demotivated towards life. On the other hand people who have introvert attitudes believe to reflect and learn from their thinking. They get exhausted easily if they are continuously exposed to work and tend be demotivated in their life. Introverts refresh their selves by reflecting on their actions and from their events in life.

The basic qualities of an extrovert and an introvert can be identified with the following observations,

• Extroverts are more active as compared to Introverts
• Extroverts find relief in working environments while Introverts find the same in reflection
• Extrovert people are more outward and interactive while Introverts tend be less interactive and believe in introspection.
• Extroverts are directed by action while Introverts are directed by their thoughts.

The Functions: as defined by Carl Jung, there are two different types of psychological functions. These generally refer to the cognitive behaviours of an individual and explain how an individual would think and perceive the world around himself or herself. The types of cognitive functions are classified as Perception and Judgment. The kinds of perception are sensing and intuition, while the kinds of Judgment are thinking and feeling.

The thinking or perception defines the way an individual perceives the environment around him.  Depending on the basis of the perception and individual reacts either in an extravert or an introvert way. Individuals who perceive by sensing are much more dependent upon their senses and perceive the surrounding based on their understanding from the senses. While people who perceive on the basis of their intuition depend more on the surrealistic realm and might have a abstract meaning behind the concrete facts or information.

The decision making or judging function relate to the way people react or decide to the external world are influenced by either reflecting or feeling about the actions or events. These are influenced by their perception as well. A person who decides on thinking will be more rational and practical, while decisions made out of feeling tend to be more sympathetic or empathetic depending on the situation (Sample, 2017).

Attitudes: Extraversion and Introversion

An online survey was attempted to make an analysis of myself on the MBTI parameters and the results derived were critically evaluated to understand the Type of personality being possessed by me. The online survey was carried out with the help of free online tools analyzing the types following the MBTI pattern. The following are the results which have been derived out of the tests and subsequent three similar types have been identified (Rashid, & Duys, 2015).

This ENJF type refers to Extraversion, Intuition, Feeling and Judgment. Depending on the four pair of cognitive functions and attitudes, the result has been derived as ENJF. This refers to the type as E; Extraversion to Introversion. N; refers to making decisions that are based more on intuition than to senses. F; refers to my feelings which depend more on social implication than to logical constructs and J; refers to the decisions that I take are based more on analysis and judgments rather than perceptions.

As per the derivation from the MBTI theory, it is obvious that there will be a hierarchy in the manner of the cognitive functions of sensing, intuition, thinking, and feeling. This actually represents the person’s behavioral pattern. The functions are categorized with the being dominant, the auxiliary, the tertiary function which is less developed as compare to the former two types and lastly the inferior type which is mostly the weakness of an individual. The dominant function is believed to be the most comfortable role that an individual plays. The Auxiliary functions support the dominant functions to perform their preferred personality type. The tertiary and the inferior functions are the weakness of an individual and dosent exert much influence to the character type of the person.

Dominant function: The dominant function for my type the (ENJF) is Extraverted feeling or Fe, which refers to the extraversion form of the same and indicates that I have a conflict in prioritizing the feeling of myself and the feeling of others.

Auxiliary Function: The auxiliary refers to the decision making capacity of myself, with respect to thinking or feeling. My auxiliary is Introverted intuition or Ni, which supports my dominant function in shaping my cognitive functions. Introverted intuition refers to my thinking through intuition rather than sensing.

Tertiary Function:  My tertiary function is Extraverted sensing or Se, which refers that my thinking is weaker with respect to sensing of the physical world and to the perception of the senses. This is the section that will require development from my inner self.

Functions: Perception and Judgment

Auxiliary Function: My auxiliary function is   Introverted thinking or Ti, which refers to that I pay less importance to logical reasoning while explaining the external world and give importance to the bigger picture that lay behind a situation. This is the most inferior function and would probably require more of an attention to develop my personality.

The types that would be compatible with my type need to have the opposite of the dominant characters that I have (Charilaos, 2014). Since my dominant function is Fe or Extraverted feeling, the ones with Introverted feeling will be highly compatible with my types. The compatible types of my character would include the

• INFP which have the dominant function as Introversion, opposite to my type of extroverted dominance.
• ISFP also has dominant function as Introversion, and auxiliary as sensing, feeling, perception
• INFJ is similarly compatible with my type, their dominant being introversion, and auxiliary as intuition, feeling, and judging

The following have extroversion as their dominant function as extroversion and auxiliary as sensing, thinking and judging.

• ESTJ- Extroverted, Sensing, Thinking, Judging
• ESTP- Extroversion, Sensing, Thinking, Perception
• ISTP- Introversion, Sensing, Thinking, Perception

These types are mostly contradictory in nature to the type of ENJF as they are dominant in extroverted sensing but their auxiliary is generally introverted, thinking and judgment and perception. These types of personalities generally have opposite thinking and cognitive behaviours as compared to those of ENJFs.

However the theory of the MBTI has faced severe criticism due to its incapacity to address certain issues and failing to establish the validity of the theory. Many of the studies that construct their validity with the MBTI model lack scientific approach and justification of the same. The terminology of the model has also been put to question arguing the credibility of the assessment.

The choice of types is brief and not precise. Since the options of categorizing are based on preferences of one over another, there is chance that the exact identification of types might not be possible to be represented. The MBTI also generates different results owing to the tests being taken under different conditions. This rejects the validity of such tests in practical usage.

Conclusion

Though there are several drawbacks to the theory yet the theory attempts to categorise the various personality types of individuals and had been widely studied during the late half of the 20^th century. The report helped me to analyse my character type based on the MBTI model enabling the theory to use. The attitudes and functions by which an individual is analysed seem interesting and provide several combinations character types to analyse individuals. The speculation of Myers and Briggs, that an individual perceives the world around with their cognitive behaviours and thereby react to them on the basis of their perception, decide their identity is in fact a considerable option to analyse human personality types.

References

Capretz, L. F., Varona, D., & Raza, A. (2015). Influence of personality types in software tasks choices. Computers in Human behavior, 52, 373-378.

Charilaos, M. (2014). Analysis of networking characteristics of different personality types. arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.3663.

Furnham, A. (2017). Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). In Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences (pp. 1-4). Springer International Publishing.

Rashid, G. J., & Duys, D. K. (2015). Counselor Cognitive Complexity: Correlating and Comparing the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator With the Role Category Questionnaire. Journal of Employment Counseling, 52(2), 77-86.

Sample, J. (2017). A Review of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in Public Affairs Education. Journal of Public Affairs Education, 23(4), 979-992.

Tananchai, A. (2017). The Personality of Students Studying the Social Etiquette and Personality Development Course by Myers Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) Theory. AJE, 3(2).