Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI): Jung-typology popular personality test

About the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

Katharine Cook Briggs was a self-educated student of personality typology who became interested in Carl Jung's 1921 book Psychological Types. Through the 1920s and 1930s, she developed informal personality classifications inspired by Jung's framework. Her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers extended this work during WWII, developing a structured questionnaire to assign people to one of 16 personality types based on four dichotomous dimensions: Extraversion-Introversion (E-I), Sensing-Intuition (S-N), Thinking-Feeling (T-F), Judging-Perceiving (J-P).

The 1944 MBTI prototype was used for vocational guidance during WWII; the formal instrument was published in 1962 (after Isabel Briggs Myers had spent two decades refining it). It became extraordinarily popular in corporate America from the 1970s onward. Today the MBTI is administered approximately 2 million times annually, used by 88 of the Fortune 100 companies, and is the most-used personality assessment in the world.

Despite its commercial success, the MBTI has substantial scientific concerns: (1) Bimodal forced-choice categorization - Jung's continuous dimensions are forced into binary categories at the median, which loses information and creates instability near the cutoff. (2) Poor test-retest reliability - studies report 30-50% of test-takers receive a different type designation when retested 5+ weeks later. (3) No empirical validation of the 16-type framework as distinct natural groups. (4) No predictive validity for major life outcomes (career success, mental health, relationship outcomes). The Big Five (1981) has substantially better empirical support. But the MBTI persists due to commercial momentum and intuitive appeal.

The 4 subtests

Source

All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:

MBTI items and the official MBTI Instrument remain under CPP (Consulting Psychologists Press) copyright. We document the test's history and the substantial scientific concerns about its validity.