Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
Also known as: MBTI
Sixteen personality types from Jungian dichotomies; widely used despite weak psychometric support.
The MBTI is a personality typology classifying individuals into one of sixteen types from four dichotomies (Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving). Developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs from Carl Jung's typological theory, it became enormously popular in corporate training and team-building contexts. Mainstream personality psychology rejects it on psychometric grounds — its forced-choice dichotomies impose categorical structure on continuously distributed traits, test-retest reliability is poor, and predictive validity beyond chance has not been established.
Core components
- Extraversion/Introversion
- Sensing/Intuition
- Thinking/Feeling
- Judging/Perceiving
- sixteen resulting types
Primary use case
Corporate team-building, career counseling, and self-development contexts; use in high-stakes decisions like hiring is generally discouraged by mainstream psychology.
Common criticisms
- Forced-choice dichotomies misrepresent continuous trait distributions
- weak test-retest reliability with many people changing types on retest
- lack of empirical validation for the sixteen-type structure
- rejected by mainstream personality psychology in favor of dimensional models like the Big Five.
Lineage
- Child of
- Jungian Analytical Psychology
- Siblings
- Big Five, HEXACO, DISC Assessment, Enneagram
- Derived from
- Jungian Analytical Psychology