MBTI - Origin and Preferences

In the last blog, we looked at 3 broad ways in which personality was measured. In today's blog (and continuing in the next blog) we look at the most commonly used tool for assessing personality - MBTI Instrument.

Origin of the MBTI framework:
The origin of the framework could be traced to the works of Swiss psychiatrist - Carl Jung. His classic work - "psychological types" proposed that there were two basic types of people - Extroverts and Introverts. He also identified that there were two types of perceiving (sensing and intuition) and two types of judgments (thinking and feeling).

This initial work caught the attention of a mother-daughter team - Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers who developed the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator Instrument also called MBTI. This instrument put Jung's type theory into practice.

MBTI is used extensively in Career Counseling, Team Building, Conflict Management, Understanding Management styles etc.

Preferences

In this section, we shall define the 8 types of preferences:

• Extraversion: A preference indicating that an individual is energized by interactions with other people
• Introversion: A preference indicating that an individual is energized by time alone
• Sensing: Gathering information through five senses
• Intuition: Gather information through "sixth sense" and focusing on what could be rather than what actually exists
• Thinking: Making decisions in a logical, objective fashion
• Feeling: Making decisions in a personal, value-oriented way
• Judging Preference: Preferring closure and completion in making decisions
• Perceiving Preference: Preferring to explore many alternatives and flexibility