But they come from the disregarded theories of an early-20th-century thinker who believed in things like ESP and the collective unconscious.Īctual data tells psychologists that these traits do not have a bimodal distribution. It’d be one thing if there were good empirical reasons for these strange binary choices that don’t seem to describe the reality we know. “There is no such thing as a pure extravert or introvert,” Jung wrote It arrives at the conclusion by giving people questions such as ”You tend to sympathize with other people” and offering them only two blunt answers: “yes” or “no.” Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum."īut the test is built entirely around the basis that people are all one or the other. Jung himself admitted as much, noting that the binaries were useful ways of thinking about people, but writing that "there is no such thing as a pure extravert or a pure introvert. If you ask people whether they prefer to think or feel, or whether they prefer to judge or perceive, the majority will tell you a little of both. With most traits, humans fall on different points along a spectrum. It still assigns you a four-letter type to represent which result you got in each of the four categories: Wikimedia Commons/Jake Beech The Myers-Briggs uses false, limited binaries The test has grown enormously in popularity over the years - especially since it was taken over by the company CPP in 1975 - but has changed little. Myers and Briggs gave titles to each of these types, like the Executive, the Caregiver, the Scientist, and the Idealist. Raise two (the number of possibilities in each category) to the fourth power (the number of categories) and you get 16: the different types of people there apparently are in the world. It copied Jung's types but slightly altered the terminology, and modified it so that people were assigned one possibility or the other in all four categories, based on their answers to a series of two-choice questions. They began testing their "Type Indicator" in 1942. To learn the techniques of test-making and statistical analysis, Briggs worked with Edward Hay, an HR manager for a Philadelphia bank. Jung's principles were later adapted into a test by Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of Americans who had no formal training in psychology. None of this came out of controlled experiments or data - it was all theoretical "Jung literally made these up based on his own experiences." But Jung's influence on the early field was enormous, and this idea of "types" in particular caught on. "This was before psychology was an empirical science," says Grant, the Penn psychologist. These categories, though, were approximate: ”Every individual is an exception to the rule,” Jung wrote.Įven these rough categories, though, didn't come out of controlled experiments or data. All four types, additionally, could be divided based on attitudes into introverts and extroverts. The former group could be further split into people who prefer sensing and others who prefer intuiting, while the latter could be split into thinkers and feelers, for a total of four types of people. In it, he put forth a few different interesting, unsupported theories on how the human brain operates.Īmong other things, he explained that humans roughly fall into two main types: perceivers and judgers. In 1921, Jung published the book Psychological Types. Douglas Glass/Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images The Myers-Briggs rests on wholly unproven theories Carl Jung in 1960. Here's an explanation of why these labels are so meaningless - and why no organization in the 21st century should rely on the test for anything. Yet you've probably heard people telling you that they're an ENFJ (extroverted intuitive feeling judging), an INTP (introverted intuitive thinking perceiving), or another one of the 16 types drawn from Jung's work, and you may have even been given this test in a professional setting. A personality test can’t tell you who you are
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