Did you know that the MBTI assessment is used more than any other personality test in the world?
Approximately two million people annually around the world take the MBTI assessment.
~Myers-Briggs Company
MBTI is based on the work of Carl Gustav Jung who was an academic and Swiss psychologist. He generally researched and published works for doctors and psychologists. In 1921, Jung published Psychological Types which was originally published in German.
According to Jung, the original psychological functions were:
- Rational functions including thinking and feeling
- Irrational functions including sensation and intuition
He also investigated the differences between extraversion and introversion.
In 1923, Katharine Briggs, a young mother living in Michigan, read Jung’s work and recognized the similarities between his personality type theory and the theory she was pondering. Her own queries started after she had married. She recognized that despite her intelligence, going to college at age 14 and graduating first in her class, she was now expected, as a woman, to abandon her intellectual pursuits and become a wife and mother. She began looking into what she could do at home. Where did she start? Studying children including her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers.
Interestingly, after her daughter went to school, Katharine found herself with more time on her hands. She began communicating with Carl Jung, asking him questions about his psychological types. She began expounding on his work by looking into his abstract theories, moving into more concrete information.
Briggs believed that if individuals understood others better there could be less conflict, especially in the shadows of World War II. People could come together based on empathy.
She decided that there needed to be a way for people to learn about personality type and be able to identify their type. This would create a foundation of understanding as people began to look at the similarities and the differences between their personalities. She called this people sorting.
For the next twenty years, she worked on developing a means, or an assessment, writing questions and determining the validity and reliability of the new MBTI Instrument which was first published in 1962. Her work has been supported and continuously developed by CPP, Inc (Consulting Psychologists Press and then later renamed the Myers-Briggs Company in 2018).
Follow us on Instagram: MBTI.Specialist
Follow us on YouTube: StudentSuccessSpace
Want to learn more about this topic?
Learn more about MBTI on Udemy.com. Search for Tracy Atkinson’s courses.
Or read about MBTI. Search for Tracy Atkinson’s publications on Amazon.
Comments are closed