MBTI :: Historical development

Katharine Cook Briggs began her research into personality in 1917.

Upon meeting her future son-in-law, she observed marked differences between his personality and that of other family members.

Briggs embarked on a project of reading biographies, and she developed a typology based on patterns she found.

She proposed four temperaments: Meditative (or Thoughtful), Spontaneous, Executive, and Social.

Then, after the English translation of Psychological Types was published in 1923 (having first been published in German in 1921), she recognized that Jung's theory was similar to, yet went far beyond, her own.

Briggs's four types were later identified as corresponding to the Is, EPs, ETJs and EFJs.

Her first publications were two articles describing Jung's theory, in the journal New Republic in 1926 (Meet Yourself Using the Personality Paint Box) and 1928 (Up From Barbarism).


Briggs's daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, added to her mother's typological research, which she would progressively take over entirely.

Myers graduated first in her class from Swarthmore College in 1919 and wrote the prize-winning mystery novel Murder Yet to Come in 1929 using typological ideas.

However, neither Myers nor Briggs were formally educated in psychology, and thus they lacked scientific credentials in the field of psychometric testing.

So Myers apprenticed herself to Edward N. Hay, who was then personnel manager for a large Philadelphia bank and went on to start one of the first successful personnel consulting firms in the U.S. From Hay, Myers learned test construction, scoring, validation, and statistics.

In 1942, the "Briggs-Myers Type Indicator" was created, and the Briggs Myers Type Indicator Handbook was published in 1944. The indicator changed its name to the modern form (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) in 1956.


Myers' work attracted the attention of Henry Chauncey, head of the Educational Testing Service, and under these auspices, the first MBTI Manual was published in 1962.

The MBTI received further support from Donald T. McKinnon, head of the Institute of Personality Research at the University of California; Harold Grant, professor at Michigan State and Auburn Universities; and Mary H. McCaulley of the University of Florida.

The publication of the MBTI was transferred to Consulting Psychologists Press in 1975, and the Center for Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT) was founded as a research laboratory.

After Myers' death in May 1980, Mary McCaulley updated the MBTI Manual, and the second edition was published in 1985.

The third edition appeared in 1998.

 

 

Differences from Jung

 

Judgment vs. perception

The most notable addition of Myers and Briggs to Jung's original thought is their concept that a given type's fourth letter (J or P) is determined by how that type interacts with the external world, rather than by the type's dominant function.

The difference becomes evident when assessing the cognitive functions of introverts.

To Jung, a type with dominant introverted thinking, for example, would be considered rational (judging) because the decision-making function is dominant.

To Myers, however, that same type would be irrational (perceiving) because the individual uses an information-gathering function (either extraverted intuition or extraverted sensing) when interacting with the outer world.

 

Orientation of the tertiary function

Jung theorized that the dominant function acts alone in its preferred world: exterior for the extraverts, and interior for the introverts.

The remaining three functions, he suggested, operate together in the opposite world. If the dominant cognitive function is introverted, the other functions are extraverted, and vice versa.

The MBTI Manual summarizes references in Jung's work to the balance in psychological type as follows:

There are several references in Jung's writing to the three remaining functions having an opposite attitudinal character. For example, in writing about introverts with thinking dominant...Jung commented that the counterbalancing functions have an extraverted character.

However, many MBTI practitioners hold that the tertiary function is oriented in the same direction as the dominant function.

Using the INTP type as an example, the orientation would be as follows:

• Dominant introverted thinking
• Auxiliary extraverted intuition
• Tertiary introverted sensing
• Inferior extraverted feeling

From a theoretical perspective, noted psychologist H.J. Eysenck calls the MBTI a moderately successful quantification of Jung's original principles as outlined in Psychological Types.

However, both models remain theory, with no controlled scientific studies supporting either Jung's original concept of type or the Myers-Briggs variation.


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