What is Your Personality Type?

We’ve all heard of the Myers- Briggs Type Indicator/ Personality Test, where participants get assigned one of 16 different 4 letter acronyms describing their personalities through a self questionnaire. Nowadays, online personality quizzes have become somewhat of a fad, where we can even be categorized into trivial things such as “what color am I” or “what TV show character am I”, and then find out why. However, originally personality tests were scientifically designed and the ones that are offer valuable insights about people, which can be useful for employers, family members, or self-reflection.

The Myers- Briggs test was created in the mid-1900’s by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers. Katharine was inspired by Dr. Carl Jung’s “Psychological Types” article published in 1921, which involves his theories of personal differences. Working from that, Katharine and her daughter developed their Type Indicator test, the most widely used personality type test with one of the highest credibilities. 

The test is scientific in its calculations and questions as it asks the person to answer about their interests, values, and reactions to things. This is done by having participants select a point expressing their feeling about a statement over a scale from “agree” to “disagree”. It then takes these answers and is able to identify a person’s perception and judgment in an orderly way. The first letter people are assigned dictates whether the person prefers their inner world or the outer world, and they can either be E for extraverted or I for introverted. The second letter involves whether the person handles information by focusing on the basics or through interpreting information with meaning, assigning people S for sensing or N for intuition respectively. The third letter involves decision making and whether a person looks at consistent logic or people and circumstance first, which generates either T for thinking or F for feeling. Finally, the last category involves whether a person prefers solid decisions or flexibility in regards to new options and information, which gives an answer of either J for judging or P for perceiving. Each person then takes the four letters they received and gets their answer in that order, such as being an INTJ or an ESTP for example. 

Personality testing can never be 100% accurate, as the wording of questions can cause bias, our self-reporting can be inaccurate, and our personalities can change very quickly. However, this test has been found to withstand many of these confounding variables to remain quite accurate, and so it is widely used in the field of psychology and beyond. Some employers ask their applicants to complete this test or a similar one of their own design in order to see if a candidate is a good match for the company or position. Therapists may have a couple take this test in order to compare their personality types and come up with a conflict resolution strategy. Individuals wanting to know more about their behaviors may take this test in order to learn more about themselves and how they can improve as people. None of the preferences in the test are better or worse than the other, they simply show a natural instinct and difference in people in an ordered and workable way. Understanding these differences allows for people to be helped based on them, with time-proven strategies or advice specific to their type.

Curious about what your type is, or curious if your type has changed? The first resource link takes you to an online free version of this test so you can see for yourself (this test can also be professionally given for greater accuracy). From there, you can find out which famous people share your type, along with interesting information about which career paths, hobbies, or designs may suit you. All of this can and should be taken with a grain of salt, as there are billions of different “types” of people and not 16. But self reflection is a great skill to work on, and this test can provide scientific insight on that for you.

Kyndal Sims

Birch Psychology

Resources

https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test

https://eu.themyersbriggs.com/en/tools/MBTI/Myers-Briggs-history

https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/