Myers-Briggs Personality Types

The Myers-Briggs personality types are determined by a questionnaire. They indicate different psychological preferences regarding the way people perceive the world and make decisions. The test assigns a binary value to each of four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling and judging or perceiving. 

One letter is taken from each category to produce a four-letter test result. Examples include ESFP and INTJ. The test was developed by two Americans, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers. They were inspired by the book Psychological Types written by Karl Jung.

Karl Jung speculated that people experience the world with four principal psychological functions- sensing, intuition, feeling and thinking. In his view, one of the four functions is dominant in a person most of the time. According to the Myers-Briggs test, each person has one preferred quality from each category, which produces 16 types.

The 16 types are indicated by an abbreviation of letters. They are the initial letters of the four type preferences with the exception of intuition, which uses the abbreviation N to distinguish it from introversion. 

The 16 personality types are the following:

ENTJ ENTP ENFJ ENFP

ESTJ ESTP ESFJ ESFP

INTJ INTP INFJ INFP

ISTJ ISTP ISFJ ISFP

The Myers-Briggs test does not measure aptitude. It simply indicates the preference of one quality in each category. However, the test does not indicate the degree to which a person prefers one quality over another. Nevertheless, Isabel Myers considered the direction of the preference to be more important than the degree of the preference.