Myers-Briggs Personality Types

Jungian Personality Inventories & You

When we discuss type, we often use short 4-letter codes such as ISTP or ESFJ. These codes, superficially, mean nothing and to use them for any sort of analysis would be futile, since it wouldn’t align with reality and wouldn’t produce reliable conclusions. Once decoded, however,  the short 4-letter type code becomes an 8-letter long “map” of an individual’s brain structure. (Personality is the direct result of your physiology. You’ll have an easier time changing your jaw shape or breast size than your personality. It would take physical change to the brain to alter your personality.)

This “map” is composed of the 8 different Cognitive Functions your brain can have.
Each one has an opposite. (T vs F, S vs N, and then e vs i.)
I did you a favor and put opposites next to each other, more on that later.
Maybe you’ll be able to pick up on the pattern?

The 8 Cognitive Functions are:
Te    Fi
Ti     Fe
Se    Ni
Si     Ne

Your type is defined by just 4/8. With only 1 of each T, F, S, and N included in these 4. One last tidbit on that, the little letters denote Introversion and Extraversion, which basically detail whether the function is “Subjective” and “Objective.” 2/4 will have a lowercase e, and 2/4 will have a lowercase i.

If that all seems too formulaic and hard to follow, perhaps an example will help. Here’s what an ESTP’s functions would be:
 Se Ti Fe Ni

You might notice that e and i alternate, that’s part of the pattern. We call your first function the “Dominant” function, the second “Secondary/Auxiliary,” the third “Tertiary,” and the last function and the opposite of the dominant is the “Inferior” function. The higher it is, the easier it is to use and the more you use it as a result. With experience using functions, we can get better with them, but our functions are set for life. People develop, grow, and adjust, but they do not fundamentally change. In other words, your type is fixed. It is suspected you may be set in stone as early as 2 years of age, but it is hard to tell type any earlier than that. (Next to nobody remembers themselves when they were that young.)

Of course, I’m sure right now, many people will read the line “type is fixed” and are quick to point out that they have tested as many different types, or that their type has an “x” in it,  or that they’re somewhere between two types. It isn’t your fault for being confused, there is a lot of misinformation and outright speculation about type on the Internet, what’s important is that you not only take a moment to realize why these two common misconceptions are wrong, but why they don’t even make sense.

1. The Test

Immediately, know this: the test is not a test. No need to reread that, you read it right the first time: the tools that are so often used to determine personalty, are not tests. They are inventories. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® (MBTI^®) is an inventory of personality traits. It is a tool that helps an Analytical Psychologist discern your dominant, auxiliary, tertiary, and inferior functions. Simply put, the key difference between a test and an inventory is that a test has an predefined answer key, and an inventory does not. Isabel Briggs Myersnever intended for it to be misunderstood as a test. We commonly rely on tests for objective evaluation, however, it doesn’t take much to realize that taking a personality inventory is inherently subjective. By its very nature, it cannot be taken impersonally. It is about one’s self.

2. Thinking that a type with X in it, is an actual type

If you recall, the 4-letter codenames for each type break down into 4 cognitive functions that describe a mode of brain function. Due to how the encoded type becomes decoded, putting an X in it can really result in entirely different decoded cognitive functions. The only exception to this, however, is the E/I at the beginning of the encoded type name. Replacing E or I with an X doesn’t result in entirely different cognitive functions, it just shows what first 2 cognitive functions suspected, and concedes that the person putting the X there doesn’t know which of the first 2 cognitive functions is the dominant and which is the auxiliary. Putting an X in place of a P or J does the most damage to the decoding process.

The four letters don’t tell you as much as the 2 defining cognitive functions they encode. Myers created this type inventory (the MBTI) and used this method of encoding to help popularize her theory. (Imagine if you had to say “FiSeNiTe” instead of “ISFP” all the time!) Other type theorists tried making Carl Jung’s personality archetypes less unwieldy, and came up with titles like “The Duty Fulfiller” and “The Performer” and gave biographical descriptions for each. These made sense to the general public as well, but lead to the theory being confused with horoscopes due to how the descriptions seemed to be be groundless arbitrary generalizations. It is one of the more common misconceptions of type!