7 Myths and Misconceptions About Myers-Briggs
These seven tend to come up during Myers-Briggs workshops and can cause a lot of confusion. So without further ado…
1. Carl Jung developed the sixteen personality types.
No, Myers and Briggs developed the sixteen types building on Jung’s research. Jung developed his type theory by the identifying eight cognitive processes, or functions, that everyone uses to perceive information and make decisions. Myers and Briggs developed the MBTI® to serve as a key for putting those functions in order of preference. Their contribution was to develop the ‘orientation’ attitude, which indicates which function a person shows to the world (i.e. what he extraverts). By adding this attitude, they moved from eight Jungian functions to sixteen Myers-Briggs types.
2. The MBTI® produces your personality type preference.
Not exactly - the MBTI® produces a hypothesis of your personality type preference. YOU determine your OWN type preference after a self-verification session. You compare your own self-picked preference with the results of your MBTI® and decide on a final preference. In doing so, you increase your understanding of what separates the MBTI® dichotomies, and ultimately your understanding of yourself. To aid this process, we augment the MBTI® with Exploring You™, a robust web-based self-verification tool that lets you experience your type preferences in action.
3. Your type preference changes over time.
Some people take the MBTI® multiple times and get different results. They interpret this as an indication that they have ‘changed.’ But this isn’t the case. Type is innate. Your type preferences don’t change. But your cognitive functions develop over time. Your functions develop in their order of preference as you get older. You become more comfortable using all of the Jungian functions. You might feel that this means your type is changing - but it isn’t.
So what does it mean when you get different results from repeated MBTI®s? It could mean you once took it under duress. Also, when you take it at work, you tend to answer in a work ‘frame of mind.’ Your responses may be different when taken at home, or at a library, or at any lower-stress environment.
4. Determining your four-letter preference is the end goal of Myers-Briggs.
The primary purpose of Myers-Briggs is self development. As such, learning your preference is merely a starting point. From there, type dynamics explains how you use each of the eight Jungian functions, and how to develop them. There are a myriad publications on how to use type preferences in team building, sales, and conflict resolution. And my specialty is applying Myers-Briggs in problem solving, change, and innovation.
5. “Extraverts are loud, Introverts are shy, Perceivers procrastinate,” etc.
It’s easy to draw stereotypes from the individual Myers-Briggs dichotomies, and from the sixteen type preferences themselves. Don’t get sucked into this. Some who prefer Extraversion may be loud or talkative, but they also use Introversion as well. We use ALL of the Jungian functions at one time or another - we just prefer to use some more than others. A person who prefers Feeling tends to make decisions based on values and people - but can also use facts and logic when necessary. A person who prefers Perception may want to keep their schedules open, but can also plan activities and meet deadlines if the situation requires.
6. The MBTI® measures “strength of personality preference.”
Of all the misconceptions, this one is the most common, due to the nice visual aid in the MBTI® report:
A person looks at this image and assumes that the blue bars represent strength, or intensity, of a preference relative to the center. But this is not the case. The MBTI® is not a strength of preference indicator - it’s a sorter. Each question forces you to choose between two psychological opposites. The blue bars indicate how consistent you were at selecting between one or the other.
In this example, the person selected all the Perception answers for iNtuition, indicating a very clear preference. But he selected slightly more Judgment answers for Thinking than he did for Feeling. This doesn’t indicate he’s a ‘weak Thinker.’ It means, for whatever reason, the MBTI didn’t do as good a job indicating a clear preference for one over the other, certainly not as well as it did for Perception. That’s one of the reasons we self-verify.
7. To find your ‘opposite,’ just switch the letters of your preference.
This one sounds logical on its face. If you prefer ISTJ, then naturally your opposite (i.e., the type you’ll have the hardest time relating to or working for) is ENFP, right? Au contraire - it’s ESTP, or INFJ, depending on how you think of ‘opposite.’ Why? I don’t have enough room in this post to explain. It’s an aspect of type dynamics, which you’ll learn after you take the assessment.
BONUS! BONUS! BONUS!
7a. Organizations tend to take on the personality traits of their senior leadership.
Large organizations tend to take on a personality of their own, independent of revolving senior leadership, due to the organization’s character. This is more than just the predominant Myers-Briggs preference of the organization - it’s in the way organizations fashion their internal and external processes, decision making, data collection, and customer interface. It’s explored more completely with the Organizational Character Index.
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