What does the myers-briggs type indicator classification of e or i stand for?

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is one of the most popular personality tests in the world. It’s also one of the most regularly debunked.

The test sorts people into one of 16 four-letter personality types based on their preferences for Sensing (S) or Intuition (N), Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I), Thinking (T) or Feeling (F), and Judging (J) or Perceiving (P). The company’s website boasts the assessment has a 90% accuracy rating and a 90% average test-retest correlation, “making it one of the most reliable and accurate personality assessments available.”

Many researchers, however, have long questioned the MBTI’s scientific merit.

“In social science, we use four standards: are the categories reliable, valid, independent, and comprehensive?” Adam Grant, a professor of industrial psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, wrote in an essay on the subject. “For the MBTI, the evidence says not very, no, no and not really.”

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These faults are likely in part because neither of its creators, Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, had formal training in psychology, explained Merve Emre, author of "The Personality Brokers,” which explores the history of the MBTI.

Katherine Briggs became interested in Carl Jung’s book “Psychological Types” and began “typing” everyone she knew, said Emre, a professor at Oxford University. In 1943, amid the labor boom of World War II, her daughter took that system and designed a questionnaire to determine what job a worker’s personality is best suited for.

“It really was this very unscientific process,” Emre said.

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In 1975, Consulting Psychological Press, now known as the Myers-Briggs Company,  commercialized the test and became its exclusive world wide publisher, according to Suresh Balasubramanian, the company's general manager/senior vice president of products, programs, marketing. The company has spent decades improving the assessment and doing more research on its validy, Balasubramanian said.

Research has since found that upwards of 50% of people got a different score when they re-took the MBTI just five weeks later. Studies have also shown that the test is not effective at predicting people’s success in different jobs.

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Balasubramanian claims the research discrediting the MBTI is outdated, but the statistics have been so often repeated by subsequent articles and studies that it created a sort of "Internet myth." He added that the problems those researchers encountered have long since been fixed.

"When you look at validity of the instrument it is just as valid as any other personality assessment," Balasubramanian said.

Today, some 1.5 million people take the test online each year and 88 of the Fortune 100 companies are clients of the Myers-Briggs Company, according to Balasubramanian. So why do people continue to take a test that reporters from Vox said in 2015, “has about as much scientific validity as your astrological sign?”

Emre, the Oxford professor, explained that unlike other personality tests, the MBTI is appealing because it is “nonjudgmental” meaning that that all the results are positive.

It was designed that way because its creators “thought that would be very motivating for workers to believe the only purpose of the indicator was to match them to the best job that was suited for them,” Emre said.

She added that the test satisfies an innate desire to know more about ourselves and an easy way to describe that self to others.

"Once you know that you can figure out ways to bring your life choices into alignment with that version of yourself," Emre said. “I think that’s a really, really appealing fantasy that we can aspire to a kind of self governance and a kind of coherence."

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The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective, self report evaluation that identifies a person’s personality type and psychological preferences.

The purpose of this assessment is to assign individuals into one of four categories based on how they perceive the world and make decisions, enabling respondents to further explore and understand their own personalities.

The four categories are: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving. Each person is said to have one preferred quality from each category, producing 16 unique personality types.

According to the MBTI theory, you combine your preferences to arrive at your personality type. The 16 types are referred to by an abbreviation of the initial letters of each of the four type preferences.

For example, “ISTP” would denote introversion, sensing, thinking, and perceiving. There is not a combination that is considered "better" or "worse” than another– all types are viewed as equal.

Rather, the MBTI emphasizes that each individual has specific preferences in the way they view the world and this assessment provides insight into the differences and similarities in people's experiences of life.

The Development of the Myers-Briggs Test

The MBTI tool was developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs in 1942 and is based on psychological conceptual theories proposed by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung from his work Psychological Types.

Jung’s theory of psychological types was based on the existence of four essential psychological functions – judging functions (thinking and feeling) and perceiving functions (sensation and intuition ).

He believed that one combination of the functions is dominant for a person most of the time.

Jung's theory holds that human beings are either introverts or extroverts, so the combinations are expressed in either an introverted or extraverted form (This is why E or I is the first letter of the series). The remaining three functions operate in the opposite orientation.

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