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Mbti Critique

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was developed in part to offer a form of Jung's personality type theory that is more coherent and useful in people's lives. It has become one of the most accepted and widely-used development tools for assessing personality characteristics in non-psychiatric populations. Applications have been made across a broad range of human knowledge, including in areas such as psychotherapy and counseling; education, learning methods, cognitive styles, career counseling, and management and leadership in organizations. Isabel Briggs Myers devoted a great deal of her life to the creation of an instrument that would be valuable to the largest possible population of people, initially designed to facilitate research interests and later adapted for general use. The MBTI has been continually researched and was recently revised, with the publication of Form M in 1998 (Geyer, 1998), which is the form still used today.
Overview
The MBTI is a psychometric instrument designed to sort people into groups of personality types. Based on Jungian theory which submits that variants in human behavior are not due to chance, but to fundamental and discernible disparities in the ways people choose to use their minds to collect and process information. Once a person reaches adulthood learning begins to overlay our core personality, which is when the blending of nature and nurture becomes more evident. For some people, this learning serves to strengthen what is already there, but for others it constructs assorted facets of personality.
The instrument is used to measure a person's preferences, using four basic scales with opposite poles. The four scales are: (1) extraversion/introversion, (2) sensate/intuitive, (3) thinking/feeling, and (4) judging/perceiving(Geyer, 1998). Every person moves toward one of two propensities in what you might call natural energy. While these are two different but complementary sides of our nature, most people have an inherent...