Personality Type

What exactly is a "personality type"? How many personality types are there?

The Myers-Briggs system says that there are 16 personality types. They get the number 16 because 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 = 16. Myers-Briggs divides the human population using four dichotomies: preference for extraversion vs. introversion, intuition vs. sensation, thinking vs. feeling, and judging vs. perceiving.

But there must be a zillion other ways of classifying personality types. For example, you could also distinguish by whether a person is calm or high-strung, assertive vs. aggressive vs. timid vs. indifferent, clever vs. plodding, whimsical vs. sober, and on and on and on and on and on. It's rather silly to say that there are 16 personality types. With just as much reason, you could say that there are 17 or 15 or 9 or 2,245,476. It all depends on what distinctions you want to draw. [ -- This is an introverted intuitive perspective, and an extroverted thinking perspective. Jung: (Speaking on Ti)This type of thinking is synthetic from the start. It organizes the stuff of experience along the lines of the concept and uses it as a "filling" for ideas. Here the [singular!!!!!!] concept is the agent by virtue of its own inner potency, which seizes and shapes the experienced material. The extravert supposes that the source of this power is merely arbitrary choice, or else a premature generalizing of experiences which in themselves are limited. -- reference the "But there must be a zillion other ways...." from the beginning of this paragraph.

- Robert Evans, all emphasis mine -- given this, it's entirely possible you're an extroverted thinker, not an introverted intuitive.

As an aside: William James labeled the introverted thinker as "sensationalistic", thus my use of !!!!!!!!!! ;-). ]

A less semantically confused version of our question is: Does the number 16 arise merely from the fact that the MBTI uses four dichotomies, or does it correspond to exactly 16 deep divides in human nature, reflecting the structure and design of the human brain?

If the MBTI really divides people along particularly deep differences, we would expect that on each scale, most people would come out clearly on one side or the other, and very few people would tend to answer the questions in a way that puts them at the borderline. If we plotted number of people against number of questions answered in accord with a certain letter, we would expect to see a "two-humped" graph (a "unimodal distribution" in the language of statistics). But that's not what happens. In fact, most people come out near the middle. The MBTI, with its emphasis on "sorting" people into 16 personaity types, ends up drawing its lines of greatest distinction right at the points of least difference. [Unfortunately, this is primarily due to problems of differential semantic understanding inherent in people who take these tests. Jung didn't set out to define axes, he set out to define 8 particular types by giving examples/descriptions of their defining traits and sub-traits. People tend to score certain ways on the tests because the tests are not precise enough to sort people into their types, not because the types are not accurate. (And because people idealize, and thus identify, with traits other than their own.) -- Robert Evans

That said, it seems likely that sub-trait variations that are shared among differing types exist below the main type (you are still a type, but you may share character traits with a person who is a completely different type).]

Academic researchers look into the vast range of human personality and don't limit themselves to "16 types". To get a taste of the true breadth and richness of the field, take a look at http://www.personality-project.org/.

Interestingly enough, Lenore Thomson's writing, while it does include a 16-way personality test, does not purport to give people career guidance or marriage advice based on the four-letter code that it assigns. The four-letter code is not meant to sum you up as a person. Hypothesis: Lenore is describing just one aspect of ego orientation and not even trying to categorize whole personalities into a small number of natural categories.

Admittedly, this is a strange exegesis given the title of Lenore's book.

See Not Personality, Beyond Personality, Tea Leaves and Tarot Cards.