The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a personality assessment that categorizes individuals into sixteen distinct types based on four binary dichotomies: introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving.
The instrument was developed during the 1940s by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, drawing on 📝Carl Jung's 1921 theory of psychological types. It grew into one of the most widely administered self-report inventories in the world — used heavily in corporate hiring, team development, career counseling, and military assignment. Each respondent is mapped to a four-letter type code (e.g. INTJ, ENFP) that is then interpreted through type descriptions developed by the Briggs-Myers tradition and its commercial publisher, CPP Inc.
Despite its commercial reach, the MBTI has been broadly criticized in academic psychology for relying on dichotomous categories that the underlying data do not support, for low test-retest reliability when respondents are reassessed weeks apart, and for limited predictive validity relative to dimensional models like the 📝Five-Factor Model.