What is the History of the Myers-Briggs Personality System?
With roots that trace back to the early 1920s, the Myers-Briggs personality test is a highly refined personality assessment system. The classification of each test-taker into one of 16 types is determined by their answers to an extensive list of questions which measure preferences, tendencies, perspectives and psychological and emotional needs — all the aspects that comprise a comprehensive personality profile.
The insights offered for your personality type, whatever it might be, have practical applications in every area of your life, providing you with vital data that can help you improve your relationships, career and personal wellness, and find a stronger sense of direction and purpose in life.
An estimated 50 million people globally have taken a Myers and Briggs personality test. Its universal utility is a direct result of the extraordinary efforts of its creators to capture all the aspects that make up a person’s personality.
Two Women, One Lifelong Passion
The Myers-Briggs personality system emerged from the tireless efforts of two women – the mother and daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. While neither was a trained psychologist or statistician, they set out to discover the true source of personality differences among people through objective investigation. Their scientific approach used actual data collected from real human beings to demystify personality and break it down into its essential parts.
Initially intrigued by the personality quirks of her future son-in-law, Chief Myers, Katharine Briggs used the work of psychologist Carl Jung as a major reference point. In his landmark book Psychological Types, Jung theorized that people experience the world through four primary cognitive functions: sensation, intuition, feeling and thinking. These functions impacted how they perceived and interacted with other people and with the world at large, Jung said.
After reading Jung’s book, Briggs recognized that his ideas aligned with what she was discovering in her research. This helped convince her that she was on the right track. Briggs actually made Jung’s acquaintance and kept in contact with him for several years, integrating his insights and research with hers to create the framework of what would evolve into the Myers-Briggs’s personality typing system.
Turning Data Into a Personality Test
Even though she was a bit reluctant at first, Isabel Myers picked up the research mantle in the World War II era, building on her mother’s earlier work and expanding it to include more objective measurements and statistical analysis. As Katharine’s obsession gradually became Isabel’s, she sought to develop a test that could reliably assign a personality type to each person who took it, which could then be used to help place that person in a job that most suited their preferences and inclinations.
Isabel spent nearly two decades carrying out research into the complexities of personality, using her mother’s concepts (and Carl Jung’s) as the basis for her work. Determined to uncover the nuances, she used data obtained from surveys filled out by thousands of medical students and nurses to refine her theories, ultimately developing a personality test that extended well beyond 100 questions.
Isabel Briggs Meyers released the first version of the Myers-Briggs personality test in 1944, and a much more developed version of the test (plus an associated guidebook) in 1962. The latter emerged from her collaboration with a company known as the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which provided Isabel with an opportunity to work with professionally trained statisticians and psychometric experts.
In 1975, Isabel Myers began publishing and distributing the Myers-Briggs personality test through Consulting Psychologist Press (CPP), which made promotion of the Myers-Briggs materials their top priority (something that the ETS had never been willing to do). The CPP worked hand-in-hand with Isabel’s research lab, the Center for Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT), which she opened that same year in conjunction with her research partner, clinical psychologist Mary McCaulley. The CPP changed its name to The Myers-Briggs Company in 2018, while CAPT merged with the Myers & Briggs Foundation in 2023, highlighting the professionalization of the Myers-Briggs franchise that has helped it become the most popular and recognized personality assessment system in the world.
Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers passed away in 1968 and 1980 respectively, meaning that neither was around to see just how successful their personality testing system would become. But the family tradition continued, as it was left to Isabel’s son Peter Briggs Myers to carry on the work of his mother and grandmother.
The Myers-Briggs Personality Spectrum
While the test itself has undergone revisions since its initial publication and widespread adoption in the 1970s, its core framework remains unchanged. Each test-taker “types” into each of four essential categories in a binary format, each of which contributes equally to the assignment of a personality type:
Extraversion (E) vs. Introversion (I) – This category measures where people find their energy, with Extraverts drawing energy from social interaction and dialogue and Introverts from solitude and self-reflection.
Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N) – This category identifies how individuals prefer to process information, with Sensing types focusing on concrete details picked up through the senses while Intuitive types search for underlying patterns that can reveal deeper truths.
Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F) – This pairing emerged from the study of how people make decisions, with Thinking types emphasizing logic and objectivity and Feeling types prioritizing values and emotions.
Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P) – This difference describes an individual’s approach to the outside world, with Judgers favoring structure and planning and Perceivers preferring flexibility and spontaneity.
Letters are assigned from each category based on test results, leading to the creation of each person’s four-letter personality designation: ESTP, INFJ, and so on. If you complete the test you’ll be issued a comprehensive report that explains what the results mean in detail, along with advice on how you can use your newfound knowledge to increase your happiness and improve your life performance.
Each letter reveals personality preferences, but these traits are not absolutes. Instead, they represent opposite ends of a spectrum, and the Myers-Briggs test determines where along that spectrum each test-taker belongs. In fact, research shows that most people who take the Myers-Briggs test will land somewhere in the middle range between the two poles, favoring one side over the other but not by a huge margin. You might be 60% Extraverted and 40% Introverted, for example, as measured by your answers to the test’s questions.
The Multiple Layers of the Myers-Briggs Personality System
While Carl Jung’s ideas helped create the template into which Katherine Briggs could fit her insights, Isabel Myers’ work formalized and simplified Jung’s ideas to make them more accessible to a non-academic audience. For example, in Jung’s conception there were four cognitive functions: sensation, intuition, thinking and feeling, each of which could operate in either an introverted or extraverted mode. The Myers and Briggs system keeps this foundation, but sorts for an overall preference for Extraversion or Introversion. E or I appears as the first letter in your four-letter code to simplify the system.
Let’s show how this works by comparing two personality types, the ENFJ and the INFP. ENFJs have a dominant Extraverted Feeling function (Fe) and a secondary Introverted Intuition function (Ni), while INFPs have a dominant Introverted Feeling function (Fi) and a secondary Extraverted Intuition function (Ne). This means that the focus of the Feeling function is on the external world for ENFJs, but on the internal world for INFPs. Conversely, ENFJs turn inward to engage with their Intuition function, while INFPs immerse themselves in the real world to do the same.
What we can see here is that the individual letters do not represent personality traits that exist in isolation. So the Feeling function does not manifest in the same way for all personality types, but plays a different role depending on whether it is introverted or extraverted.
Isabel Myers’ research was so intensive and extensive that it allowed her to recognize subtleties that made the Myers-Briggs framework more precise and refined. This was also evident in her expansion of Jung’s concept of the dominant and auxiliary (supportive) function. She retained that idea, but with the understanding that an Introvert would always have an Introverted dominant function, and the Extravert an Extraverted dominant function. This means ENFJs have a dominant Feeling function and an auxiliary Intuition function, while for INFPs it is just the opposite.
Isabel Myers added yet another layer of interpretation to the cognitive functions, dividing them into Judging and Perceiving functions, an idea missing from Jung’s framework. As Sensing and Intuition relate to how someone receives and processes information, they are classified as “Perceiving” functions. On the other hand, Thinking and Feeling are classified as “Judging” functions, because they have direct relevance to how a person makes decisions.
Reading through it the first time, all this may sound convoluted. But once you get the hang of the terminology you’ll come to realize it's actually straightforward — as are other concepts you’ll run into as you take a deeper dive into the multilayered personality testing system Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs spent their lifetimes constructing and perfecting.
A Personality Test People Trust
The history of the Myers-Briggs personality testing system shows how it evolved over time, becoming more precise and reliable as the research behind it accumulated more and more data points. Estimates are that more than 10,000 businesses, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations now use personality assessments based on the Myers-Briggs framework in some capacity, and of course there are tens of millions of people who’ve taken the test on their own initiative.
This is a testament to how dedicated Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers were to probing as deeply into the question of personality as they possibly could, to create a personality assessment tool—and a brand name—that people could trust. Their work has made a huge impact on many people’s lives, and that is its best validation.
