A professor friend and I attended a couple of presentations about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator decades ago. We found the ideas and procedures interesting and helpful for understanding ourselves, our family members and others. We spent a good bit of time with the Myers-Briggs and the related "True Colors" simplification. A couple of days ago, I began reading "The Personality Brokers" by Prof. Merv Emre, a history and the background to the development of the Type Indicator.
We were told in the presentations that Briggs was a woman and the mother of Myers, that they were prompted by the mass testing by the US Army preparing for participation in WW 1 and by the development of paper intelligence tests to try to develop a paper test for group use to ascertain personality. So far, my reading in The Personality Brokers has emphasized the personality and ideas of the mother of the pair of women, Katharine Cook Briggs. The unfolding story has reached the point where Isabel Myers is married and the mother of her own children.
I am a retired professor of education and my PhD is in measurement, statistical analysis and experimental design. I bet you wish you had a degree like that. It might not be as much fun as it sounds but it does give a person like me ideas. Most teachers develop an awareness of the importance of individual personality and unique aspects of each human.
Those of us who incorporated discussion and exploration of the Type Indicator found that the categories and combinations were helpful in thinking about teaching style, learning style and student development. The basic variables are related to Carl Jung's thought, theories and experiences. They are introvert-extrovert, sensor-intuitive, thinker-feeler and judger-perceiver. I have a fairly traditional chart of the 16 combinations of 4 binary categories on my web site here:
https://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/life-classes/myers-briggs-types
I also have a warning that everyone shows all sorts of tendencies and the "type" or "personality" is just a superficial attempt to summarize typical tendencies a given person often shows. It occurs to me that Briggs, Myers and Emre are all women. I am not. I am related to women. My own mother was a woman, my only sibling is a woman, my wife, daughters and granddaughters are all women. Just as health, diet, body type, age and many other variables matter in our lives and how we live them, gender does, too. Prof. Emre's book emphasizes what emerging ideas of how a woman should live and what fulfilment for a woman probably looked like during the period of Briggs and Myers lives.
My friend and I knew that people are complex and show many sides and traits. We found that the simplification of the Type Indicator usually called "True Colors" was faster, cheaper and more useful. If you are interested, there is a summary of the four Colors here
https://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/life-classes/colors
and on related pages on the same site and in my blog Fear, Fun and Filoz.
For comparison, I am ENTJ and I am Green as grass.
https://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/life-classes/colors
Note: no blog tomorrow. Start a blog of your own, look up your favorite music on YouTube or read my old blog posts.
