A little M-B background

It has come to my attention that many folks are unfamiliar with Myers and Briggs as individuals and creators of the personality type indicator test. Here is a little background for you, taken from this website:

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Test was created by a mother/daughter team of Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. They based their work on Carl Jung's theories about psychological type preferences. After reading Jung's work, Myers and Briggs decided to create an everyday application of his work for the general public. Myers developed the pen & pencil test in the 1940's. They tested it on friends and family during WWII hoping to resolve conflicts and help match people to appropriate work. It took over 20 years to fully develop the instrument.

Myers and Briggs also added a forth dimension to Jung's scheme focusing on how people deal with the outer world. They determined that each person has an external orientation towards orderliness and decisiveness (judgment) or towards new information and going with the flow (perception).

MBTI is one of the most widely used personality instruments in the world. Its ease of use, high statistical validity and reliability make it one the most respected personality instruments that exist. The test/retest measurement is very accurate, in 75% of cases, individuals will test the same in 3 of the 4 dimensions. Over 600 dissertations have been written on the MBTI and there are well over 1,000 articles and dozens of books. An average of 2 million people in the United States takes the MBTI each year and it has been translated into more than 30 languages.