Personality Traits and Typing

Introduction

There are many different ways of categorizing personality traits; some traits that can be considered include whether one is optimistic or pessimistic, friendly or aloof, or accepting vs judgmental. In 1921, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung published his book Psychological Types that characterized individuals based on the most primary of personality traits – whether they were introverted or extraverted, and how they process information. 

Types of Personalities

If you are introverted, you prefer the company of your own thoughts and inner world to that of other people. If you are extraverted, you are focused outwards and enjoy the company of others. Jung also separated the way people process information into two main categories; 

• The perceptive functions or personality traits.
• The judgmental functions or personality traits.

The Perceptive Personality

 The perceptive personality traits are ways of perceiving, or taking in information. If you are a “senser, you use data remembered from your five senses as your main source of information. If you are an “intuitive”, you pay more attention to your inner voice and its ability to recognize patterns than to any sensory information. 

The Judgmental Personality 

The judgmental personality traits relate to how we make decisions based on the data we receive. Jung called these personality traits “thinking” and “feeling”. Thinking types tend to make decisions based on deductive logic, while feeling types tend to make decisions based on emotion. 

Personality Types

Based on this analysis and associated personality traits, there are eight different personality types:

• Introverted Thinker
• Introverted Feeler
• Introverted Sensor
• Introverted Intuitor
• Extraverted Thinker
• Extraverted Feeler
• Extraverted Sensor
• Extraverted Intuitor

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Tests

Many years later, Isabel Myers and Katherine Briggs used this method as a basis for the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator tests – in which they proposed 16 different human personality types based on common traits. The Myers-Briggs method added these insights: 

• Everyone has both a primary personality trait, and a secondary or “auxiliary” one.
• If the primary personality trait is judgmental, then the auxiliary one will be perceptive and vice versa.
• If the primary personality trait is introversion, then the auxiliary one will be extraversion and vice versa. 

This system allows two choices for orientation; E and I for extraversion and introversion, two choices for information uptake; S for sensing and N for intuition; two choices for judgment, T for thinking and F for feeling, and two choices for decision making, J for judgment and P for perception. It is believed that other personality traits such as perfectionism and leadership derive from these basic functions, and that each of us can be described by a combination of these four letters.