In the 1920s, the idea of personality type was being explored by leading scientists and philosophers. A Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, wrote Psychological Types during that time, in which he gave a detailed description of what has now become one of the most widely used typologies in the world.

In the 1940s, Isabel Myers began developing a self-report questionnaire—the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® instrument—that could help people find where they fit in Jung’s theory. The use of this instrument has led to an almost universal understanding that there are sixteen basic personality types, each of which can be “named” by a four-letter personality type code....Read more...

In each of the sixteen types, each of the eight processes plays a different “role” in the personality. The type code lets you know what role each process plays for each type. This is called “type dynamics.” It is also referred to as the “hierarchy of functions”: Dominant, Auxiliary, Tertiary, and Inferior. The roles are explained below to help you better understand the patterns. In most of what we do we rely on two of the processes—a preferred way of accessing information and a preferred way of organizing and evaluating that information. As we look more closely we can see that one process takes a leading role and the other takes a supporting role....Read more...