The Theory Behind the TypeFinder

The TypeFinder looks at your tendencies and characteristics across four dimensions of personality:

• Extraversion/Introversion describes your approach to managing your energy level
• Sensing/Intuition describes your style of thinking about facts and ideas
• Thinking/Feeling describes your orientation to personal values
• Judging/Perceiving describes your approach to goals and time management

The goal of the TypeFinder is to help you find the personality type, out of sixteen possibilities, that best reflects your attitudes and behavior. By asking you questions about your approach to each aspect of life, we aim to help you understand how you can best describe your own personality.

You may already recognize the four-letter codes we use to describe personality types. These type codes have been made famous by other assessments such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (a registered trademark of the MBTI Trust, Inc.) and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter® (a registered trademark of David Keirsey).  But the TypeFinder is a little different.

The TypeFinder takes the extremely useful system of personality types and improves its validity by incorporating modern personality research. Over the past 60 years, the sixteen-type system has proved itself invaluable in helping people understand themselves and others, choose appropriate careers, and develop as people. However, although  Myers' work on personality types was revolutionary, it is also several decades old. Traditional assessments based on her theories don't benefit from the wealth of information about personality that psychologists have discovered in recent years.

We have modernized the concept of personality types by blending the theories of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers with the findings of contemporary psychologists, specifically, the Big Five model of personality. While we still use types to describe people, incorporating findings in the Big Five field allows us to give you a more accurate and up-to-date assessment.

Because Briggs and Myers were so perceptive in their theory, it's possible for us to use the same type codes while still updating our conceptual framework to better reflect modern thinking. The result is information that is better organized, clearer, and more scientific, yet still helpful, versatile, and easy to understand.

It's important to note that personality typing is best thought of as a theory or a system, not a fact. Most personality scientists agree that people cannot be neatly divided into types; it's more accurate to think of us each having an infinite number of traits which may fall anywhere along a spectrum. While this is scientifically correct, it makes personality science difficult and inaccessible to anyone who's not a research psychologist. Real people think about personality in terms of types. Our goal is to help you do this as accurately as possible.

FAQ

Q. Why don't you talk about function pairs or attitudes? Everyone knows this is the foundation of Jungian typology!

A. We don't talk about mental functions or attitudes because, to put it plainly, they don't seem to exist. Yes, we know that's a radical thing to say. We know that Jung's theory of functions and attitudes is the foundation of the typology we use. However, while there's ample evidence to support the idea of four dimensions of personality, there's pretty much zip to support Jung's original theory.

Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers devised their system of personality types based on the work of Jung, who postulated that individuals had various mental functions which they used in either an external or internal orientation. For instance, Thinking was one such mental function, describing the process of evaluating facts and options in an objective manner. According to Jung, Thinking could either be used externally, by analyzing the world and putting it in order; or internally, by reviewing and organizing concepts and facts within the mind.

Jung further theorized that individuals would vary in their inclination to use Thinking (and all the other functions) as well as their preference for using it internally vs. externally. These variations in preference created differences between people's personalities. From the foundations of this theory, Katharine Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Myers, developed a comprehensive system of personality types to describe individuals and their preferences for the functions. They came up with four dimensions of personality, each with two possible preferences. A person could thus be any one of sixteen personality types.

In the years since Briggs and Myers did their work, scientific researchers have also been hard at work studying the makeup of the human personality. And an odd thing has happened—particularly odd when you consider that neither Briggs nor Myers had any formal psychology education whatsoever. Amazingly, modern personality science has confirmed that the four dimensions conceived by Briggs and Myers do correspond to four of the major components of human personality. Scientists have also found a fifth dimension, known as Neuroticism, which Briggs and Myers did not include—but they were remarkably close nonetheless. No matter how you analyze the human personality, it essentially breaks down to five major dimensions, four of which were described more than 50 years ago by a pair of laypeople working at their kitchen tables. It's an incredible story.

What modern science has not found, however, is evidence to support Jung's original theory. The mental functions he talked about are surely aspects of the way we think, but there's no reason to believe that they are delineated the way he described. We're awfully glad he came up with the theory, since it was the catalyst for one of the most practically useful systems of understanding personality that we have today. But we have found that modern systems of personality type are clearer and more scientifically accurate when they do not attempt to incorporate his original theory.