MBTI (Myers–Briggs Type Indicator)

The Myers-Briggs typology emerged in the mid-twentieth century as an attempt to make Carl Jung's theory of psychological types accessible and practical. Isabel Myers and her mother Katharine Briggs spent decades developing a questionnaire that would allow the identification of a Jungian type without deep theoretical knowledge. The result was a system of 16 types designated by four-letter codes: INTJ, ENFP, ISFJ, and so on.

The four dichotomies describe preferences rather than abilities. Introversion / Extraversion — where a person draws energy. Intuition / Sensing — what they rely on when perceiving information: patterns and possibilities, or concrete facts and details. Thinking / Feeling — how they make decisions: through logic or through values. Judging / Perceiving — how they structure their relationship with the outer world: in a planned and organized way, or flexibly and openly.

Each of the 16 types has a characteristic "stack" of cognitive functions — the order in which different modes of information processing are engaged. This gives the model additional depth: two people with different types may behave similarly on the surface yet operate in fundamentally different ways internally. Type stability is relative: the maturity of functions changes with age and life experience.

MBTI is one of the most popular instruments in corporate settings and popular culture, which simultaneously attests to its accessibility and creates risks of oversimplification. Academic psychology views it critically: retest reliability is modest, and the dichotomies artificially split what in reality is a spectrum. Within Errarium, MBTI is treated as a typological system with an authored foundation — valuable for self-knowledge but fundamentally distinct from statistical models such as Big Five.