Typing relates to an expansion
and explanation of human personality developed by the Swiss psychiatrist
Carl G. Jung and later popularized by Isabel Briggs Myers.
Type relies on a division of
human information processing: perceiving (taking in information)
and ordering (making decisions). Jung suggested that people have
inborn preferences for both perceiving and judging which manifest
over time. Perception occurs either through sensing or intuition
and ordering is by thinking or feeling. Jung called these the
"four functions which determine what information people
attend to and their preferred process for making decisions. People
have one of these four functions as their dominant function,
also called "superior function." Jung also added a
third factor, "attitude preference" relating to the
orientation one takes towards the world: extravert or introvert.
Psychological types become discernable
as children mature and by the the late teens one can consistently
recognize both attitude preference and superior function. Temperament
type is useful on a practical basis because as temperamental
preference becomes fixed, we can then make reliable assesment
of people's personality, learning habits, and communication skills,
to name a few areas.
Jung's typology was popularized
in the United States by Myers-Briggs who added a fourth factor
-- the judging-perceiving preference which relates to the propensity
to stop perception to make a decision. The judging type does
this sooner than the perceiving type.
The 4 letter typing schema separates
temperament into 16 different types depending upon these preferences:
E or I (Extravert or Introvert); S or N (Sensing or Intuition);
T or F (Thinking or Feeling); P or J (Perceiving or Judging).
1. C. G. Jung. Psychological
Types, trans. by H. G. Baynes, rev. by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971 (originally published in
1921).
2. Myers-Briggs, Isabel. Gifts
Differing, CRP Books, 1993.
(This article also took excerpts
from the Webpage of Association for Psychological Type, Ó1996
by APT, All Rights Reserved)
Copyright
2001, 2005, Robert I. Winer, M.D.
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