Personality Types

Any serious understanding of the complexity of human personality would no doubt label as futile any attempt to classify people by their personality types. Such classifications are prone to being gross simplifications usually limited to some given aspect of human behaviour about whose axis the classification holds. As a case in point, Howard Gardner’s (1983) classification of multiple human intelligences focuses on the aspect of inherent skill potential of people. Similarly, classifications such as those made by Felder and Soloman (online), and Litzinger and Osif (1992) among others are based on learning style preferences.

It is however the very complexity of human personality which demands that some model of it is required to make any headway in understanding it. As such, the only solution to this paradox is to apply a proposed model classification of personality and evaluate its effectiveness empirically, all the while recognizing that it is a necessarily simplified model of the real human condition.

Arguably, one of the most empirically tested models of human personality types stems from the work of Carl Jung (see for example George Boeree (online)). Arguably too, one of the most practical incarnations of his theories is the well known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality classifier most popularly expounded by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates (1978).

Apart from the multiple axes around which personality classification is modeled in this work, its empirical application in employee recruitment, team formation and self-analysis in a wide variety of settings ranging from commercial business to religious organizations bears witness to its merits as a reasonable simplification of human personality types.

According to this model, human personality is classified along four axes: the direction in which a person’s energy is focused (introvert, I or extravert, E), how a person prefers to receive information (primarily by sensing, S or intuition, N), how they prefer to make decisions (primarily through thinking, T or feeling, F), and how they prefer to organize their lives (primarily by judging, J or perceiving, P). Thus, each individual will be classified as belonging to one of sixteen possible groups in the model through the four letters most closely describing that person along the axes above. See Wikipedia entry for a summary of these types along temperament types due to David Keirsey. (You can take a test free at sites such as http://www.gesher.org/gwtest/gwtest.html)

This model has been applied to diverse areas of life including in self-understanding, relationship building, career choice decisions, team building, child raring and student learning. In most expositions of the model, care is taken to stress that it is not intended to pigeonhole people or give them excuses for their personal preferences, but rather to help them understand some of their limitations with a view to helping them adjust to others.