The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, also known as the MBTI, is a self-report questionnaire that is used by companies, schools, and psychologists to understand the psyche of people and their motivations. This psychological questionnaire is something many writers use to help build their character profiles, which we will show you in this article series. This first part is focused on explaining what the MBTI is, while the second part will be focused on why you should use this technique to build your characters.
What is the MBTI?
As stated above it is a psychological questionnaire designed to analyze the motivation, values, interest, and needs of people. It uses four principles of psychological functions: sensation, intuition, feeling and thinking. However you also have an additional four traits that can be added to the questionnaire and those are: extraversion, introversion, judging and perceiving. The idea behind this is to acknowledge that all humans have these eight traits, but some are more dominant than others. Some people might be more perceptive, but it doesn’t mean they lack judgment. Depending on the dominant features will determine the personality of that individual. The MBTI presents questions and scenarios that will help you identify which traits are dominant for each person, helping you understand what will motivate them. Companies use this to understand their employee's values and be able to help them adapt better to their work environment.
Who created the MBTI?
The people behind the MBTI are the mother-daughter duo, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. However, their work was inspired by Carl Jung’s work which started the study on people having different dominant traits in their personality. Jung’s work, however, looked into the conscious choices and unconscious features, while Briggs and Myers only focus on the conscious traits. This is because you can't create a questionnaire for unconscious behavior.
What are the results?
MBTI offers you sixteen possible results, each of them a variation of ESTJ or INFP. ESTJ focuses on extraversion, sensing, thinking, and judgment; INFP, on the other hand, is the opposite: introversion, intuition, feeling and perception. This is different from Jung’s work who said there are 32 results, but this was because he also focused on the unconscious behavior. Overall, by the end of the questionnaire, you will understand if the person is a more rational extrovert or a judgemental introvert. There are many charts online that show you the sixteen results with their meaning, in case you want to investigate further.
For the next part of this article we will explain how this test is a great tool to develop and write your characters, but before that, why don’t you try reading some books and see if you can identify the personality traits of the characters using MBTI. You can check out our online library www.hublmedia.com for some books to do this exercise with.
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