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The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator moves into wide use
Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers built a four-letter personality sorter drawing on Jung's types. Organizations and schools adopted it widely, while academic reviews question its type structure and reliability. Its publisher side disputes those criticisms.
- Where it sits
- Consumer applicationUse of psychology, or claims about it, in commerce, policy or product design.
- Evidence level
- ContestedThe evidence conflicts or is disputed, for example after failed replications.
- Sources inspected
- 6 of 64 with the relevant text, company document or archive item checked, 2 as an abstract or reference article, 0 not verified.
What happened
Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers built the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from the ideas of Carl Jung. The publisher's timeline dates Jung's Psychological Types to 1921 and the MBTI to 1943, and the Myers and Briggs Foundation says the book was translated into English in 1923. A magazine article on Merve Emre's history says Educational Testing Service published the first MBTI manual in 1962.
The psychological idea
According to a 2018 Nature review by Alexander Haslam, the instrument plots a person on four axes: extraversion to introversion, sensing to intuition, thinking to feeling and judging to perceiving. The result is a four-letter label. The Myers and Briggs Foundation says the MBTI uses dichotomous scales that sort people into categories, and describes the dispute with critics as type theory against trait theory.
In practice
Haslam, summarizing Emre, says the Office of Strategic Services embraced the test at the end of the war to assign intelligence operatives, and that by the mid-1950s Briggs Myers had persuaded more than 45 medical schools to use it for admissions. He lists General Electric, Standard Oil and Bell Laboratories as clients, and says its uses remain largely corporate. These are secondary summaries, not school or company records.
Why it mattered
The MBTI shows an instrument that spread through institutions while academic psychologists questioned it. Haslam suggests that for many people who have taken a formal personality test, it was probably this one.
Limits and qualifications
McCrae and Costa (1989) used self-reports and peer ratings from 267 men and 201 women and found four relatively independent dimensions, not sharply separated types. They judged Jung's theory incorrect or poorly captured by the test. Haslam says the MBTI has low validity and low reliability by conventional psychometric criteria. The Foundation, which speaks for the instrument, rejects the label pseudoscience and cites its own 2018 manual for retest coefficients of 0.81 to 0.86 in 1,721 adults. Those figures were not checked against the manual.
Evidence behind the claims
The Myers and Briggs Foundation's timeline says Jung's Psychological Types was translated into English in 1923, after which Katharine Briggs, who had begun developing her own personality system, applied the theory, and that Isabel Briggs Myers created the MBTI in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Myers-Briggs Company dates Jung's foundational work to 1921 and the MBTI to 1943, and says it became exclusive publisher in 1975 as the company formerly called CPP Inc.
A magazine article on Emre's history says Educational Testing Service published the first MBTI manual in 1962 and that corporate interest in the test spread afterward; it is the only opened source for the 1962 detail.
Haslam's Nature review says Myers introduced the MBTI in 1943 with four axes, that the Office of Strategic Services used it to assign intelligence operatives, that by the mid-1950s Briggs Myers had persuaded more than 45 medical schools to use it for admissions, that clients included General Electric, Standard Oil and Bell Laboratories, and that its uses remain largely corporate.
McCrae and Costa (1989) used self-reports and peer ratings from 267 men and 201 women and concluded the MBTI measures four relatively independent dimensions rather than sharply separated types, and that Jung's theory is incorrect or poorly operationalised by the test.
Haslam says the MBTI is highly suspect by conventional psychometric criteria, with low validity, low reliability and little predictive power.
The Myers and Briggs Foundation cites the 2018 MBTI Manual as reporting retest coefficients of 0.81 to 0.86 in 1,721 adults tested 6 to 15 weeks apart, rejects the label of pseudoscience, and describes the dispute with critics as dichotomous types against continuous trait scales.
People involved
- Katharine Cook Briggs. Developed a personality typology from Jung's work
- Isabel Briggs Myers. Turned the typology into the MBTI
- Carl Jung. Author of Psychological Types (1921)
- Robert McCrae. Co-author of the 1989 reinterpretation of the MBTI
- Paul Costa. Co-author of the 1989 reinterpretation of the MBTI
In the Psy101 course
- OpenStax Psychology 2e, section 11.3: Neo-Freudians: Adler, Erikson, Jung, and HorneyChapter 11, Personality. Concept. The section discusses this topic.Covers Jung's introversion and extraversion and says Jung's view of these types is the basis of the MBTI.
- OpenStax Psychology 2e, section 11.9: Personality AssessmentChapter 11, Personality. Context. Nearest related section; it does not discuss this topic by name.Nearest related section: it covers personality assessment but was not found to discuss the MBTI.
This is course relevance only. It is not evidence for the historical or corporate claims on this page.See the full course map.
Sources and inspection
6 of 6 sources were opened and read at the level shown. A source marked as not verified supports no claim on this page by itself.
- [1]Validity and reliabilityThe Myers & Briggs Foundation. The Myers & Briggs Foundation, 2026. Company document. Company document.Company document readRead the Foundation's own defense of the test as returned by the fetch tool: the retest figures, the pseudoscience response and the type-versus-trait framing. The 2018 manual itself was not seen. The page says nothing on ETS or 1962.
- [2]Myers-Briggs and Jung legacyThe Myers & Briggs Foundation. The Myers & Briggs Foundation, 2026. Company document. Company document.Company document readRead the Foundation history timeline: 1923 translation, 1950s and 1960s creation, 1975 center. It does not state 1921 or mention a first manual or ETS.
- [3]Our StoryThe Myers-Briggs Company. The Myers-Briggs Company, 2026. Company document. Company document.Company document readRead the company timeline: 1921, 1943, 1960s, 1975. It does not mention ETS or 1962.
- [4]Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from the perspective of the five-factor model of personalityMcCrae, R; Costa, P. Journal of Personality, 57(1), 17-40 (abstract on Duke Scholars), 1989. Journal article. Critique or replication.Abstract or publisher record onlyRead the abstract and citation details on a university repository page. Full text not read.
- [5]Self-made creators of Myers-Briggs (review of The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre)Haslam, S. Nature, 561, 176, 2018. Journal article. Secondary account.Relevant text checkedOpened the one-page Nature book review PDF and read it in full.
- [6]What's Your Type? The Myers-Briggs Test and the Rise of the Personality QuizThe Ringer. The Ringer, 2018. News report. Secondary account.Reference article readRead a magazine article about Emre's book as returned by the fetch tool. It is the only opened source for the ETS and 1962 detail.
Access note: The 1962 ETS manual rests on one magazine article, not a primary record. McCrae and Costa were read as an abstract only. The Emre book and Pittenger's 1993 critique were not opened.
Independent source review: Claude review agent, independent of the research agent, 2026-10-21. Verdict: pass-with-edits.