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Myers-Briggs Test: The Most Popular Personality Evaluation
The promise of an in-depth personality evaluation is the main selling point of any dating site. eHarmony, EliteSingles and Chemistry all proudly boast their personality quizzes, which https://datingranking.net/escort-directory/raleigh/ are based on the e psychologists like Dr. Neil Clark, Robert McCrae and Paul Costa. But are these personality tests accurate enough to reveal the inner self of millions of unique individuals or are they just smoke and mirrors to bewilder naive singles into subscribing to the service? In order to determine the reliability of these quizzes, we should first take a look at the mother of all personality tests and how this craze began.
Are you a talkative person who likes to focus on reality, values fairness and above all else seeks to settle things on your own? Then you have an ESTJ type personality – Extroversion, Sensing, Thinking, and Judgement – or in other words, you are an ‘Executive’. This is how the Myers-Briggs test works in a nutshell. Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabell Briggs Myers based their theory on the works of 20th Century psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who stated that humans are either perceivers or judgers. He then extended the categorization by adding further traits, such as thinkers or feelers and sensing or intuition. Jung also suggested that outside of these eight categories people can be extroverts or introverts too.
Twenty years later the Briggs family dusted off the psychoanalyst’s observations and combined the loosely connected personality traits into one larger theory that had 16 potential outcomes. They also described each of the categories with an easily understandable label such as ‘Mediator’, ‘Adventurer’ or ‘Entrepreneur’. The Myers-Briggs test has quickly gained popularity and it’s widely used when it comes to career coaching, employee screening and even for judging the compatibility of a couple.