MBTI: the new astrology

The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a method of sorting and categorizing different personalities, has become quite trendy these days - mostly on twitter - and even though this classification isn’t 100% accurate, it helps comprehending how one interacts with the outer world. However, it’s important to keep in mind that a person's personality tends to change throughout their life and there are many factors that can influentiate one’s feeling, action or way of thinking when facing a certain situation. That being said, the types of personality that will be presented in this article will certainly not give you a lifetime-systematic-way of how you or others will behave, but I personally consider it a great helper when it comes to understanding more about people.

A little bit of history

The theory behind this indicator was developed by a swiss psychologist named Carl G. Jung, who proposed two main orientations - extroversion and introversion - and four basic functions - thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting - that would compound one’s personality. On top of that, he suggested that people generally engage into one of two mental functions - perceiving or judging -, which became the fourth dichotomy later established by the researcher Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, the creators of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator.

What each letter stands for

As previously mentioned, there are 16 types of personality and each one is comprised of four letters - or functions:

E (extrovert) x I (introvert)	your comfortable way of interacting with the outer world - especially people
S (sensing) x N (intuition)	how you comprehend and process information around you
T (thinking) x F (feeling)	your way of making decisions
J (judging) x P (perceiving)	how you orientate and deal with your outer life

When combining your preferences in each category, you get an acronym - or your personality type:

More about personality types

From what I’ve observed, people tend to stop right there - at comprehending what their type stands for - and only knowing one’s acronym and its letters’ meanings doesn’t give us the whole story. In other words, I’d say it’s important to also understand how those functions interact together: for example, an introverted-sensing type usually manifests their sensing differently than an extroverted-sensing type does; which means that the same function can look very different depending on one’s main orientation.

However, I’ll not get into that, because there’s another theory behind that way of comprehending the 16 personalities - named Socionics - and this article’s main theme is the MBTI. Besides, it’s way more complex than the given indicator, despite both having the same basis - Carl Jung’s theory. Still, I find it worth taking a look at Socionics if you’re willing to understand more about your personality type and make the classification as accurate as possible, so you might want to take a look at that later.

Astrology and MBTI

After all that personality stuff, I can finally get to my point that astrology and MBTI are pretty alike nowadays - and unfortunately not in a good way. As previously mentioned, instead of the 12 zodiac signs, the Myers Briggs Indicator gives us 16 types in which people could be classified and - to no one’s surprise - with such classification some stereotypes have been built. So, there’s the problem: stereotypes. They don’t give us the whole story and frequently lead to presumptions or even misunderstandings.

Well, I know this sounds pretty obvious, like “of course I wouldn’t presume shallow things about someone”, but we often do assume people’s characteristics, way of behaving or sayings, even when we know them; given that reason, I once more appeal for not taking categorizations as an universal truth, especially when it comes to people. In addition, I insist there’s no such thing as “the best personality type”, but I can assure you that are certain characteristics that can make, for example, one’s easier to talk to or not - and that’s ok, because it just means you’re different from another person or you two have things in common!

In conclusion, when it comes to similar things to astrology and MBTI, I’d say they’re useful - to a certain extent - to understand others’ way of being and then accepting that some people are just the way they are (such a cliché, but it’s true). Also, my personal advice concerning personality classifications is: use them to think; not to assume things or put people in a box, but to think how people are, how their mindset influentiate their lives and how they deal with things. I assure you all this thinking process can be very helpful someday :)

Tests

Free Personality Test | https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test

descubra seu MBTI | https://testembti.carrd.co/