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Jung/Myers-Briggs/Kiersey Typing Systems The Myers Briggs, Kiersey, and Socionics personality systems are all based on the ideas of Carl Jung, a Swiss Psychiatrist who produced many significant ideas in the field of Psychology. Jung's writing was rather abstract so it would be naive to think any of these systems are exact to Jung's original ideas. Introverted/Extroverted, Feeling/Thinking, and Sensing/Intuition are the clearest dimensions he described in his work Personality Types. Judging/Percieving is less evident and there is significant differences between the Myers-Briggs/Kiersey version and the Socionics version.
The various Jung systems (MBTI, Socionics, Kiersey, etc.) come closest in usefulness to the five empirical found personality traits (Big 5/Global 5), but only contain four elements/dimensions. They say little about the Emotional Stability element. At least two of the four elements (Thinking/Feeling, Intuitive/Sensing) are not sufficiently unidimensional. For example, T/F covers aspects of Accommodation, Intellect, and Emotional Stability and N/S covers aspects of Intellect and Orderliness. This means a T could be an objective thinker, a selfish jerk, a stoic, or some combo of the three; there is no way to discern from the results. The Jung systems also pretend/infer that everyone fits into 16 types (most personality systems share this 'everyone fits one of our boxes' delusion). With five personality elements the least amount of boxes you can fit all people into with only general accuracy is 256. However, Jung systems have been around longer and are more well known. They do share substantial correlations with the Big 5 (which speaks to the potential of intuition, at least in intelligent minds like Jung, at coming close to the empirical objective truth). Therefore, I think they still have some value until Big 5 based systems become more well known.
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