Journal of Psychological Type® (JPT) > Vol 80, 2020

From The Editor

This year, the Digest focuses on a key element of the MBTI^® system: providing people with greater insights into themselves and others.

We begin with a study with an online Reddit MBTI Forum—a community that enables sharing, understanding, and application of the MBTI—with the objective of achieving greater acceptance and appreciation of diversity.

The science of heroism is a relatively new academic field, and our second featured article explores how one's personal story, understanding of self, and hero's journey may translate into leadership. Leadership and entrepreneurial attitudes are also explored in our third article that focuses on subtle gender, age, and personality-preference differences that refine our understanding of these factors.

The final two articles focus on the use of the MBTI in medical and health fields. One presents a discussion of why metacognition is an important part of training for Physical Therapy graduate students and should be incorporated into curriculum guidelines. The final article is a review of research using the MBTI assessment in medical education.

The Digest ends with a highlight of a dissertation that explores the important question of which theoretical focus psychologists should identify when they elect their sub-specialty. Using the MBTI Step II and a phenomenological approach, the author elicits valuable insights about students' personal quests to reach this important decision.

We invite your thoughts, opinions and comments on the reviewed studies and the Digest as a whole. After each article summary, you will find an opportunity to share your thoughts or feedback on the Digest as a whole. Please let us know your what you think!

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ARTICLE PERMALINK:

https://www.capt.org/journal-psychological-type/from-the-editor/

ARTICLE COMMENTS:

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SubReddit Community: Life after taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® Tool

Ward, T. (2019). Life after taking the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® Tool: A Discourse Analysis of the R/MBTI SubReddit Community. Laridae V.01, pp. 18-23

Reddit is an online forum with a reputation as a play-space; it is also a carnival, a performance, a platform, and a community. A large MBTI^® community has found a home on Reddit in numerous subforums based on common questions or needs, so members can share their enthusiasm with others who know the theory. This study analyzed a grouping of 59 posts from the Reddit group devoted to the MBTI tool called r/mbti. By examining the purpose and type of knowledge each post attracted, the posts were grouped into themes to discover what r/mbti members valued.

Results revealed that the r/mbti community was motivated by themes of Identity, Community, Truth, and Knowledge. Members used language in ways that validated the feelings of others who had joined the community because they felt misunderstood elsewhere. Numerous discussions relating to identity revealed that members longed to fit in and have their daily life practices and feelings recognized as legitimate.

This investigation found Reddit to be more than a site for play. It provides ample evidence that the site fulfilled the needs of many intelligent Redditors to connect with others. The MBTI gave users, who felt unrecognized by society, a vocabulary that they felt accurately described themselves and validated their seemingly contradictory feelings and actions. These discussions were essential to maintaining the community because they allowed members to share their knowledge and experiences with a group of people who would grant them respect.

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ARTICLE PERMALINK:

https://www.capt.org/journal-psychological-type/subreddit-community-life-after-taking-the-mbti/

ARTICLE COMMENTS:

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Heroism and Leadership Potential of Future CEOs

Pestana, J.V. and Codina, N. (2019). Being Conscious of One's Own Heroism: An Empirical Approach to Analyzing the Leadership Potential of Future CEOs. Frontiers in Psychology/www.frontiersin.org, V. 9, Article 2787

Heroism Science is an emerging transdisciplinary field focused on promoting collective appreciation of the value of every individual's heroic journey from perspectives that may span the natural, social, and health sciences viewed within a humanities context.

The study consisted of 45 student participants enrolled in a master's program for future CEOs, 21 males and 24 females, ranging in age from 22 – 47 (median 26.69). Participants wrote heroic stories in which they were the protagonist and were administered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® (MBTI^®) assessment and a 51-item questionnaire on Personal Values. Correlations between the three tasks were analyzed.

Nearly half the sample had preferences for Sensing, Thinking, and Judging: 25.7% ESTJ and 20% ISTJ. Of note was an imbalance of the Feeling function in the sample. Of the six types with a Feeling preference either dominant or auxiliary, all 4 Introverted types (INFP, INFJ, ISFP, ISFJ) and one Extraverted type (ENFP) did not appear in the sample at all. ENFJ, ESFJ each had one representation and ESFP had two. A group of executive and leadership students with a typological makeup skewing towards STJ is not new, but the impact a lack of NF may have had on the task to imagine one's self in a heroic story was not addressed in the researchers' analysis, though they did acknowledge the lack of NF in the sample.

A cross correlation of typological preferences and personal values revealed expected results, particularly an emphasis on Conformity (Sensing) and Self-Direction (Thinking); of surprise was a low showing for Tradition considering the predominance of Sensing types. The heroic story analyses applied Campbell's model of the hero's journey; results indicated a concentration of themes in the three main sections of the journey model concentrated on stages that can be considered more concrete compared to more abstract or conceptual or imaginal labels. Again, this result conforms to a predominance of Sensing types in the sample.

The implications of this research suggest that further exploration of the heroic element of leadership can be used to inculcate important self-knowledge, skills and other awareness, through use of the MBTI assessment and qualitative methods, ultimately transcending a pedestrian view of leadership into one of heroic stature.

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ARTICLE PERMALINK:

https://www.capt.org/journal-psychological-type/heroism-and-leadership-potential-of-future-ceos/

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Relationship of Gender, Age and Personality on Entrepreneurial Attitude

Brandt, T. (2019). Relationship of Gender, Age and Personality on Entrepreneurial Attitude. Conference Proceedings of the 14th Annual European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, pp. 1-12. DOI: 10.34190/ECIE.19.268

Entrepreneurship has long been considered an important engine for economic growth and wealth creation. This study focused on the role that age, gender, and personality have on entrepreneurial attitudes of adults.

The researcher collected 852 participants over 3 years from populations of students and working adults. The mean age was 40.8, with women comprising 59% of the sample. Participants took the MBTI^® assessment and a 5-item questionnaire created by the author measuring entrepreneurial attitude through responses to items on risk-taking and growth-orientation.

The most prevalent preferences of the sample were ESTJ, reflecting the most common preferences in Finnish culture. Men had higher scores than women for entrepreneurial attitude across ages and MBTI preferences. As other studies have shown, preferences for Extraversion and Intuition had greater entrepreneurial orientation than Introversion and Sensing across gender and age. Across the sample, youth and preferences for Extraversion and Intuition most impacted entrepreneurial attitude positively.

Women with preferences in Extraversion and Intuition scored higher at all ages in entrepreneurial attitude than those with preferences for Introversion and Sensing. However, women with preferences for Introversion and Sensing scored higher under 40 than those with the same preferences over 40. And women under age 30 with preferences for Feeling and Judging had higher entrepreneurial orientation than older women with the same preferences.

This study offered valuable replication of type preferences in entrepreneurial attitudes and provided additional insights into the impact of age and gender. As the author suggests, further research could explore life factors, such as marriage, children, and opportunity, that impact entrepreneurial men and women of various ages and types.

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ARTICLE PERMALINK:

https://www.capt.org/journal-psychological-type/relationship-of-gender-age-and-personality-on-entrepreneurial-attitude/

ARTICLE COMMENTS:

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MBTI^® for Interprofessional Communication

Smith, L. J., Curtis, C.P., Perry, M., LoVasco, L., and Yorke, A. M., and Talley, S.A., (2019). MBTI® Type and Interprofessional Communication Skills in Doctor of Physical Therapy students. Internet Journal of Allied Health Sciences and Practice. V. 17 No. 4 ISSN 1540-580X, (Article 9), pp. 1-12

Interprofessional education (IPE) is an important area of healthcare education that supports students to learn about, from, and with each other through collaborative and direct efforts. An important doctrine of learning objectives, established by the IPE Collaborative, is to help to improve patient outcomes and use of health care and to promote clear and appropriate communication. In past analyses of communication barriers in healthcare communication, personality factors appeared as a key variable and personality types influenced attitudes towards teamwork, professional rapport, among other elements.

The purpose of the study was to first characterize the distribution of types in a sample of master's level students in physical therapy. The sample consisted of 32 students (17 female, 53.1%), ranging in age from 23 to 31 (mean 25.2), which was surprisingly diverse with the most prevalent types ISTJ and ENFJ. Of note in this small sample, women tended towards Extraversion and Thinking significantly more and men towards Introversion and Feeling, which was inconsistent with past findings in physical therapy students.

The remainder of this article focuses on building a platform to explore and support interprofessional education and competency domains for physical therapy students. Recommendations included several suggestions that reflect the importance of incorporating personality types and metacognition into educational methods and provides an excellent foundation for future research in this area.

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ARTICLE PERMALINK:

https://www.capt.org/journal-psychological-type/mbti-for-interprofessional-communication/

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Review Article: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® in Medical Education

Ramachandran V et al., Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® in medical education: A narrative review and analysis, Health Professions Education, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hpe.2019.03.002

The medical field has a long history of using the MBTI instrument in education, specialty training, selection, and evaluation. This article provides a comprehensive review and analysis of the MBTI^® assessment across its varied contributions to medical education from a Pub-Med search (1975-2018) producing a final review of 40 articles.

The authors found inconsistent results in studies that investigated the assessment's role in students' choice of medical specialties and a broader engagement in the applied use of MBTI assessments for medical education.

The MBTI assessment has been used to investigate improvements in communication skills, identify individuals who may be at risk for burnout, or to assist in providing greater awareness of inherent bias. This span of applied studies led the authors to consider the MBTI instrument a potentially powerful tool for medical education more than for specialty selection. Of note, the authors suggest that the MBTI assessment can attenuate biases in medical school interview processes, increase psychological diversity, and enhance problem- and team-based learning.

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ARTICLE PERMALINK:

https://www.capt.org/journal-psychological-type/review-article-mbti-in-medical-education/

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Use of MBTI^® Step II^™ as a Tool for Selecting Clinical Psychology Specialty

Phillips, M. R. (2019) The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® and the Development of Therapeutic Orientation. Dissertation, California School of Professional Psychology, Alliant International University, 171 pp.

This study combined a qualitative phenomenological design with the MBTI^® Step II^™ assessment as a vehicle to probe more deeply into the metacognition and self-knowledge of clinical graduate students in a doctoral program in clinical psychology on the west coast.

Through a complex, demanding process, these students are expected to recognize their unique professional identities by way of psychological self-examination, without benefit of significant breadth of experience. Little guidance is provided to pre-professional students, without much time for active processing to achieve an appropriate level of self-insights that are essential in clinical psychology. Thus, students often end up relying upon the advice of fellow students, supervisors, or mentors, rather than engaging in critical thinking regarding this important career decision.

The MBTI Step II was provided to eight graduate students and interviews were conducted for thematic analysis, resulting in two global themes and five sub-themes that spanned self-knowledge and identity and the role of the graduate program in facilitating clinical specialties. Several themes addressed directly the impact of the MBTI assessment on student's self-knowledge and choice of specialty; of note are recognizing harmony between theoretical orientation and personality type, and, appreciating how MBTI personality profile could have informed graduate education decision-making.

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ARTICLE PERMALINK:

https://www.capt.org/journal-psychological-type/use-of-mbti-step-ii-as-a-tool-for-selecting-clinical-psychology-specialty/

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The Journal of Psychological Type^® - Research Digest (JPT-RD) is made available through the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, Inc., CAPT, worldwide publisher. The editorial team includes Kesstan Blandin, PhD, Yvonne Nelson-Reid, PhD, Logan Abbitt, MLIS, and Purnima Sims.

For inquiries about accessing original articles, contact library@capt.org.

CAPT is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to educate the public about psychological type—including its ethical, meaningful, and practical applications—and to conduct research on psychological type and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® (MBTI^®) instrument. The JPT-RD, published annually, is one of a suite of CAPT publications that highlight research and ideas in the field of psychological type, the MBTI instrument, and Jungian thought. ^©2023 Center for Applications of Psychological Type, Inc., publisher. Contact the JPT-RD Editorial Team at research@capt.org.