Cognitive Processes

The following is adapted from Linda V. Berens and Dario Nardi, Understanding Yourself and Others®: An Introduction to the Personality Type Code (Telos Publications, 2004) *Used with permission.

The History

In the 1920s, the idea of personality type was being explored by leading scientists and philosophers. A Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, wrote Psychological Types during that time, in which he gave a detailed description of what has now become one of the most widely used typologies in the world.

In the 1940s, Isabel Myers began developing a self-report questionnaire-the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® instrument-that could help people find where they fit in Jung's theory. The use of this instrument has led to an almost universal understanding that there are sixteen basic personality types, each of which can be "named" by a four-letter personality type code.

Two Worlds

Jung first noticed that people seemed fundamentally different in terms of whether they were more extraverted, oriented to the external world of people and experiences outside themselves, or introverted, oriented to their internal worlds of thoughts, ideas, feelings, and memories. Then he noticed more differences in terms of what people were doing in each of those worlds. These he called "functions." They are now thought of as cognitive processes.

Functions-Cognitive Processes

Using metaphors for names, Jung described two kinds of cognitive processes-perception and judgment. Sensation and Intuition were the two kinds of perception. Thinking and Feeling were the two kinds of judgment. He said that every mental act consists of using at least one of these four cognitive processes. Then he described eight personality types that were characterized by using one of the processes in either the extraverted or introverted world; extraverted Sensing types, introverted Sensing types, extraverted iNtuiting* types, introverted iNtuiting types, extraverted Thinking types, introverted Thinking types, extraverted Feeling types, and introverted Feeling types. He also suggested that these processes operate not just as the dominant process in a personality but also in other ways.

The Instrument

As Isabel Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs, began to craft a self-report instrument, they faced several challenges. They had to take what Jung had seen as an integrated whole personality pattern and try to figure out how to ask questions to get at that whole. They chose to focus on Jung's notion of opposites and force choices between equally valuable psychological opposites. They also added a dichotomy to help reveal the type pattern. The result was sixteen types, each indicated by a four-letter code such as ENFP or ISTJ.

Type as a Whole Pattern, Not Just Four Letters

The purpose of this website is to help you understand how the type codes represent patterns of how we use the eight cognitive processes-extraverted Sensing, introverted Sensing, extraverted iNtuiting, introverted iNtuiting, extraverted Thinking, introverted Thinking, extraverted Feeling, and introverted Feeling.

The Eight Cognitive Processes (aka: Eight Functions)

Adapted from Linda V. Berens and Dario Nardi, Understanding Yourself and Others®: An Introduction to the Personality Type Code (Telos Publications, 2004) *Used with permission.

Cracking the 4-letter Code

Adapted from Linda V. Berens and Dario Nardi, Understanding Yourself and Others®: An Introduction to the Personality Type Code (Telos Publications, 2004) *Used with permission.

It is important to remember that the four-letter type code is more than the sum of four letters. It results from how we answer questions along four dichotomies, Extraversion-Introversion, Sensing-iNtuiting, Thinking-Feeling, and Judging-Perceiving. While on the surface each of these dichotomies can be described generally, they are not separate parts or traits. In the development of the MBTI, it was assumed that reporting preferences for one over the other of each dichotomy would give us an idea of the pattern of cognitive processes of the personality and thus reveal Jung's psychological type patterns. Use the following diagram to remind you of the kinds of processes and what the letters mean.

One can "crack the code" in a mechanical fashion and for some people this is necessary for them to understand how the processes are in a hierarchy.

Cognitive Processes and the 16 Personality Types