On Gifts Differing

A few months ago I got curious about ways of carving up personality. The most respectable framework is the Big Five, which sorts a person into openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism — but there are plenty of others, some scientific and some not. This book introduces the Myers-Briggs typology, which is itself built on Jung. Rather than seeking traits, as the Big Five does, Myers-Briggs looks for cognitive functions. There are four pairs, and the only one it shares with the Big Five is extraversion/introversion; the others are sensing/intuiting, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. Your type is set by the functions you prefer — the ones you fall back on unconsciously.

It opens with the cognitive functions and then turns to how they show up in relationships, occupations, and the rest. I was especially drawn to the long discussions of the sensing/intuiting and judging/perceiving pairs; I see myself as an introverted intuitive with a solid judging streak. There’s plenty written elsewhere about the limits of Myers-Briggs, and you can go find it. My own issue isn’t that it’s unscientific — I’m not a psychologist, and that doesn’t much matter to me; I just want to understand myself a little better. It’s more the way HR departments the world over have taken it up; it seems far more prominent in occupational therapy than in other fields, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Even so, this is essentially the first book published on the typology, and it does its job remarkably well. The prose feels postwar American, but that’s no real flaw — it’s much better than the corporate lingo we’re surrounded by now. For anyone curious about personality type, it’s worth the time, even if it isn’t the most scientific account of personality.