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Type Talk Essay

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Type Talk: The 16 Personality Types That Determine How We Live, Love, and Work by Otto Kroeger and Janet M. Thuesen Dell Publishing, October, 1989 Type Talk is a primer on personality preference typing centered on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (“MBTI”). The MBTI is a widely-used “test” that helps a person begin to understand why people perceive situations differently, communicate different from others, and opt for different activities. The book’s authors, Otto Kroeger and Janet Thuesen, husband and wife, have long been in the forefront of adapting the MBTI for use in everyday life and coined the phrase “Typewatching” as a descriptor for their work. Kroeger and Thuesen open the book with a chapter on “name-calling”. They use this …show more content…

In 1956, the MBTI was published by Educational Testing Service of Princeton, NJ, publishers of the venerable Scholastic Aptitude Test. Word of the instrument began to spread, but only for use as a research tool. In 1969, Isabel Myers teamed up with Mary McCauley at the University of Florida and the two began a typology laboratory at the school that emerged as the center for all MBTI-related activity. Three years later, the laboratory became the Center for the Application of Psychological Type and remains the principal facility for Typewatching. According to the CAPT web site, approximately 2,000,000 people per year take the MBTI instrument (http://www.capt.org). Type Talk begins its presentation of preference alternatives by introducing them in pairs: Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving. These are immediately followed by a detailed examination of the basics of Typewatching from Jungian theory. These basic functions are described as “information-gathering” and “decision-making”. If we gather information in an exact, sequential manner our preference is toward “S”ensing or if we gather in a figurative, intuitive manner our preference is to be iNtuitive. (pp. 23-25). Our decision making is either detached, analytical and objective, marking us as a “T”hinker or if done on an

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