Sixteen types, four dichotomies, one public-domain theory
The 16-type model goes back to Carl Jung's Psychological Types (1921). In the 1940s, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers re-organized Jung's cognitive functions into four either/or axes — Extraversion vs. Introversion, Sensing vs. Intuition, Thinking vs. Feeling, Judging vs. Perceiving — which combine into 16 four-letter codes like INFJ or ESTP. The result is the most widely used personality model in the world, with all the strengths (a common vocabulary) and weaknesses (forced binaries) that popularity creates.
This test is not the official Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The MBTI is a registered trademark of The Myers & Briggs Foundation, with a licensed test and certified practitioner network. What you are taking here is an independent assessment built on the same public-domain Jungian theory that inspired it.
What the four letters actually measure
E vs. I — Extraversion or Introversion — describes where you draw energy from. After a long conversation, do you feel charged up (E) or drained (I)?
S vs. N — Sensing or Intuition — describes how you take in information. Do you trust concrete details and what you can verify (S), or do you reach for patterns and possibilities (N)?
T vs. F — Thinking or Feeling — describes how you make decisions. Does the logic of the argument win even when someone gets hurt (T), or does the impact on people outweigh the logical case (F)?
J vs. P — Judging or Perceiving — describes how you structure your daily life. Plans, schedules, and closure (J) — or options, flexibility, and emergence (P)?
How this test scores
Each axis has eight statements scored on a 5-point agree/disagree scale. The sign of your accumulated score picks the letter. If you land exactly at the midpoint of an axis, the tie breaks toward I, N, F, and P — the convention used in the standard Jung population literature. If a single letter feels "wobbly" in your result, that is the test telling you the score was close to the middle; you can legitimately call yourself the boundary type.
From the four letters into the color frameworks
Once you have a type, we translate it into the three major color personality frameworks: True Colors (Orange / Gold / Green / Blue), the 4-color wheel as used by Insights Discovery (Red / Yellow / Green / Blue), and the Hartman Color Code (Red / Blue / White / Yellow). The translation is approximate — the frameworks measure different things — but it lets you carry the same self-understanding into a workshop or a relationship conversation that uses one of the color vocabularies. Read the deep dive on the color frameworks →