Personality Type aims to provide a comprehensive overall picture of a person’s preferred behaviour. PeopleMaps is a type profile.
Scoring of type is different from that of traits. Traits measure a characteristic that people possess to a certain degree, for example, extraversion, and this can be measured against a norm (More than most people – as often as others). Believing that people were unique, Jung did not measure against norms he measured the flow of their energy, which would include extraversion, along bi-polar scales and the combination of these scales resulted in a type profile.
“Energy is never lost but shifts from one part to another reordering nature toward balance or equilibrium.” – Jung 1917.
Through reading this statement it can be concluded that since energy is a moveable feast there was no point, as far as Jung was concerned, in measuring exactly how much extraversion a person had against another, as even against themselves as this could vary on a day to day basis. It was not the amount of extraversion that was important to Jung more how it was applied in conjunction with the other bi-polar scales such as thinking, feeling etc.
Many avenues of psychometric testing, such as numeracy, literacy and problem solving, are conducive to measurement as they necessarily must be able to identify right and wrong responses. However, this form of measurement cannot apply to personality profiling and particularly to Jungian based systems, such as MBTI and PeopleMaps, a fact widely recognised by esteemed scholars in the field for many years. Jung did not recognise that there were good or bad personalities, he did not believe that you can ‘fail’ a personality test, or that people can be measured against each other.
His approach to classification was of the whole personality or type rather than trait measuring and it is this method that provides the version of Jung’s ‘compass’ which is a PeopleMaps’ profile.
“Measurement is a useful tool but if it makes one think that one has embraced the totality of a personality by having a series of scores then it has gone too far.” – Gordon Willard Allport – one of the founding figures of personality psychology.
Jung treated these categories as a compass and stated that he would not for anything be without this compass especially when trying to understand others. His approach to classification was of the whole personality or type rather than trait measuring and it is this approach that provides the version of Jung’s compass which is a PeopleMaps’ profile.
