Fluffywolf
Nips away your dignity
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2009
- Messages
- 9,581
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 9
- Instinctual Variant
- sp/sx
Well, when you make up the categories arbitrarily, there can be however many kinds of people you want in the world. When we ask, "How many kinds of people are there in the world?", we must choose some sort of criteria for distinguishing between different kinds.
In one sense, there is only one kind of person in the world: the carbon-based kind. If we define the categories as "carbon-based" or "not carbon-based", everyone in the world will fall into the former category.
Or, I could make up a system where everyone at least 5'6" tall is a K type, and everyone shorter than that is an R type. In terms of this system, there are only two kinds of people in the world.
Jung/MBTI does the same thing; it just divides people up into sixteen categories instead of two. It takes the set of all human attitudes and then just cuts them up sixteen ways and assigns an arbitrary label to each one.
So in terms of this particular arbitrarily made up labeling system, there are sixteen kinds of people.
Yeah obviously, but the criteria of MBTI are not foolproof. We do still have free will, and choices we can make. Events in our lives that can shift us between the various behavioural patterns of MBTI. Showing different kinds of cognative function strengths in different situations. To the point that there's no single MBTI system that we fit in perfectly. But still there's always one we'll fit in more than others.