Psychologist Minds Our Ps and Js as a Decoder of Personality Types

When I got back to my office after interviewing psychologist David Kiersey, I discovered I’d left my briefcase in his office. He was expecting my call, listened silently while I berated myself for my stupidity, then said calmly, “You shouldn’t be angry at yourself. What you did is perfectly in line with an NF personality type. You should be pleased that you’re consistent.”

That comment summarizes both the charm and the irritation that Kiersey can inspire in a listener. He knows what he knows and is glad to explain it to you but doesn’t require that you accept it. What he knows has been set out in two books: “Please Understand Me,” which has sold 750,000 copies since its first publication 10 years ago, and “Portraits of Temperament,” published last year. In these books, Kiersey breaks all of us down into 16 basic personality types and describes each type in some detail.

“These books,” he says, “are for laymen, and the major effect of reading them is to improve and enhance family relationships--with your spouse and children and parents--by better understanding them and yourself.”

“Please Understand Me” contains a series of 70 questions that readers can answer and grade to discover their own personality types. There are lots of extra answer sheets for other members of the family. Theoretically, by understanding one another, family members can create a more harmonious home environment. Or, if they fight, they can understand why and do something about it.

Kiersey breaks his basic personality types down into four sets of preferences: extroversion (E) versus introversion (I), intuition (N) versus sensation (S), thinking (T) versus feeling (F) and judging (J) versus perceiving (P). Your combination of these preferences indicates your personality type--and Kiersey stresses that by far the most important are the middle pair. The NF--thinking and feeling--type, I learned, tend to leave briefcases in other people’s offices.

In “Please Understand Me,” Kiersey says extroverts “experience loneliness when they are not in contact with people. Introverts are likely to experience loneliness when they’re in a crowd.”

The sensation-preferring or “sensible” person wants facts, trusts facts and remembers facts. This type focuses on “what actually happened rather than worrying too much about what might have been or will be in the future.” By contrast, the intuitive person seems “somewhat bothered by reality, constantly looking toward possibilities of changing or improving the actual.” To the sensible, says Kiersey, “the intuitive frequently appears to be flighty, impractical and unrealistic,” while the intuitive group views the sensibles “as plodding and exasperatingly slow to see possibilities in tomorrow.”

The thinking types make choices impersonally while feeling types choose on a very personal basis. More men than women (60-40) report that they prefer to make decisions logically and objectively, on the basis of principles. Says Kiersey: “Both types can react with the same intensity; the ‘F’ person, however, tends to make his emotional reactions more visible, and others may see him as warmer and capable of deeper feelings. . . . Thus ‘T’ people are often described as cold and unemotional, while in reality they may be experiencing as intense emotion as an ‘F’ person.”

And, finally, Judging types prefer closure and the settling of things, while the Perceiving type prefers to keep options open and fluid. Writes Kiersey: “The ‘J’ is apt to report a sense of urgency until he has made a pending decision and then be at rest once the decision is made. The ‘P’ person, in contrast, is more apt to experience resistance to making a decision, wishing that more data could be accumulated.”

After you take the test and discover the four letters that best describe your temperament, Kiersey spends the rest of “Please Understand Me” and all of “Portraits of Temperament” telling you how to apply this information to live better both with yourself and those around you.

I found the assessment of my personality type uncannily accurate--which didn’t please me a lot. But Kiersey understands that too. “The concept that people are fundamentally different is tough to accept for most of us. We go after our Significant Others because we don’t understand or accept these fundamental differences in people. This disrupts a lot of marriages and drives a lot of children away.”

Kiersey’s basic premise is as simple as it is difficult to accept. “All of us,” he says, “are born with a certain temperament, and that’s it. Nothing in the world is going to change it.”

He moderates the hard finality of that statement by adding, “Although you can’t change it, you can do a lot about it. You can develop it or enlarge your potential, but the best thing you can do is to understand your personality type and go with it--then accept and appreciate others. But understanding yourself doesn’t lead to change. That’s a myth that has been sold for decades. Rather the reverse is true: One understands oneself in the ways one changes.”

How well are these assertions accepted in Kiersey’s own field of clinical psychology? Not very--which also doesn’t upset Kiersey. “This isn’t academically oriented,” he says. “Some clinical psychologists are beginning to look at it, but academics have probably never even heard of it. And to put it bluntly, I couldn’t care less. I’ve been a maverick from the beginning.”

This despite the fact that Kiersey spent 15 years in academia. He’s a professor emeritus at Cal State Fullerton, leaving there in 1983 to march strictly to his own drummer. He now operates out of an office in Carlsbad where he devotes almost full time to writing.

Kiersey has deep roots in Orange County. Although he was born in Oklahoma in 1921, his family moved to Tustin a year later. There, his father raised citrus fruit and owned a nursery--and even had a street named for him. Kiersey’s mother was a public school teacher in El Toro, and Kiersey and his brother studied for one year in her two-room schoolhouse. Kiersey was attending Santa Ana Junior College--where he met his wife, Alice, a Costa Mesa native--when World War II broke out and he joined the Navy Air Corps. He spent the last two years of the war as a Marine pilot flying fighter planes off carriers in the Pacific.

“Among other things,” he says today, “I learned about bureaucracy during the war.” He came up with a method of dogfighting he considered far superior to the scissor tactic commonly used, but his commanding officer rejected the idea. When Kiersey persisted, the CO challenged him to a dogfight, and Kiersey and his wing man repeatedly wound up on the tail of their commanding officer. “When we got down,” Kiersey says, “he blamed it all on his own wingman, and nothing was changed. I’ve used that lesson many times since.”

He’s had plenty of opportunity. After getting his bachelor of arts in psychology from Pomona College, he worked as a public school psychologist for two decades, ending up in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, where he designed a counseling program. Then he joined the Cal State Fullerton faculty, where he taught counseling to graduate students in tandem with Marilyn Bates, a Ph.D. Kiersey meanwhile was pursuing his own doctorate in psychology--which he was awarded in 1967 from Claremont College.

Throughout this period, he was fascinated with the causes of abnormal behavior, searching the works of all the major writers in this field to put together a new, composite thesis. The search was too long and complex to try to describe in detail here but basically--and seriously oversimplified--it involved combining the work of E. Kretschmer, who had resurrected four basic personality types and applied them to abnormal behavior (“people go mad their own way”) and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a tool for identifying 16 different patterns of action. Says Kiersey: “I re-based the Myers-Briggs ideas with those of Kretschmer to come up with a system that explains both normal and abnormal behavior. The broad theory is called typology, and it was abandoned in the 1920s when Freud and Skinner were dominant. Neither had any room for the idea that personality determines your behavior.”

Kiersey put these ideas into “Please Understand Me,” written in collaboration with Bates, who died of cancer in 1977. He was unable to interest a publisher in the book and finally published it himself in 1978. “We had no sales network,” says Kiersey, “only word of mouth. It took eight years to get it into book stores. We sold 5,000 copies that first year, and then sales built steadily each year until now we have about 750,000 copies out.” He expects “Portraits of Temperament”--which goes into much more detail about the eight dominant personality types--to follow about the same sales pattern.

When his first book was clearly successful, Kiersey retired from CSUF to write and lecture full time. His wife heads up his publishing firm and handles the family business. The Kierseys have been married for 43 years and have three children, all married and all living in Southern California. Kiersey sees his four grandsons often.

Kiersey’s horn-rimmed glasses give him a rather owlish look, and he is soft-spoken and precise in speech and sometimes abstract. But he also has a strong vein of humor and occasional self-deprecation that lightens and leavens his talk.

He is now involved in two new books, one on psychopathology, “which will cover the whole field of abnormal behavior as a function of personality and will probably take me five years.” The other is designed to assist counselors in helping “school kids in trouble”--but he hopes it will be read by parents too. He has strong feelings--”from looking for 20 years at the soft underbelly”--that “schools should start telling people how to do things and stop just giving information.”

Kiersey’s thesis is consistent: “People are different from each other, and no amount of getting after them is going to change them, because the differences are probably good, not bad.

“To each his own, different strokes to different folks. To achieve the intent of these sayings will take a lot of work in coming to see our differences as something other than flaws. But first, it is necessary to study yourself. If you don’t have yourself accurately portrayed, no way can you portray anyone else accurately.”