Personality types in academic medicine.

Based on Swiss physician-scholar Carl G. Jung's theory of psychological types proposed in the 1920s, Kathleen Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) three decades later. They applied Jung's dynamic theory to determine how persons take in information, make decisions, and communicate thoughts and feelings. Medical students were of special interest to their research and much has been written since then about the use of the MBTI in medicine. In this study, results of MBTIs administered to 1797 freshmen students at Louisiana State University School of Medicine--New Orleans from 1988 to 1998 are compared with those reported by the MBTI developers and others over the years and throughout the United States. Findings indicate some noteworthy shifts in the psychological profile of medical students over time and among schools that may be due to changes in the delivery of health care, the increase in technology in the practice of medicine, and the dramatic increase of women in medicine.