Four-Letter Type Test — The Dichotomies, Scored as Gradients

Four questions, asked six ways each. Where your attention goes when nothing is demanding it and what company costs you. Whether you reach first for what is physically there or for what it might mean. Which consideration wins when the fair call and the kind one point in different directions. And whether a decision closing feels like relief or like losing your options.

Those four are the dichotomies Jung's typology proposed and that every four-letter system since has used. What this version does differently is refuse the final step. A standard type instrument takes your score on each pair, cuts it at the midpoint, and hands you a letter — which works cleanly for the people at the ends and badly for everyone else, because scores on these four pairs pile up in the middle like height rather than splitting into two camps. If you land two items from the line, you get a confident letter that a retake weeks later may well reverse.

So each pair here is reported as a position with a margin attached. You still get the four letters, because that is the vocabulary you came for and it is genuinely useful shorthand. But a letter with a three-point margin is labelled as one, and that label is the most informative thing on the page: it tells you which part of your type description to take seriously and which part is a rounding artifact you have been carrying around as an identity.

This is not the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® and it does not reproduce any part of it. That instrument is copyrighted and its name is a registered trademark of The Myers-Briggs Company. These items are our own, written on the four-dichotomy framework as it appears in the open literature — the same framework the public-domain Open Extended Jungian Type Scales works from.

Four bars, one per pair, each showing where you sat and how far that was from the midpoint. Above them, the four letters that position produces — with any letter inside ten points of the middle marked as borderline, meaning that letter is the one most likely to read differently if you take this again in a month.

Then the part that is specific to this site: which of our other assessments measures the same territory on a continuous scale, and what a behavior task would predict about you if the letters are accurate. Your type says something checkable about how you act when a loss is immediate and the odds are hidden. The balloon task records what you actually did. Those two agree less often than people expect, and where they disagree is more interesting than either one alone.