David Keirsey



David West Keirsey(b. August 31, 1921, Oklahoma), is an internationally renowned psychologist, a professor emeritus at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of several books. In his most popular publications Please Understand Me (1978, co-authored by Marilyn Bates) and the revised and expanded second volume Please Understand Me II (1998), he lays out a self-assessed personality questionnaire, known as the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, which links human behaviorial patterns to four temperaments and sixteen character types. Both volumes of Please Understand Me contain the questionnaire for type evaluation with detailed portraits and a systematic treatment of descriptions of temperament traits and personality characteristics. With a focus on conflict management and cooperation, Dr. Keirsey specialized in family and partnership counseling and the coaching of children and adults.

Education and professional experience
Keirsey earned his bachelor's degree from Pomona College, and his master's, and doctorate degrees from Claremont Graduate University. In 1950, he started his career dealing with youth as a counselor at a probation ranch home for delinquent boys. Since then, he has spent twenty years working in public schools engaged in corrective interventions, intended to help troubled and troublesome children stay out of trouble. Over the next eleven years at California State University, Fullerton, he trained corrective counselors to identify deviant habits of children, parents, and teachers, and to apply techniques aimed at enabling them to abandon such habits.

Development of Keirsey's temperaments
Keirsey has written extensively about his system of four "temperaments" (Artisan, Guardian, Idealist, and Rational) and sixteen role variants. Much of the internet literature about types has been derived from Keirsey's descriptions in Please Understand Me.

Keirsey traced his work back to the father of medicine, Hippocrates, and to Plato and Aristotle. Among his modern influences he counts the works of William James, John Dewey, Ernst Kretschmer, William Sheldon, Jay Haley, Gregory Bateson, Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler, Raymond Wheeler, Erich Fromm, Alfred Adler, Rudolf Dreikurs, Milton Erickson, and Erving Goffman.

In 1921, Carl Jung published a conceptual framework of psychological types based on introversion versus extraversion, thinking and feeling as rational functions, sensation and intuition as irrational functions, and the coexistence of principal and auxiliary functions, which Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Cook Briggs subsequently codified into a test for sixteen personality types, called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Isabel Myers described the sixteen types briefly, in her two page chart of Characteristics of Types in High School (Myers Briggs Manual, Form E 1958). This system of sixteen types of people has been used by many researchers and practitioners since, and by Keirsey in a greatly expanded and modified form of his own. Keirsey's critical innovation was organizing these types into four temperaments and describing observable behavior rather than speculation about unobservable thoughts and feelings. Keirsey provided his own definitions of the sixteen types, and related them to the four temperaments based on his studies of the five behavioral sciences (anthropology, biology, ethology, psychology, and sociology). While Myers wrote mostly about the Jungian psychological functions, which are mental processes, Keirsey focused more upon how persons use words in sending messages and use tools in getting things done, which are observable actions.

While Keirsey's main strength may be his accuracy regarding differences in overt behavior, perhaps his most important contribution is his synthesis of Myers' model of "sixteen types" with Ernst Kretschmer's model of four "temperament types." While Myers proposed a two-dimensional grid based on the assumption that the four pairs of introverts are alike, and that the four pairs of extraverts are similarly alike, Keirsey realigned the pattern in three dimensions, using the three other trait distinctions (other than introvert/extravert) that better align with a number of existing models, including Kretschmer's, that Keirsey traces back to Greek mythology.

Myers wrote that 1) INTPs and ISTPs are alike; 2) INFJs and INTJs are alike; 3) INFPs and ISFPs are alike; 4) ISTJs and ISFJs are alike; 5) ENFJs and ESFJs are alike; 6) ENTJs and ESTJs are alike; 7) ENFPs and ENTPs are alike; 8) ESFPs and ESTPs are alike. Keirsey, influenced by Kretschmer's types (Hyperesthetics, Anesthetics, Melancholics, and Hypomanics), argued that the four "NFs" (iNtuitive/Feeling types) were Hyperesthetic (oversensitive), the four "NTs" (iNtuitive/Thinking) were Anesthetic (insensitive), the four "SJs" (Sensing/Judging) were Melancholic (depressive), and the four "SPs" (Sensing/Perceiving) were Hypomanic (excitable). At the time (mid-1950s) Keirsey was mainly interested in the relationship between temperament and abnormal behavior, finding that Ernst Kretschmer and his disciple William Sheldon were the only ones who wrote about this relationship.

ADHD controversy
Keirsey's stance regarding ADHD has led him to count himself among the minority of clinical psychologists who believe that giving psychotropic stimulants to schoolboys, whose greater activity and/or distractible temperaments are considered disruptive to classroom proceedings, was not only unnecessary but harmful to these boys. Consequently, he acts as an ardent critic against what he sees as an "epidemic abuse of children", and claims to be successful in the management of such children by applying what he calls the "method of logical consequences" (see "Abuse it - Lose it" at ). Keirsey asserts that Attention Deficit Disorder was an altogether different matter, in that these children were inactive and paid no attention to the teacher's agenda, and that ADD was defined exclusively by stating what they do not do, and in no way defined their observable behavior. Thus, in his opinion, ADD was a misleading label assigned to children who ignore the teacher while bothering nobody, as do children who are actually disruptive. Keirsey refers to the current therapeutical practice of drugging inactive kids as "The Great ADD Hoax". Several of his statements, such as his warning to "make no mistake about the power of Ritalin to disable and eventually shrink the brain", while scientifically valid to a certain point, are considered to be exaggerations by some and contradict most clinical studies, although these studies are often conducted or financed by pharmaceutical industry. His main claim is that children with ADHD or ADD have an 'SP', or 'Artisan', temperament (concrete in thought and speech/utilitarian in implementing goals), though it is thought by most other people to resemble those with a Myersian 'NP' preference, particularly INTP. Keirsey does acknowledge, however, that those with an NP preference would be subject to frequent misdiagnosis, but believes the rare rate of NP in the population to be insufficient to account for the high rate of ADHD diagnosis; the main types in the school population being SPs and SJs, (or those with (S)ensing preferences) the SPs are the ones that are going to be labeled. (See also the Controversy section in the main ADHD article)