Keirsey Temperament Sorter
personality questionnaire
The Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS) is a self-assessed personality questionnaire. It was first introduced in the book Please Understand Me. The KTS is closely associated with the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI); however, there are significant practical and theoretical differences between the two personality questionnaires and their associated different descriptions.
Historical development
See also Historical Development of Theories of the Four Temperaments
David Keirsey became familiar with the work of Ernst Kretschmer and William Sheldon after WWII in the late 1940s. Keirsey developed the Temperament Sorter after being introduced to the MBTI in 1956. Tracing the idea of temperament back to the ancient Greeks, Keirsey developed a modern temperament theory in his books Please Understand Me (1978), Portraits of Temperament (1988), Presidential Temperament (1992), Please Understand Me II (1998), Brains and Careers (2008), and Personology (2010). The table below shows how Myers' and Keirsey's types correspond to other temperament theories or constructs, dating from ancient times to the present day.
Four temperaments
Keirsey expanded on the ancient study of temperament by Hippocrates and Plato. In his works, Keirsey used the names suggested by Plato: Artisan (iconic), Guardian (pistic), Idealist (noetic), and Rational (dianoetic). Keirsey divided each of the four temperaments into two categories (roles), each with two types (role variants).
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This entry incorporates text from “Keirsey Temperament Sorter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.