Getting inside the brains of Birmingham city councillors: Dr Jung will see you now
A plucky band of Birmingham politicians are to submit themselves to personality tests first devised by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung in an effort to discover what makes them tick.
Volunteers on the city council are being sought to undertake psychometric testing that will profile their individual style, leadership characteristics, discover whether they are introvert or extrovert and assess how they approach complex problems.
The online sessions will cost the council £1,620 and are part of a new member development programme that could be extended to all 120 councillors if the pilot scheme is successful.
Those taking part must fill in a questionnaire based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which was developed to measure psychological preferences in decision making.
Although the test was first used in the 1940s it was based on theories proposed at the beginning of the 20th century by Jung, who identified four principal psychological functions by which people experience the world: sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking.
According to Jung, one of these four functions is dominant most of the time. It’s simply a matter of finding out whether you are touchy-feely or more of a prickly loner.
The councillor development programme is being pushed forward by Carl Rice, chairman of Birmingham’s main scrutiny committee, which will discuss the psychometric testing plan at its next meeting.
