You may not even be aware that a personality test can tell you a little about your thought processes. I mean, not general stuff, like oh yeah duh, if I know your personality type then I get how you see the world, thus how you think. No. Talking more specifics than that; specifics on how a person views the world.
So get this. There are 8 cognitive processes total, according to personality theory. And of course they are not meant to include all thought processes ever possible. They are to be used as a framework in understanding personality.
Carl Jung originally theorized that we are all born with a way of seeing the world that shapes our cognitive processes. This is our "dominant process". Then in childhood/adolescence we develop our auxiliary process, then later our tertiary, and in mid-adulthood we are still developing our inferior process.
Why is this so interesting? Well its not, really, until you consider what those 8 cognitive processes are.
The 8 cognitive processes can be divided into 4 personality traits: Thinking, Feeling, Sensing, and iNtuition. Intuition is represented with a capital N because I is needed for introversion in the overall temperament sorter profile.
According to this theory, we all have one of each of the four traits. And those 4 traits are expanded into 8 cognitive processes by Introversion and Extroversion: Introverted Thinking, Extroverted Thinking; and so on. For example, I (and everyone else) have either Introverted or Extroverted Thinking, either Introverted or Extroverted Feeling, Introverted or Extroverted Sensing, and Introverted or Extroverted iNtuition. The differences come (among the 16 different personality type profiles) from the order of the development of these processes.
Isn't it interesting that both Carl Jung and the Myers-Briggs team both found cognitive processes to be relevant enough to personality theory to include entire books about them? And their Personality Tests are the most well-known out there. Even those later created usually draw from the original two. But still we don't study cognitive processes when briefing over Myers-Briggs Temperament Sorter in Psych 101.
