MBTI Personality Type and Student Code Comprehension Skill

This study aimed to examine the skill of participants in understanding the functioning of a piece of Java code by reading it. Their skill at this task was measured via a code comprehension task. The aim was to ascertain any relationships between this skill and their personality as measured by the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The study was carried out with 74 participants, all of whom were from a computing science background and were of undergraduate, postgraduate or postdoctoral level, the majority being undergraduate students. It was discovered that there was one significant interaction between personality as measured by the MBTI and code comprehension skill. Individuals who had a leaning towards Introversion on the Extroversion/Introversion preference were significantly better at the code comprehension task. None of the other three MBTI preferences yielded a significant result. This is discussed in the context of previous research.