Decision-Making Styles: A Comparison of Extension Faculty and the Public

We hypothesized that Extension faculty, both on-campus specialists and off-campus agents, have different decision-making preferences than the public. We drew upon data from a previous study and from a national sample to compare the faculty groups and the public. We found agents to be much more like the public in the judging function. We also found both groups of faculty to have a very strong orientation to the S and J preferences. This suggests faculty may be so engaged in data gathering and management that they are unaware of public interests in intuitions, feelings, and action. We posit that faculty should be sufficiently fluent with the MBTI to recognize and work with people having different preferences.