Merve Emre

An unprecedented history of the personality test conceived a century ago by a mother and her daughter--fiction writers with no formal training in psychology--and how it insinuated itself into our boardrooms, classrooms, and beyond The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by Fortune 500 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language of personality types--extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving--has inspired television shows, online dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. Yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $2 billion industry, have struggled to validate its results--no less account for its success. How did Myers-Briggs, a homegrown multiple choice questionnaire, infiltrate our workplaces, our relationships, our Internet, our lives? First conceived in the 1920s by the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of devoted homemakers, novelists, and amateur psychoanalysts, Myers-Briggs was designed to bring the gospel of Carl Jung to the masses. But it would take on a life entirely its own, reaching from the smoke-filled boardrooms of mid-century New York to Berkeley, California, where it was administered to some of the twentieth century's greatest creative minds. It would travel across the world to London, Zurich, Cape Town, Melbourne, and Tokyo, until it could be found just as easily in elementary schools, nunneries, and wellness retreats as in shadowy political consultancies and on social networks. Drawing from original reporting and never-before-published documents, The Personality Brokers takes a critical look at the personality indicator that became a cultural icon. Along the way it examines nothing less than the definition of the self--our attempts to grasp, categorize, and quantify our personalities. Surprising and absorbing, the book, like the test at its heart, considers the timeless question: What makes you, you?

The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

The Personality Brokers

Samantha Alukas 

Medical journals are dry. Objective data, straight facts. They use specific language to avoid biases in writing. And that is how I want my medical journals.

But when I’m reading a book for popular consumption, I want it to have some character, some humor or interest in the writing. I want to enjoy it. What I’m trying to say is, for a book about personality, this one didn’t seem to have one. Ok, yeah that was pretty harsh, but the line basically wrote itself people! 

In all honesty, it’s a pretty thorough biography of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myer, and an academic account of the final design and marketing of the MBTI we know today. Well written, well researched. If you are looking for a historic account of the MBTI origins, this is the book for you, but if you are looking to explore the complexity of personality, look somewhere else.

Nico J

Felt a weird, tense, stomachache of emotions reading this book because trying to sympathize or relate with the mother-daughter duo that was detailed, so precisely, was uncomfortable. They aren't relatable and I don't think it's the time period, necessarily, or even the historical context. The desires to go beyond a limited station in life, to contemplate one's path, are reasonable. Bringing oneself up to the level of a doctor, a licensed psychologist, or other roles to justify making up a fun quiz based on a smattering of understanding of the fields and, at points, the subtlety of an 8 ball with answers, is plain strange. Some it felt like a creative outlet, which the author made fantastic points about, and some of it is definitely to justify the personalities and neuroticism of Katharine and Isabel in their own minds to deal with their position of subservience. 

I'm baffled by the letters written to Jung, and that he wrote back. It's insane that these standardized tests, now fully in the realm of making people and personalities a billion-dollar business, have roots in a woman that was going after a vulnerable child to try to save her soul. It has the window trimmings and veneer of a cult, like a fanciful pyramid scheme made in a lab to try to capture people like animals in traps. To say it nicely, these are incredibly eccentric and self-absorbed people trying to "save" others with the intensity of a proselytizer, and it begs the questions: Are there people who should be in charge of others, and be allowed to draw the lines in the sand of "enlightened?" and "non?" Do we not see these types of people run companies, invent devices and ideas and paradigms and cures, convinced it's all for the common good? Run countries and install governments, even? 

If my opinion is unforgiving, it's because I'm skeptical and sometimes dually irritated and fascinated with personality quizzes. It's relaxing and alluring to look at horoscopes and imagine that the answers float the surface easily - that's what we want, isn't it? Easy answers? The faux spiritual quest involved in Katharine's doggedness of pursuit is also totally unsettling and frustrating. What blows me away is how ingrained it's become in actual institutions and the ramifications of that - educational testing, mindless internet quizzes morphing into talking points, determinism in workplaces - it's ludicrous. Musing on workplaces, a manager of mine has her results from some red-and-green leadership type-IQ-nonsense pasted up in her cube. The undercurrent of anger I have about it is admittedly driven by skepticism and irrational anger that someone in a position of power is leaning on a quiz to understand the "self." On the other hand, if we start thinking about all the ridiculous things we use as crutches in the pursuit of self, we'll be angry all the time. 

You should read this book.

The basis for the new HBO Max documentary, Persona *A New York Times Critics' Best Book of 2018* *An Economist Best Book of 2018* *A Spectator Best Book of 2018* *A Mental Floss Best Book of 2018* An unprecedented history of the personality test conceived a century ago by a mother and her daughter--fiction writers with no formal training in psychology--and how it insinuated itself into our boardrooms, classrooms, and beyond The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by Fortune 500 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language of personality types--extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving--has inspired television shows, online dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. Yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $2 billion industry, have struggled to validate its results--no less account for its success. How did Myers-Briggs, a homegrown multiple choice questionnaire, infiltrate our workplaces, our relationships, our Internet, our lives? First conceived in the 1920s by the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of devoted homemakers, novelists, and amateur psychoanalysts, Myers-Briggs was designed to bring the gospel of Carl Jung to the masses. But it would take on a life entirely its own, reaching from the smoke-filled boardrooms of mid-century New York to Berkeley, California, where it was administered to some of the twentieth century's greatest creative minds. It would travel across the world to London, Zurich, Cape Town, Melbourne, and Tokyo, until it could be found just as easily in elementary schools, nunneries, and wellness retreats as in shadowy political consultancies and on social networks. Drawing from original reporting and never-before-published documents, The Personality Brokers takes a critical look at the personality indicator that became a cultural icon. Along the way it examines nothing less than the definition of the self--our attempts to grasp, categorize, and quantify our personalities. Surprising and absorbing, the book, like the test at its heart, considers the timeless question: What makes you, you?

The Personality Brokers The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

Reviews