by Merve Emre
*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?
*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?
Reviews-
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July 1, 2018
An illuminating dual biography of two women who invented a hugely popular personality test.The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is still widely used by businesses, schools, churches, and the military. Although it has no scientific credibility, it incited a vogue for self-assessment questionnaires proliferating in popular magazines, online dating sites, and self-help books, offering a means of "self-discovery as a civilizing form of self-mastery." Los Angeles Review of Books senior humanities editor Emre (English/Oxford Univ.; Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, 2017, etc.) has dug deeply into published and archival sources to produce a deft, gracefully written account of Katharine Briggs (1875-1968) and her daughter, Isabel Myers (1897-1980), ardent devotees of Carl Jung who created, tested, and promoted a lengthy questionnaire that, they insisted, revealed an individual's true, innate, unchanging personality type. Influenced by Jung's Psychological Types (1921), they devised a rubric that identified personality according to four "easy to understand and easily relatable" categories: extravert or introvert, thinking or feeling, sensing or intuiting, judging or perceiving. Katharine's early interest in personality shaped her "Obedience-Curiosity" method of raising her daughter: Disobedience was punished by slaps and drills, obedience rewarded by stories, and curiosity encouraged--as long as it did not lead to disobedience. Occasionally, Isabel attended school, although Katharine derided the "rapidly democratizing public-school system." Katharine's unconventional method attracted enough attention that she was asked to write magazine articles expounding on child-rearing advice. By 1923, with her daughter grown and married, Katharine sank into depression, alleviated by her discovery of Jung, for whom she developed an intense, even erotic, passion. As she delved into his work, she came to believe "that knowing one's type could save the soul of an individual while prompting him to assume the specialized offices that would help him advance civilization." Emre traces the intersection of the Briggs-Myers inventory with widespread interest in personality that involved prominent psychologists, sociologists, businessmen, college admissions officers, and researchers eager to find tools for measuring character and capability.A discerning history of the quest for self-knowledge.COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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July 9, 2018
Emre (Paraliteracy), an associate English professor at Oxford University, tells the fascinating story of the origins of the world’s most widely used personality test, the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory (MBPI.) The MBPI, which was introduced in 1943, classifies personality in terms of four polarities: introversion-extraversion, intuition-sensing, feeling-thinking, and judging-perceiving. Emre profiles each of its developers, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, noting neither possessed any formal psychological training. She also observes that for Briggs, personality “typing” was a kind of “personal religion” inspired by her near-reverential regard for Carl Jung’s theories, while for Myers, who developed the MBPI’s first 117-question multiple choice test, it was more of a vocation and, later, a business. In a major omission, Emre never discusses, or even delineates, the 16 personality types derived from the MBPI. However, she is excellent at recounting how the MBPI began to sweep American institutions in the 1950s–Brown University administered it to all 950 members of the class of 1958—and attained widespread popularity after its creators’ deaths. Emre’s fine study balances some sharp criticisms, such as from social theorist Theodor Adorno, with her own candid testimonial to the MBPI’s effectiveness; in the process she restores Briggs and Myers to their rightful place in the annals of popular psychology. -
August 1, 2018
This combined dual biography and social history seeks explanations for why an admittedly flawed, unscientifically proven personality test?created in the 1920s by a mother-daughter team of two untrained pseudointellectuals?continues to be the most revered personality indicator in existence. Many readers may remember their own results from having taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a written evaluation that sorts individuals according to four realms. Oxford professor Emre's readable account documents how complicated family relationships, Katharine Briggs' lifelong obsession with Karl Jung, and her daughter Isabel Briggs-Myers' shameless self-promotion and willingness to pursue any opportunity (training spies in World War II, ferreting out communist sympathizers, or seeking validation through publicized affiliation with celebrities, beatniks, hippies, and West Coast new agers) turned the Myers-Briggs into the most widely administered personality indicator, still endorsed today by major international industries and the U.S. government. The human race has been seeking personal validation since the early Greeks ( know thyself ); this eye-opening account gives readers insight into how one evaluation method morphed into a neat, satisfying packaging system for our complicated psyches.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.) - The Economist "[A] brilliant cultural history of the personality-assessment industry."
- The Ringer "A unique meld of a hidden history of two admirably prickly women and an examination of why their ideas were simultaneously damaging and popular."
- Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg "This is a sparkling biography--not just of a pair of remarkable women, but of a popular personality tool. Merve Emre deftly exposes the hidden origins of the MBTI and the seductive appeal and fatal flaws of personality types. Ultimately, she reveals that a sense of self is less something we discover, and more something we create and revise."
- Liza Mundy, author of the national bestseller Code Girls "Genius, passion, insight, love, heartbreak, war, family, competition, corporate villainy: the story of the Myers-Briggs personality assessment, and the extraordinary mother-daughter duo who conceived and developed it, has all the stuff of a great novel, with the added advantage that it's true. Chances are you didn't know that Myers and Briggs were women. In the tradition of Hidden Figures, this brilliant book proves--yet again--that women were behind some of the most important scientific innovations of wartime and postwar America. I absolutely love it."
