The Personality Brokers
The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
An unprecedented history of a personality test devised in the 1940s by a mother and daughter, both homemakers, that has achieved cult-like status and is used in today's most distinguished boardrooms, classrooms, and beyond.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It has been harnessed by Fortune 100 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language--of extraversion vs. introversion, thinking vs. feeling--has inspired online dating platforms and BuzzFeed quizzes alike. And yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $500 million industry, struggle to account for its success--no less to validate its results. How did the Myers-Briggs test insinuate itself into our jobs, 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 aspiring novelists and devoted homemakers, the Myers-Briggs was designed to bring the gospel of Carl Jung to the masses. But it would take on a life of its own, reaching from the smoke-filled boardrooms of mid-century New York to Berkeley, California, where it was honed against some of the twentieth century's greatest creative minds. It would travel across the world to London, Zurich, Cape Town, Melbourne, and Tokyo; to elementary schools, nunneries, wellness retreats, and the closed-door corporate training sessions of today.
Drawing from original reporting and never-before-published documents, The Personality Brokers 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?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Emre (Paraliterary), 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 Type Indicator (MBTI.) The MBTI, 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 MBTI'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 MBTI. However, she is excellent at recounting how the MBTI 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 MBTI's effectiveness; in the process she restores Briggs and Myers to their rightful place in the annals of popular psychology.Correction: An earlier version of this review misspelled the name of the author's previous book, and also incorrectly referred to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory.
