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

· Sold by Anchor
2.0
3 reviews
Ebook
336
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

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?

Ratings and reviews

2.0
3 reviews
Switch Yard
March 7, 2021
Basically a hit job that portrays Myers and Briggs as fanatical, even hysterical, proto-fascists that twisted Jungian theory into a modern day cult. Well researched but bias against these women and the world they lived in drips off each page. The analysis focuses more on smearing than enlightening. I didn't expect glowing praise but this? It pretty much paints MBTI as a cult made by right wing early 20th century women. A strange canted work written from a leftist viewpoint that comes across as more of a marxist feminist political screed than an honest "warts and all" biographic. Pointless because its about political disdain for Myers and Briggs.
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About the author

MERVE EMRE is an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New YorkerHarper's Magazine, Bookforum, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Baffler, n+1, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is senior humanities editor.

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