The Personality Brokers

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

By: Merve Emre

Narrated by: Ellen Archer

*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?

great book that pitches past the W

well reported and written, the book tears apart the mbti, but makes too broad claims about personality testing. there are reputation based clinical and nonclinical tests that, unlike the mbti, have test-retest validity, convergent validity and are psychometrically sound. the underlying gender bias and racial bias and poor psychometric properties, make it unconscionable to use the mbti for selection, assignments or anything more serious than fortune telling. it would have been interesting hear from it's corporate or organizational psychology defenders

Insightful especially for practitioners

Very useful and even compulsory stuff for practitioners. Respectful, honest and critical! Sorry to hear the author had to experience a zelotic instructor. But that is what is meant by the 'believers'.
It is not a religion and it is from a scientfic point of view outdated. I know that and I tell it to all people who do the test. I will not call them my subjects. Still, it is more fun than astrology or the big five test. And since it so popular in the workplace and sports you need to understand what your dealing with... and what not. And that is why I liked the research. The story was sometimes difficult to follow when new characters were introduced and I couldn't grasp their significance.

Type This

If the obvious isn’t enough to make you question the validity of MB, this excellent book ought to seal it for you. The research is outstanding.

Loved Myers-Briggs Already - Wonderful Backstory

I've taken a life long interest in studying Personality Types. This book is a heart warmer, told romantically. A great choice for those who are attracted to the raising of children, homeschooling. This is the progression of Katharine Cook Briggs' natural interest in her family and children, observational learning of the neighborhood children, and keeping written accounts of all (not just her own). And it blew up from there. I was sympathetic to Briggs' inability to untie the apron strings to her adult daughter, Isabel Myers, yet she had raised her so well that the daughter was not desperate for her approval. I loved that no man could measure up to the ability of the matriarch of the 1900s to speak parenting so fluently as did Mother Briggs. The author portrayed both Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers as a couple of intense ladies and I loved the depiction. Both of their husbands seemed largely supportive of them through their crazy journey. This book could make a great movie, with Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Hitler, Jean Piaget, John F. Kennedy, Nixon and the BFF of Isabel in her senior years making their appearances in this story. I'm inspired by the lives of these two women. Narration is excellent.

A deep dive into the history of type indicators

Great book. Very historical and introspective look on type indicators, and their future in society.