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    What’s Your Type?: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing
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    What’s Your Type?: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing
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    What’s Your Type?: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing
    Audiobook11 hours

    What’s Your Type?: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

    Written by Merve Emre

    Narrated by Laurence Bouvard

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR

    ‘History that reads like biography that reads like a novel – a fluid narrative that defies expectations and plays against type’ New York Times

    ‘Brilliant and savage’ Philip Hensher

    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 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 validate its results. How did the Myers-Briggs 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 20th 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, What’s Your Type? examines nothing less than the definition of the self – our attempts to grasp, categorise and quantify our personalities. Surprising and absorbing, the book, like the test at its heart, considers the timeless question: What makes you you?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateSep 11, 2018
    ISBN9780008201401
    Unavailable
    What’s Your Type?: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

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    Reviews for What’s Your Type?

    3.5/5

    73 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Review:
      I am not forever changed by this book. But learning the history was rather interesting.

      Quotes, notes and snippets:
      The theory behind the indicator supports the fact that you are born with a four letter preference. If you hear someone say "my type changed." They are not correct.
      And the wolves are the people that want to get in my way, I said with a menacing tone. The other trainees looked at me nervously as if seeing me, the true me, for the first time.
    • 3/5
      I already knew that the MBTI was not considered valid by psychologists, and that it had been invented by a mother and daughter who were not trained in psychology, so this contained no surprises on that score. The intro to this book makes it seem like there's vast secrets hidden in the archives; nothing quite so thrilling.

      Emre has a certain appreciation for Briggs and Myers and their desire to see something positive in all types of personalities; this remains part of the appeal of the MBTI, along with its ability to easily categorize people according to 4 simple traits, classified in a binary manner. The story, while fun and well written, would have benefited from someone with more experience in psychology and personality testing. The lack of validity of the test is fairly easy to demonstrate, especially once you know the history, but it would have benefited at least as well from a wider approach to the science of personality and not just the personalities of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers.
    • 5/5
      The book I've been waiting for since the mid-80s, when the managers where I worked at the time were all made to take the Myers-Briggs "indicator" (as its overlords insist on calling it). Luckily, I was not a manager, but when my manager "suggested" we underlings also take it, I dodged. Intuitively (ahem), it felt flaky and simplistic to me, and I resisted being labeled in such a fashion.

      Fast forward 30 years. My current employer imposed something called "Total Insights," a dumbed-down knockoff of the MBTI where they didn't even need to use *words* to describe the profiles, but *colors*! Yay! By this time, I had dialed back from a management position, but our department director "invited" everyone on the department to take this profile. I was, um, out of the office that day. I and one colleague, who had a degree in psychology, were the only two who refused to take it. We work in a large academic medical center, where "evidence-based research" is a holy grail, where protocols, therapies, interventions, policies and procedures are all supposed to be based on evidence. With the obvious exception of HR.

      So I thank Merve Emre from the bottom of my heart for this detailed and careful study of Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers and the test they invented. Yes, bottom line is: they made all this stuff up. It grew out of Briggs's obsession with Carl Jung (she emphatically described him as her "personal god," to whose ideas and writings she would devote her life). Jung, a flaky thinker with Nazi sympathies whose patients and acolytes frequently became his bed partners, *also* made all this stuff up. He dreamed up a triad of personality trait pairings. Briggs and Myers sat around their kitchen tables and "profiled" their husbands, kids, and a couple neighbor kids. And ta-daa! The MBTI was born. They set themselves up as counselors - with zero schooling, formal training or any sort of licensing in psychology or counseling and a signal lack of ethics - and profiled people. Briggs latched onto a very troubled teenaged girl in a very creepy way, following her around, examining her, profiling her, writing about her, without any sort of actual consent. Myers went on to carry her mother's torch of obsession, and finally landed a job with a (wait for it...) management consultant. He thought it might be useful, and they started selling it to companies and HR departments, who happily used to it to hire and fire people. A publisher of psychological tools, the Educational Testing Service, got wind of it and hired Myers on - it was cheaper to pay her as a part-time employee than actually buy the rights to it. They then spent years working over the instrument, attempting to validate it. Myers was furious that anyone would dare to tinker with her sacred instrument and stonewalled, complained and was generally a nuisance. The professional analysts found it nearly irredeemably flawed. But it was simple, it was easy to give, a breeze to score (especially with the recent advent of computerized analysis), and businesses loved it. So on it went, to become the juggernaut of nonsense it is today. And making a ton of money for its owners, not only selling the instrument and its scoring, but in the very expensive process of "certifying" HR folks to administer it.

      The author attempted to gain access to the archives held by the current owners of the tool. She was told she would have to enroll in a week-long formal certification program at a cost of several thousand dollars. She did, and was still refused permission. It was a cult-like experience, with attendees chanting "Type never changes!" In spite, of course, of the research that demonstrates that half the people who take the instrument get different results if they repeat it. And the explanation for why this happens, according to the MBTI gurus, is so convoluted I could barely follow it... something to do with having taken the test "awakening awareness" of one's traits and so you allow your "real self" to emerge in the later test.

      I would love to donate a copy of this book to the library of the organization where I work. But no one would read it. But I hope it will offer some serious backup to employees who wish to resist being pigeonholed into a fabricated category of personality which is no better than a horoscope.
    • 3/5
      To investigate the history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the most popular personality inventory in the world, is to court a kind of low-level paranoia. Files disappear. Tapes are erased. People begin to watch you.

      The first start of this book made me think of scientology, how closely guarded and paranoid they are, and it turned out to be right all along this story. However, this book is not about the mechanics that surround what makes the Myers-Briggs Indicator Type test, but its core, its beginnings, and its life through its makers and where it's ended up today, as a kind of fortune cookie that's entirely made without basis in science, still used by major companies and institutions.

      Although they were not the only figures in the history of personality psychology to pose these questions, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, were among the first to perceive how hungry the masses were for simple, self-affirming answers to the problem of self-knowledge. As proud wives, mothers, and homemakers with no formal training in psychology or psychiatry, they believed they could craft a language of the self that was free from judgment and malice; free from the coldness and impassivity that, in their minds, characterized the attitudes of professional clinicians. Their first subjects were the people they loved the most, their husbands and their children; their first workplaces were their homes. While they did borrow much of their language of type from Carl Jung, their relationship with him was vexed: at times mutually admiring; at times dangerously, even sexually, obsessive. No matter what obstacles or disappointments they faced, they believed they could overcome their amateurism with a stubborn, sometimes infuriating dedication to their cause, a belief that persisted even when it cost them their friendships, their marriages, their sanity. Their personal lives were everywhere bound up with the life of their invention, so much so that once it passed from the private into the public realm, they would eventually become eclipsed by it, in much the same way that the name “Frankenstein” has come to stand for the monster rather than his creator.

      Emre does a good job in navigating the reader through the home-styled makings of the "type", and permeates the innards of how a highly bizarre and damaged mother turned her daughter into making the test with her, while being obsessed with Jung.

      Katharine spent the next five years doing little else but scrutinizing every word of Jung’s book, copying paragraphs from it into her notebooks with the quiet determination of a monk in his cell.

      To say there are a lot of parts of Jung in the Myers-Briggs test is a complete understatement; the family wont to justify the simplification of people into stereotypes, where one can—simply by identifying the existence or lack of a single letter in one's "character" as defined by Myers-Briggs—know who to glom to or avoid, is everywhere, based on obsession and also om psychological transference; Katherine Briggs (the mother) wrote erotic fiction about Carl Jung even.

      This book started veering a bit boringly towards the last third, but still, it was interesting. Its author is also laudable for listening to in radio interviews. Check this book out, it's likely to charm, and mainly, to in a gentle and scientific way expose the Myers-Briggs test for what it is: a vehicle made not for scientific purpose, but to make money.
    • 4/5
      This book was a bit of everything: a biography of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs-Myers, a history of the Myers-Briggs type indicator; and personality testing in general.I found, after finishing the book, the introduction to be rather sensational. The truth, as written in the rest of the book, was much tamer than the intro led me to expect. As was the idea that the developers of the MBTI were amateurs; many were at that time as we had yet to reach today's level of specialization. Another interesting aspect of the book was the cult-like devotion many people have to MBTI, as described in the training session the author went to.I would have liked more ob the business side or economics of the MBTI. Who is benefiting from it now? I enjoyed this book and am still somewhat amazed that this test remains so popular despite its being discredited by many scientific analyses. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is fascinating not because it reflects society but because of how it has, in so many cases, shaped it.
    • 4/5
      I am an ESTJ. Well, at least I am this year. This is the first time, I have scored an extravert on the extroversion-introversion continuum. Could the change, even if I am a low extravert, be the result of teaching college psychology courses for the last ten years? If what I have written makes any sense to you, you are probably one of the 5o million that have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the most popular personality test in the world.This personality assessment was the creation of two women, the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. I was surprised to discover that the two were born, respectively, in 1875 and 1898. I thought this assessment was a recent development somewhere in the late 20th century. Katherine Briggs, a disciple of and frequent correspondent with Carl Jung, embraced his book on personality types, which is the foundation for the Myers-Briggs. She and her daughter, both amateur psychoanalysts decided in 1920 that knowing your personality type would be beneficial and decided to bring this instrument to humanity. Although it had limited use with such agencies such as the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, it really didn't have marketable success until it was picked up by the Educational Testing Service in the early 1960s. However, it was dropped from its inventory when some believed that the underpinning theory was faulty.The Myers Briggs was resurrected in the late 60s when Mary McCaulley, a fan of Isabel Briggs Myers, launched the Center for Applictions of Psychological Type with the Myers Briggs as its primary product. Unfortunately, Isabel died before she experienced its overwhelming success.It was noteworthy that the Myers-Briggs did not as many instruments before this was not designed to find those who needed to be culled out because of a mental illness. It was thought by the mother-daughter that this instrument might be helpful in ensuring that individuals could be slotted for the right satisfying careers. (Sounds a bit like Brave New World.) The author of this history on the birth of personality testing is open about the warts of this assessment tool. There is a question regarding its validity and reliability since anyone with a little psychological education guarantee the type one wants by answering questions in a particular manner. There are no safeguards to identify when this is being done. Additionally, the results can change when administering again shortly after the initial administration.Overall, this was an entertaining history of psychology, especially personality testing. Teaching psychology classes and naming many notables that is included in this book, it was good reading about first hand encounters between Katherine and Isabel and the early psychological heroes.
    • 4/5
      If you haven’t taken the Myers-Briggs personality test, then the odds are you have never worked for any company or gone to any school or really been involved in much in your life. The test is ubiquitous, claiming to provide each of us insights into the people we are by asking simple questions that lead to an assessment in four distinct areas. And it has paved the way for an entire industry of personality tests (DISC, TraCom, ad infinitum) designed to reveal insights to the person while showing how each of us can work and play well together. Recently, questions have begun to arise around just how effective these tests are. In-depth research is being conducted that indicates the tests may not be all they are touted to be.Merve Emre’s book is one of the most often cited when looking at popular writing about Myers-Briggs and the questions surrounding it. The book is an extremely complete telling of the backgrounds of Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers. It chronicles how these women, as amateurs, developed the personality testing that has taken over the world. Neither was trained in psychology, but it was a fledging concept at the time, so there weren’t a large number of “trained” individuals. Accordingly, it was not that unusual to have amateurs doing the work. The problem is that they were so focused on their work that they never took the time to become more than amateurs. Couple that with a refusal to understand any way that might be wrong, and you have a recipe for unresearched expertise. Then, throw in one more thing – while Myers and Briggs may have had the best of intentions, those who succeeded them may have been more focused on the profit motive.As I noted, the book goes into extensive detail. Unfortunately, the minutiae of details is where I really began to lose focus. It may well be that such details are is important in understanding the basis for how these women developed their ideas, but there is just too much.And that meant that the book did not deliver on what I had expected – more information on the current trends and research around the suspected failures of the approach. The bookends of this book are Ms. Emre’s training in Myers-Briggs. And the reader expects much more about the revelations that occurred. But that does not occur. They are only stories that surround the book, never doing more than scratch the surface of the “cult” that working with Myers-Briggs might be.I believe this is an important book for anyone who wants to understand personality testing. And I recommend it to anyone who is diving into this subject. But I really feel there could have been a better book if there had been less focus on the excruciating details of their lives and more on the tests themselves.
    • 3/5
      This book tells the story of the mother-daughter pair whose efforts resulted in that ubiquitous personality inventory, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).Homemaker Katherine Briggs developed a late-in-life obsession with Carl Jung and used his massive work on personality, Psychological Types, as the basis for her amateur theories on differentiating among types of people. Her entrepreneurial daughter Isabel Myers picked up her mother's mantle and created the instrument. After WWII, the indicator attained widespread use in organizations big and small, as a way to match workers with the jobs for which they were best suited. Today it is mostly used as a tool for self-discovery.Despite its ongoing popularity, the MBTI has been shown not to be scientifically valid. The faithful among the "type watchers", however, continue to embrace it with religious fervor.The narrative is a little dry and the two women don't really come to life as well as I had hoped. Perhaps this this because author Merve Emre was prohibited from accessing Myers's and Briggs's private papers. The full stories of these two pioneers and the rise and fall of type sorting have yet to be told.
    • 3/5
      I've always been interested in personality tests and how physiologists can determine certain traits about a person by interpreting the results of said tests. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is arguably one of, if not the most, recognizable personality tests. I myself have taken it. I had no idea though of its origins. The Personality Brokers is a good book, part biography, part psychology, part history.