“When it comes to accuracy,” organizational psychologist Adam Grant has written, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is better than a horoscope but less reliable than a heart monitor. Fashioned in the first half of the twentieth century by a mother and daughter with no formal training in psychology, the test inventories your predispositions along four different axes—introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving—and sorts you into one of 16 discrete types. This system has no basis in science, critics point out; people’s personalities can’t be reduced to simple binaries, and those who answer the questions more than once often arrive at completely different types each time. Curiously, it remains one of the most popular personality tests in the world today.



THE PERSONALITY BROKERS: THE STRANGE HISTORY OF MYERS-BRIGGS AND THE BIRTH OF PERSONALITY TESTING by Merve Emre Doubleday, 366 pp., $27.95

Taken by over two million people each year, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is used by universities, career coaching centers, federal government offices, several branches of the military, and 88 of the Fortune 100 companies. Even if you’ve never been administered an official version of the test—which the publisher CPP Inc. currently sells for $49.95—chances are you’ve ascertained your type at some point from one of the many MBTI knockoffs that circulate on the internet. You’re likely familiar with the difference between Is (introverts), who focus more on their inner worlds, and Es (extraverts), who focus on the outer world; you may also know that Ts (thinking types) make decisions based on logic and consistency, whereas Fs (feeling types) make decisions based on the people involved and the individual circumstances. Perhaps you’ve even let the Myers-Briggs type listed on someone’s dating profile determine the direction of your swipe.

How did the test establish such wide appeal? The answer, Merve Emre proposes in her new book The Personality Brokers, lies in its early-twentieth-century origins. The women who conceived of the MBTI and fought for its validation in the years during and after World War II were, she writes, “among the first to perceive how hungry the masses were for simple, self-affirming answers to the problem of self-knowledge.” Yet, as she also shows, the MBTI was always intended to be more than just a springboard for therapeutic self-reflection. It is, both by design and in practice, a tool of workplace management. The story of its success tracks the rise of a new type of employee, who, propelled by the gospel of self-knowledge, is expected to mold her character to the perennially shifting demands of the labor market.



If the MBTI attempts to measure personality in the abstract, The Personality Brokers captures the specific, idiosyncratic personalities of the test’s two creators, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. While both women were, on paper, homemakers for the majority of their adult lives, they were also autodidacts, published writers, and zealots of a distinct sort. As affluent, educated women, both mother and daughter were alternately enabled and constrained by their circumstances in the postwar period, a tension that would bend the trajectory of the MBTI introduction into the world.

Katharine, born in 1875, grew up religious and bookish. She enrolled in Michigan Agricultural College at the age of 14 and there met another young prodigy, Lyman Briggs, whom she married after graduation. Their daughter, Isabel, was born in 1897, and Katharine promptly began a series of small experiments designed to mold her child into a genius. Influenced by the popular parenting literature of the time, which sought to apply the principles of scientific management to motherhood, she dubbed the family’s living room the “cosmic laboratory of baby training,” and conscripted Isabel into near-daily behavioral drills. In one such exercise, Katharine would present her toddler daughter with a tempting yet potentially dangerous object, such as an open flame, and snap “No! No!” when Isabel reached for it, a ritual often accompanied by spanks or slaps on the child’s hand. On the occasions when Isabel demonstrated adequate obedience, Katharine regaled her with inventive, winding fables about how the rugs and tables in their household had originated in mythical lands. She documented these practices in a journal, along with notes on her young daughter’s developing personality.