![]() ![]() A third woman, Mary McCaulley, who came upon the test in 1968, the year Katharine died, was a professor of psychology at the University of Florida. ![]() Neither one had any training in psychology or in psychiatry-or, for that matter, in testing-and neither ever worked in a laboratory or an academic institution. Both books describe Briggs and Myers as intellectually driven women in an era when career opportunities for intellectually driven women were slim. ![]() They truly believed that they had discovered a way to make work more efficient and human beings less unhappy.Įmre’s book follows closely the account of the development of the MBTI given in Annie Murphy Paul’s “ The Cult of Personality Testing,” published in 2004 (a work that Emre surprisingly does not acknowledge). But Briggs and Myers were not in the personality game for the money. According to Emre, personality testing has become a two-billion-dollar industry. Since Katharine began studying personality differences when Isabel was four, this means that the two women persisted for almost eighty years before the MBTI became the commercial bonanza it is today. She died in 1980, just as the test’s popularity was taking off. She codified her mother’s method of categorizing personalities, copyrighted it (in 1943), and spent the rest of her life trying to find a permanent home for the product. The daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, was born in 1897. When she died, in 1968, the test she inspired was all but forgotten. The mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, was born in 1875. If they had not, there would be no MBTI today. They devoted their lives to their system, and they kept the faith for a very long time. To call them “mildly eccentric” would be indulging in a gender stereotype, but it seems fair to say that they were a little O.C.D. Briggs and Myers were a mother-and-daughter team. Merve Emre’s “ The Personality Brokers” (Doubleday) is the story of how the MBTI fell to earth. There are more than two thousand personality tests on the market, many of them blatant knockoffs of the MBTI, but Myers-Briggs is No. It is used by Fortune 500 companies and universities, in self-improvement seminars and wellness retreats. It is used in twenty-six countries to assess employees, students, soldiers, and potential marriage partners. More than two million people take it every year. Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers were the first kind, and the test they invented based on that belief, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, is the most popular personality test in the world. There are two kinds of people in the world: people who think there are two kinds of people in the world and people who don’t. ![]()
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