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Self-made creators of Myers–Briggs
PSYCHOLOGY
S. Alexander Hasiam enjoys the tale of how a questionable personality quiz went global.
Most of us have, at some point, completed a formal personality test. Chances are it was the MyersBriggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Introduced by Isabel Briggs Myers in 1943, it asks 93 questions, such as, "If you were a teacher, would you rather teach (a) Fact courses or (b) Courses involving theory?" On the basis of their answers, an individuals 'personality type' is plotted along four axes: extraversion (E) to introversion (I); sensing (S) to intuition (N); thinking (T) to feeling (F); and judging (J) to perceiving (P). The results, proponents claim, allow people to understand themselves and others in terms of a four-letter label: I may be an ESTJ (a 'supervisor type'); you an INTP (an 'architect type').
By conventional psychometric criteria, the MBTI is highly suspect. In failing to measure what it purports to measure, it has low validity and in failing to elicit consistent responses across testing contexts, it has low reliability and little predictive power. But The Personality Brokers, by literature scholar Merve Emre, does not debate the limitations of the MBTI - a path many have trodden. Instead, Emre's careful investigations of the tool's bizarre origins and alarming impact weave a compelling narrative that recounts the rise of twentieth-century managerial and personnel-theory science with the gritty wistfulness of a John Steinbeck novel.
Isabel Briggs Myers (1897-1980) was an autodidact who eschewed formal psychological methods of test development and validation. She became...