Book ID: CBB056189052

The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (2018)

unapi

Emre, Merve (Author)


Doubleday


Publication Date: 2018
Physical Details: 336
Language: English

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 beyondThe 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?

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Reviewed By

Review Ian J. Davidson (2019) Review of "The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (pp. 164-165). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB056189052/

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Authors & Contributors
Lussier, Kira
Peck, John
Hsiung, Hansun
Kyburz, Mark
Hoerni, Ulrich
Bedford, Riiko
Concepts
Popularization
Diffusion of innovation; diffusion of knowledge; diffusion of technology
Psychology
Personality tests
Personality; character
Historiography
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
20th century, early
21st century
20th century, late
18th century
Places
Great Britain
United States
Latin America
Italy
Canada
Institutions
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
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