The Personality Brokers
The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing
By Merve Emre
About the book
Merve Emre's history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator traces how the world's most popular personality test grew from the work of a mother and daughter, Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, homemakers with no formal training in psychology. They conceived it in the 1920s to bring the ideas of Carl Jung to a wide public. Emre follows the test from New York boardrooms at mid-century to Berkeley and then abroad to Tokyo, Zurich, London, Melbourne and Cape Town, into schools, nunneries and wellness retreats. Its language of introversion and extraversion now turns up in dating platforms and Buzzfeed quizzes, though psychometric experts struggle to validate its results. Emre draws on original reporting and previously unpublished documents.
Adam Grant praised it as a lively biography of both the two women and their test, one that exposes the test's hidden origins along with the appeal and flaws of personality types.
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Adam Grant (Author/Originals)
This is a sparkling biography—not just of a pair of remarkable women, but of a popular personality tool. Merve Emre deftly exposes the hidden origins of the MBTI and the seductive appeal and fatal flaws of personality types. Ultimately, she reveals that a sense of self is less something we discover, and more something we create and revise.
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