Who is the author of The Personality Brokers?

The author of The Personality Brokers is Merve Emre.

Psychology

The Personality Brokers Book Summary - The Personality Brokers Book explained in key points

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Name: The Personality Brokers
Rating: 3.9 (82 reviews)
Author: Merve Emre

Merve Emre

The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

3.9 (82 ratings)

18 mins

Brief summary

The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre explores the fascinating history of Myers-Briggs personality test and how it became a cultural phenomenon despite its scientific flaws and questionable origins.

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Personality

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The Personality Brokers
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Key idea 1 of 6

What’s in it for me? Discover more about what type of person you are.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the world’s preeminent personality test. You yourself may have taken it before, just like the two million people around the world who do so every year. Although it’s used by Fortune 500 companies, university admissions departments and self-help programs around the world, little is known about the origins of the test.

In these blinks, we’ll go on a journey to discover the roots of this personality inventory. We’ll learn who its creators were and what inspired them to devote their lives to the study of personality. We’ll also look at how social conditions in the early twentieth century contributed to the test’s appeal and examine just how scientifically valid this behemoth of popular psychology really is.

Read on to discover

how personality typing has a dark side;
whether the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator can really reveal your true self; and
what this test gives us that science can’t measure.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator uses an easily understandable, nonjudgmental approach to understanding personality.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) holds the crown as the best-known personality inventory. You may have taken it as part of a recruitment process for a job or simply as a way to get to know yourself a little better. But for the uninitiated, let’s start by taking a look at exactly what this popular test entails.

Our story begins during the Second World War, when a mother and daughter, Katharine Cooks Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, developed a questionnaire that later became known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This test measures a person’s personality according to several binaries of normal human behavior – common traits contrasted with their opposite, making them easy for most of us to understand.

They are: introversion (I) and extraversion (E); intuition (N) and sensing (S); feeling (F) and thinking (T); and judging (J) and perceiving (P).

In order to assess where someone’s personality lies along these four dichotomies, the questionnaire asks ninety-three separate questions about respondents’ preferences, each of which is associated with one of the test’s categories.

For example: “Do you prefer to focus on the outer world, or your own inner world?” assesses introversion and extraversion, whereas “When you make decisions, do you initially consider consistency and logic, or do you first consider people and particular circumstances?” evaluates thinking and feeling.

According to Myers-Briggs, your answers to questions like these determine your personality, which can be any one of 16 four-letter combinations. For instance, you might be an ENTJ (an extraverted, intuitive, thinking and judging personality type), or you could come out as an ISFP (an introverted, sensing, feeling and perceiving type).

Importantly, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator isn’t a test with right and wrong answers. Rather, every personality type has its own strengths and weaknesses – no type is inherently better or worse than another. People with feeling personalities, for instance, are thought to be better at empathizing with others, whereas thinking personalities are more rational problem solvers. The creators designed the indicator this way to ensure that test-takers would not worry about being regarded as inferior to others once their results were known.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is renowned for this nonjudgmental and clear framework. But people might be less enthusiastic if they knew the thoroughly unscientific roots from which this test grew.

The MBTI is based on the unscientific and unsubstantiated theories of Carl Jung.

The modern-day publishers of the MBTI, CPP, make no secret of the fact that Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers based their work on the writings of one of the most famous psychologists of the twentieth century, Carl Jung. Proponents of Myers-Briggs would have us believe that this theoretical underpinning is a mark of distinction. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find that Jung’s theories were more fiction than fact.

For much of her adult life, Katharine Briggs was interested in the idea that personality was innate, unchangeable and classifiable, believing that everyone is born with a distinct personality type. However, it was only when she read Jung’s work that her questionnaire began to take shape. Psychological Types, published in 1921, in which Jung argues that people’s souls are made up of opposing and opposite natural spirits was particularly influential.

While developing the MBTI, Katharine Briggs became obsessed with Carl Jung.

There’s no doubt Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers were inspired by the work of Carl Jung. What’s not so well known is that Carl Jung was more than an inspiration for the MBTI – he was an all-consuming personal obsession for Katharine Briggs.

During the years that she spent designing the earliest iteration of her personality questionnaire, Briggs began to revere Jung as an almost divine oracle.

Early twentieth-century society was highly receptive to Katharine Briggs’s first personality questionnaires.

After spending five years in deep contemplation of Carl Jung’s writings, Katharine Briggs turned her attention outward with a plan to bring Jung’s theories to the wider American public. This first incarnation of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was a magazine article entitled “Meet Yourself: How to Use the Personality Paintbox,” published in the New Republic in 1926.

In the article, Briggs represented each one of the 16 distinct personality types with a different color in the personality paint box. In order to meet your true self, she explained, you needed to discover which color fits you best by writing down each one of Jung’s personality types on index cards and arranging them in the order of which described you the best.

To some philosophers, the very notion of personality typing was dangerous and oppressive.

As the Second World War ravaged Europe, Isabel Myers was busy working on the personality type indicator that her mother had begun to develop twenty years earlier. In Nazi Germany, Hitler’s soldiers had begun transporting Jews to concentration camps. The practice of sorting people into groups began to mean something far more deadly.

Isabel Myers envisioned the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a benign system for helping people to better know themselves, but to a growing number of social theorists, typing people’s personalities in this way was far from harmless.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is scientifically invalid but may be useful nonetheless.

By 1980, both Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers had passed away, but their creation lives on. More than two million of us take their type indicator every year, and the MBTI is an industry worth more than two billion dollars, spanning over 20 languages and 25 countries. However, whether this is a cause for concern or celebration remains unclear.

Unsurprisingly, for many rational and scientifically minded people, it’s the former. Ultimately, the theory underpinning the MBTI has no grounding in clinical psychology. And it shows. Recent psychological studies have found that over half of all individuals who repeat the test more than once, even less than a month apart, are categorized as a different personality type the second time around. Furthermore, critics argue that the 16 different personality types are so loosely defined that each one could fit anybody.

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What is The Personality Brokers about?

The Personality Brokers (2018) explores the origins and enduring appeal of the preeminent personality test. Drawing on detailed historical research, as well as recent psychological insights, these blinks detail the origins of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and what the test can really tell us about the nature of human beings.

The Personality Brokers Review

The Personality Brokers (2018) explores the fascinating world of personality testing and its impact on our lives. Here's why this book is worth reading:

Provides an in-depth examination of the creators of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), shedding light on their motivations and the influence of their theories.
Explores the limitations and controversies surrounding the MBTI, challenging readers to critically evaluate the use and validity of personality testing.
Offers a thought-provoking perspective on the intersection of psychology, society, and the quest for self-understanding, making it a captivating read that encourages reflection.

Who should read The Personality Brokers?

Anyone interested in psychology
Those who enjoy stories about inspiring women
Sociology buffs looking for new insights into twentieth-century society

About the Author

Merve Emre is an author and an associate English professor at the University of Oxford. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker and The New Republic. She holds an MPhil and a PhD from Yale University.

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