The Personality Brokers

The Personality Brokers uncovers the true, yet un-scientific origins of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test.

The MBTI is named after it’s two creators, Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers. They were obsessed with the ideas of Carl Jung and based theirs off of his tenets.

Briggs’ obsession with the idea of fixed and classifiable personality is where the idea for the test sprouted. From the very beginning, her test came from an unscientific claim. Carol Dweck’s book Mindset teaches that our brains aren’t permanent, but changeable. Even today the test attempts to lure people into the trap of a fixed mindset.

Taking a closer look at Jung, who’s notions the meat of the test is based off of, we see a man whose theories were heavily criticized by actual psychologists. John B. Watson, a behavioral psychologist of the time, said that Jung’s approach more closely mirrored religious mysticism than any actual science. His primary reason was that Jung’s theories had no proof of validity.

In Carl Jung’s mind, however, he didn’t need evidence and refused to test his ideas against modern empirical methods. His ideas centered around assumptions rather than facts. Unfortunately, these science-deficient guesses were the basis for Brigg’s first personality test which eventually became the MBTI that we know today.

What’s really strange is the depth of Briggs’s obsession with Jung. In her mind he became like a divine oracle, even claiming that he appeared to her in a dream. At one point she began writing erotic fiction about him. Her zeal to become his disciple bordered on insanity.

So the big question now is why did the test perform so well if it had so many flaws? It was a mix of the right marketing at the right time. After five years of musing on Jung’s writings, Briggs looked toward sharing his doctrine on a wider scale. Her first version of the test, titled “Meet Yourself: How to Use the Personality Paintbox,” came out in a 1926 magazine called New Republic. Her marketing tactic combined the intrigue and novelty of a personality test with the fun of arranging index cards in a way that described an individual’s personality. Briggs didn’t realize that her methods were revolutionary. The implication of an ability to improve your life by self-discover was previously unheard of. Her efforts helped begin the era of self-help writing that is still strong today. The 1920s were the perfect time for this to start. People needed psychologists, but there weren’t enough to go around. Bringing the power of the study of the mind into people’s homes changed their lives in just the way they needed. In the past, people looked to religion for this…