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When Katharine Briggs – a mother and a housewife – started what she called a "cosmic baby training lab" in her Michigan living room in the early 1900s, she was unaware that she was preparing what which would one day become a million dollar industry. Briggs was only 14 when she went to college and eventually graduated first in her class, says author Merve Emre. She married the man who graduated right behind her at number 2 – and while he had become a scientist, she had to take care of the house.
"This incredibly educated woman – who was never supposed to do anything other than being a woman and a mother – wanted to understand how to take on these roles and professionalize them," says Emre. "She wanted to understand how she could do something in her home that would be as rigorous and as important as what everyone thought her husband was doing in his lab."
So, Briggs started studying kids and, along with his daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, created what became known as the Myers-Briggs type indicator. The test is a series of questions designed to reveal the basic personality type of a person: Are you extroverted or introverted? Sensing or intuitive? Think or feel? Judge or collect? The intersection of these traits reveals one of the 16 "types" of different personalities.
The test did not continue scientifically, but during the second half of the 20th century, the "Sorting of People" questionnaire was widely adopted by large corporations, the US government and culture as a whole. Emre traces the origins of the test in his new book Personality brokers.
Highlights of the interview
On the design of the first tests
What she started doing was bringing the neighborhood kids home and testing their personalities. She wanted to help them design educational programs that would help them realize themselves. So she started by giving their parents a questionnaire – a forced choice questionnaire, which meant that there were only two answers, A or B, and you had to choose one.
They asked parents questions like: Is your child calm or impulsive? Does he get angry very often or rarely? Does he sleep in bed at night or sleep alone? And from these questionnaires, she designed her first set of different types of child personality – this is the origin of the Myers-Briggs type indicator as we know it. aujourd & # 39; hui.
On Briggs discovering the work of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung
She spends much of her adult life caring for children – her own and others – that when her only daughter Isabel goes to school, she falls into this deep depression because She does not know what to do with her life. And it is during this depression that she reads for the first time Psychological types and becomes absolutely devoted to her. … it matches with him where she asks him to say what he means by "intuitive" or what he means by "feel" – and how she can take these somewhat abstract categories that he has designed and used to really help the people in his life to understand what kind they are and how to be the best kind of person possible.
How Briggs' ideas evolved into a "sorting people" test
For [Katharine] it was really a spiritual quest. She was a deeply religious woman and she believed that the only way to truly save her soul was to know who you were and live her best version.
Isabel, his daughter, inherits a little later from this type of language, throughout the Second World War. Isabel thinks of the kind of language she has heard from her mother for 20 years and she thinks: What if I could design a questionnaire that would help people find the jobs that suit them best? I could do it using this type of language that would not separate people into "normal" or "abnormal", "good" or "bad" worker categories, but would simply say that each type of person is different and that each type is different. has different strengths and weaknesses, and is better at doing certain things than others. It is there that Katharine-obsessed Jungian theories have become this practical instrument of what Isabel calls "sorting people".
On how the "sorting of people" has gradually become a huge industry – the Bureau of Strategic Services was the first to buy the test and used it during the Second World War to match secret agents with secret missions.
You see that kind of land in the government. … In the late 1950s, it was bought by universities like Berkeley and Swarthmore, who are trying to figure out how to use personality tests in their admissions process. Slowly, over time, it circulates in wellness centers, hospitals, clergy – and slips into all the major institutions that shape our lives.
Where it really takes off, it's in business. After the death of Isabel Briggs Myers in the 1980s … one of the things you see in business is a new effort to help workers understand how to love what they do. House. And I think that the type indicator appears to be an extremely useful tool to convince people that they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do – and that they have to engage freely and voluntarily in their work.
Why are people attracted to the test, even if it does not resist scientifically?
What makes the MBTI so attractive and so attractive is that it offers us a very simple and nonjudgmental language. He offers us a vocabulary to talk about who we are and what our desires are and it does not give us the impression that we have to apologize for those desires. I think that there is just a real hunger for self-knowledge, especially in times of great transition. I do not think it's a coincidence that most people who meet the indicator meet him for the first time in couple counseling, when they start working, when they are trying to decide whether or not they want to leave a job or not, when they go to college. …
Katharine Briggs thought of this as a parenting tool, you know? These are moments when our lives take on a kind of disorder and we just want something to anchor us in those moments of complexity or confusion. I think the language of the type can enormously clarify. Although I am skeptical of its validity and I am skeptical about its social uses and even the language used, I am do not Skeptical about the individual experiences of individuals with the indicator that, in my opinion, can be extremely liberating.
On the idea of the type being immutable
I think it's a very comforting fiction that is offered to people. On the one hand, believe that there is something innate or essential about who you are means that you do not have to apologize for who you are – this just East who are you. I think many of us are growing up – or at least I did – thinking that what I was was the sum total of what I had accomplished. I think it really takes you away from this language of accomplishment towards a language of oneself. … I think this can be an incredibly comforting fantasy and that, on the positive side, can give you the impression of being the master and arbiter of your own destiny. You can live life according to who you are and your own conditions not according to anyone. On the other hand, I think it can make you feel that you do not have to take the responsibility to change.
What would Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers think about how the MBTI is used now
Katharine would have been dismayed. In fact, she was never a fan of Isabel who turned her theory of types into questionnaires. She believed that she had spent a large part of her life studying Jung and that the only way to type someone was to be initiated to her thinking over a very long time. She was skeptical about the questionnaire from the start.
I think Isabel Briggs Myers would also be very disappointed and I think it would have been very sad to see how people could take on-line versions, how quizzes like BuzzFeed parody the logic of the type, in asking you Taylor Swift's song reveals something about which friends character that you could be. "And I think she would be very disappointed by the way the indicator was allowed to circulate freely and unregulated.
Gemma Watters and Natalie Winston produced and edited this interview for the broadcast. Beth Novey has adapted it for the Web.
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