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What’s Your Type? The Myers-Briggs Test and the Rise of the Personality Quiz - The Ringer
A new book by Merve Emre examines the history of the test and the never-ending quest to understand ourselves through data
In 1943, a failed mystery novelist named Isabel Briggs Myers started a career in the new field of personality testing. “The more you know about what a man is like, the more effectively you can work with him or under him, or assign him the right job,” Myers wrote to Edward Hay, a Philadelphia-based HR specialist who administered employee aptitude testing for companies. Hay offered finger dexterity tests for entry-level clerks and questionnaires about union attitudes for potential supervisors. Myers had something far more radical in mind, a schema to unearth a person’s true character called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which offers a questionnaire that divides test-takers into 16 different possible personality types based on the results. There were no bad personality types, only bad combinations of personality type and employment. “If men came like shoes,” she wrote, “with the most vital data as to size and style marked outside the box, many a cramping fit could be avoided.” In Myers’s vision of a capitalist utopia, everyone would whistle while they worked.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is simple, a 93-question forced-choice test, loosely based on personality types outlined by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung in his 1921 book Psychological Types. The MBTI splits people into four dichotomies: introverted (I) or extroverted (E); intuitive (N) or sensory (S); thinking (T) or feeling (F); judging (J) or perceiving (P). An ENTJ is meant to be a sociable, rational high achiever, while an ISFP is supposed to be supportive and practical. According to Myers, these types were the key to revolutionizing industry. By pairing employees with the right tasks and employers, she would create a more harmonious world.
A new book by Merve Emre examines the history of the test and the never-ending quest to understand ourselves through data
In 1943, a failed mystery novelist named Isabel Briggs Myers started a career in the new field of personality testing. “The more you know about what a man is like, the more effectively you can work with him or under him, or assign him the right job,” Myers wrote to Edward Hay, a Philadelphia-based HR specialist who administered employee aptitude testing for companies. Hay offered finger dexterity tests for entry-level clerks and questionnaires about union attitudes for potential supervisors. Myers had something far more radical in mind, a schema to unearth a person’s true character called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which offers a questionnaire that divides test-takers into 16 different possible personality types based on the results. There were no bad personality types, only bad combinations of personality type and employment. “If men came like shoes,” she wrote, “with the most vital data as to size and style marked outside the box, many a cramping fit could be avoided.” In Myers’s vision of a capitalist utopia, everyone would whistle while they worked.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is simple, a 93-question forced-choice test, loosely based on personality types outlined by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung in his 1921 book Psychological Types. The MBTI splits people into four dichotomies: introverted (I) or extroverted (E); intuitive (N) or sensory (S); thinking (T) or feeling (F); judging (J) or perceiving (P). An ENTJ is meant to be a sociable, rational high achiever, while an ISFP is supposed to be supportive and practical. According to Myers, these types were the key to revolutionizing industry. By pairing employees with the right tasks and employers, she would create a more harmonious world.