The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. Merve Emre. New York: Doubleday, 2018. 288 pages. $27.95.
Who wants to be typed? Many, it would seem. In our politically fraught days, people can’t wait to be labelled feminist, Tea Partier, Antifa, or some other grouping that aligns them with their chosen side of history. Not long ago, such willful categorization of oneself seemed less appealing. I associate the latter half of the twentieth century with more resistance to such labels. To be publicly described as anything other than human felt like having one’s agency reduced. It meant you were not a freethinking person but rather someone who either naturally possessed or willfully adopted a static outlook. In short, it impinged upon your liberty. You might decide to take off your cool sunglasses, put out that cigarette, and completely blow everyone’s mind a minute from now. Until then, you’d like to remain secure in the belief that you can be or do anything.
There were some good reasons for this resistance, as illuminated in The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre. In the 1914 American best seller The Eugenic Marriage: A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies, Dr. William Grant Hague espouses the belief that a child’s personality is set at conception, so there’s little point in trying to improve her. As a kind of extension to this thinking, the way to a better society, according to Hague, was through “selective breeding.” If such language conjures visions of Nazi Germany and concentration camps, you’re not far from the mark. Hitler was perhaps the most famous implementer of Eugenics, and one of his lessor-known crimes against humanity was the creation of 200 Hereditary Health Courts that sterilized over 400,000 people against their will. If Americans spent the next half century wary of the idea of type, who could blame them?
Into such an environment, the mother-daughter team of Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers introduced their Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which constitutes the primary subject of Emre’s book. MBTI is an “introspective self-report questionnaire” (don’t call it a test; Americans hate those, too) that sought to reveal our psychological preferences: how we see the world, with whom we’re likely to have happy relationships, in what professions we might succeed. Despite its reductive tendencies, Americans and others have found MBTI irresistible. Some seventy years after its inception, the questionnaire is still popular in contemporary business environments, churches, school systems, dating apps. There is seemingly nothing so tantalizing as finding out one’s MBTI type. Just don’t tell us it means we’re already pretty much who we are.
Emre focuses largely on the lives of MBTI creators Myers and Briggs, both of whom had literary aspirations and Jungian obsessions that fed their mutual interest in typing people. Their created indicator, existing in various forms over the decades and consisting of dozens of questions, attempts to map “answers to the questionnaire onto a set of initials [Myers] had derived from Jung’s writings: introversion (I) and extraversion (E); intuition (also I in the initial version of the test) and sensing (S); and feeling (F) and thinking (T). To Jung’s original scheme, she added a fourth category: the judging (J) function and the perceptive (P) function.” Each participant’s answers dictate onto which side of these four binary possibilities he falls, yielding a total of sixteen initialed possibilities (for example, EIFP). Reducing the human race to sixteen personality types might seem limiting, but at the same time, who wouldn’t want to know their type? Therein lies the strange allure of MBTI and dozens of other personality assessments. They rest very close to the line between what we can and cannot tolerate about reducing human beings to type. (Some days, I’m grateful there’s still a line.)
Emre’s book expands on other twentieth-century psychology and personality theories, especially those focused on what might be described as the psychology of middle class white males. This description makes clear some of the limits of MBTI. Another is the fact that, despite the indicator’s attempt at neutrality—Myers believed MBTI has no right or wrong answers since each of the sixteen types has value to society—the entities giving the indicator (frequently corporations) very much use it to cull certain types of people (i.e. employees). Hence, a culture of “cheating” emerged, as touched on by William H. Whyte in The Organization Man. Emre writes of Whyte’s position: “If asked to take a personality test as part of a job application, one should not aim for self-discovery or honesty. One’s goal should be to project the essence of complete and total mediocrity.” Sure, creative thinkers and outgoing personalities have value in society, but not necessarily from 9 to 5. I’d bet anything there are right and wrong MBTI answers to Standard Oil executives.
While popular in the boardroom, MBTI found less success in the laboratory. Many researchers flatly disagreed with its methods, which served as a sour issue for the science-minded Myers for much of her life. Emre describes the problems with MBTI of researcher Lawrence Strickler—a nemesis of Myers after her indicator was granted a second life by Princeton’s Educational Testing Service in the 1960s: “What Isabel and her mother had done was to take a complex philosophical explanation for human subjectivity and flatten it into unrecognizable caricatures of psychological theory: the self dwindled into a four-letter acronym, the world compressed into a 4 x 4 table.” Despite MBTI’s uncanny ability to trigger recognitions just below the surface of a subject’s consciousness, that doesn’t make it good science—more of a Ouija board in the guise of science. But if getting its results prompts a successful life change—as it has for many as revealed in the book—why would you care? People have altered their existences on coin flips. Who wouldn’t trade sound science for a sincerely felt destiny?
The American rock band Bon Jovi once released a boxed set of their music entitled 100,000,000 Bon Jovi Fans Can’t Be Wrong. The same can be said for MBTI, which still nets more than two million users annually. With such impressive implementation over many decades, it’s hard to argue that the indicator has no value. It may work just as its creators intended: a method to narrow one’s understanding of oneself in a way that allows for the most happiness, success, and fulfillment. The bottom line for anything that espouses to be a tool ought to be, does it work? Even if the answer is: unfortunately, yes.
