Today, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is one of hundreds of assessments that people use to think about themselves in new, if not entirely serious ways. The MBTI was developed by a mother and daughter with no formal training in psychology or statistics, Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. However, they believed that their experiences as mothers and wives taught them about the innate power of personality types. “But in the mid-20^th century, businesses used it as a powerful tool in hiring and management, changing the trajectories of many workers’ lives.” What business executives didn’t realize then was how arbitrary the “science” of the MBTI was.

In “The Capitalist Origins of the Myers-Briggs Personality Test,” Merve Emre said Katherine Briggs always had an interest in personality. She became a minor celebrity from writing parenting columns in the 1920s about how she educated her daughter Isabel. But when Isabel left for college, Katherine fell into a serious depression. Then Katherine discovered the writings of Carl Jung. After reading his book, Psychological Types, she burned the book she had begun to write on personality. Jung became her “savior” and the “author of her life.”

She developed a way of categorizing personalities by using Jung’s theory of psychological types: introversion/extraversion, intuition/sensing, feeling/thinking. To these three dichotomies she added perception/judging. Katherine’s system never caught on until her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers developed an “indicator” after reading a Readers’ Digest article on personality testing in 1941 and wondered if she could develop one with no good or bad types; without judgment or criticism. In 1943 she sold the MBTI to Edward Hay and became a part time employee of Hay and Associates. Hay was one of the first personnel consultants in the U.S.

With the rise of the labor force during and after World War II, newly established consultancies like Hay’s were warming to the idea of using cheap, standardized tests to fit workers to the jobs that were “right for them,” a match made under the watchful eyes of executives eager to keep both profits and morale high.

At the end of World War II interest in the MBTI began to accelerate. Isabel started to pick up accounts that began to double and even triple in size from their initial order. She took large orders from colleges, government bureaus and pharmaceutical companies. Some of her early clients included: Swarthmore College, the National Bureau of Standards, Bell Telephone and the First National Bank of Boston. “By the mid 1950s, Isabel’s clients were the largest utilities and insurance companies in the United States.”

It was through a client of Hay and Associates that she met Oliver Ohmann, an assistant to the vice president of the Standard Oil Company and head of its industrial relations department. Ohmann was a strong conceptual ally of Isabel and he purchased the MBTI from Hay in 1949. Ohmann thought it offered the perfect solution for “introducing people to their true selves and convincing them that the work they were doing was a natural extension of how God had created them.” Ohmann told Hay and Isabel that the MBTI in its primordial form was a bargain struck between God and mammon—“the ideal marriage of ‘higher and more enduring spiritual values’ to the material realities of work.”

But Isabel did not share Ohmann’s vision when it came to type’s spiritual reach. She did not think the benefits of knowing one’s type accrued to all workers equally. She discouraged companies from spending too much money evaluating their workers if they employed mainly unskilled laborers. She said, “The type differences show principally in the more intelligent and highly developed half of the population.” Company executives revealed a high degree of type development while blue-collar workers were the weakest type, their personalities falling “in the no-man’s-land between the indicator’s dichotomies.”

Of course, there existed no controlled study, and thus no real evidence, to validate Isabel’s belief in the inverse relationship between intelligence and the strength of one’s type preferences. But as was the case for the most famous test of the 1940s, the intelligence quotient (IQ) test, evidence mattered less than the indicator’s ability to justify as “natural” or “normal” the divisions that already existed in the world; a world where wealthier, whiter, and more upwardly mobile men were decreed more self-aware than everyone else. It did not occur to anyone, even Isabel, as unusual that the strongest preferences were always expressed by successful, self-assured men with ready access to power. Often it was these men who paid her to manage the personnel dilemmas they found unsavory or tedious. Hiring, firing, promotion, and attrition were all easier to talk about when employers were shielded from the lives of their employees by the abstract, pseudoscientific language of type.

Sometimes subjects she tested and then retested seemed to change their type overnight. “Thinkers became feelers, judgers became perceivers.” From rereading Psychological Types, Isabel discovered this was a phenomenon called “enantidromia.” Jung defined enantidromia as “The emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.” She was confident that the inability of the MBTI to be validated—to produce consistent results for test subjects over time—was based in Jungian psychology.

The Fantasy of the X-Rays of Personality

Sociologist William Whyte became alarmed as corporations were increasingly seen as the answer to post-WW II life with their introduction of new technologies such as television, the availability of affordable cars, and space travel. He was concerned that the American belief in the perfectibility of society was shifting from that of individual initiative to one that could be achieved at the expense of the individual. So, he wrote The Organization Man, which quickly became a bestseller. Inside was an appendix titled, “How to Cheat on Personality Tests.”

Whyte’s belief was that the more a test insisted it was for the individual, and that it promoted objective self-discovery, it hid the total integration of the individual within the organization’s culture. Whyte believed personality tests were tests of potential loyalty. Neither the questions nor the evaluation of them were neutral. They were loaded with organizational values and set a yardstick that rewards the conformist at the expense of the nonconformist person, “without whom no society, organization or otherwise, can flourish.” Whyte encouraged his readers to develop a test-taking persona—a hybrid of your true self, the values of the test maker and the values of the company.

Personality tests spoke for more than just an individual person or company; they represented an emergent culture of white-collar work. Isabel’s language of type helped give rise to a new spirit of capitalism: one in which the worker would be matched to the job that was divinely right for him. The job that would permit him to do his best and most creative work, afford him the greatest sense of personal satisfaction, endear him to his bosses and colleagues, and this encouraged him to lodge his sense of self even deeper into his nine-to-five occupation.

That spirit is alive today in the MBTI and other tools used by corporations and organizations to “Support your personal well-being and professional performance goals by providing you with a deeper understanding of what makes you you.” The Myers-Briggs Company said the MBTI is one of the world’s most popular personality tools because it works. It is used by 88% of Fortune 500 companies in 115 countries, and is available in 29 languages. “It has become the go-to framework for people development globally.” It claims to have helped thousands of organizations and millions of people around the world “improve how they communicate, learn, and work.”

Yet the popularity of the MBTI has waned with what is called the “Big Five,” the five-factor model (FFM) set of personality traits derived from a statistical study of words commonly used to describe psychological characteristics across cultures and languages. The categories are: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The FFM is an open-source data set and has several assessment tools derived from it, including the NEO Personality Inventory, developed by two of the creators of the five-factor model. “Unlike the MBTI, assessments based on the Big Five can reliably predict job performance, studies show.”

Examples of other modern personality tests include: the Rorschach inkblot test, the Thematic Apperception test, the MMPI or Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, the DISC assessment, the Predictive Index, StrengthFinders 2.0, the Birkman Method, and various kinds of the Five Factor Model (FFM).

In The Cult of Personality Testing, Anne Murphy Paul said since the early days of personality tests, they have been referred to as x-rays of personality. “And yet this metaphor had never been more than an alluring fantasy, or perhaps a willful delusion.” The reality is personality tests cannot even begin to capture the complexities of human beings. They cannot predict how we will act in particular roles or situations. They cannot predict how we will change over time. Many tests, like the MMPI, look for and find dysfunction rather than health and strength.

Many others fail to meet basic scientific standards of validity and reliability. The consequences of these failures are real. Our society is making crucial decisions—whether a parent should receive custody of a child, whether a worker should be offered a job, whether a student should be admitted to a school or special program—on the basis of deeply flawed information. If these tests serve anyone well, it is not individuals but institutions, which purchase efficiency and convenience at the price of our privacy and dignity. Personality tests do their dirty work, asking intrusive questions and assigning limiting labels, providing an ostensibly objective rationale to which testers can point with an apologetic shrug.

Perhaps the most insidious effect of personality testing, according to Paul, is its influence on the way we understand others and even ourselves. “The tests substitute a tidy abstraction for a real, rumpled human being, a sterile idea for a flesh-and-blood individual.” While these formularies are easier to understand than actual people, Ultimately, they only diminish our recognition and appreciation of the other’s full humanity.

For more on the MBTI and personality testing, see “Pseudoscience of the MBTI and Personality Testing, Part 1.”

In 1849, a young man arrived at the offices of Fowler & Wells in lower Manhattan. He was there to have the bumps on his skull measured in order to determine his personality traits. The man paid three dollars and sat still as Lorenzo Fowler began running his fingers over his head. A stenographer recorded every word Fowler pronounced during his reading. The young man was Walt Whitman and the procedure he submitted to was known as phrenology.

Phrenology is a process that entails observing and/or feeling a person’s skull for enlargements or indentations to determine their psychological attributes. “From absolute and relative sizes of the skull the phrenologist would assess the character and temperament of the patient. . . Phrenologists believed the head revealed natural tendencies but not absolute limitations of strengths of character.” While it was seen as a science and even had an influence on psychiatry and psychology in the 1800s, phrenology has been long recognized as a pseudoscience.

In The Cult of Personality Testing, Anne Murphy Paul observed that humans have long searched for some way to make sense out of “the unruly variety of our own natures.” In Whitman’s time phrenology was seen as a scientific answer to a problem that had unsuccessfully tried many previous ways to make sense of human nature. Today, these solutions, like phrenology, seem utterly implausible to most people. However, at the time they served a deeply ‘felt need’ of people.

They allow predictions to be made and advice to be dispensed. They permit swift judgments about strangers. They authorize the assignment of individuals, ourselves included, to the comforting confines of a group. They often justify social arrangements as they are, extending a reassuring (to some) sense of stability. Most important, they explain why we are the way we are.

The earliest such system was astrology, which is the idea that the order of the stars and planets at the time of our birth give a suggestion of the person we will become. Hippocrates (460 BC to 370 BC) developed the humoral system of medicine, believing that certain moods and emotions were caused by an excess of body fluids, called humors. These fluids were: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Galen (129 AD to 216 AD) claimed the balance of the humors determined our typical mood or temperament. He named four temperamental categories: sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic. A gloomy melancholic had an excess of black bile; a sluggish phlegmatic had an excess of phlegm; and an irritable choleric, of yellow bile.

Modern science has rejected the theories of the four temperaments. Nevertheless, the Christian author Tim LaHaye attempted to resurrect the temperament personality theory in a series of books like The Spirit-Controlled Temperament, which was originally published in 1966. Today there are many personality tests, some of which are clinical instruments administered and interpreted by psychologists and other trained personnel. There are also many online “personality tests” constructed to help you discover things such as which Star Wars character you are like.

Briggs, Myers and the Birth of Personality Testing

In The Personality Brokers, Merve Emre noted how days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor Isabel Myers gathered her mother’s preliminary materials on personality typing together. She had just read a Reader’s Digest article on personality testing that showed her how she could use her mother’s work to develop a personality test. She learned there were hundreds of personality tests classifying workers as normal or abnormal. This distinction helped employers avoid assigning an anxious worker or a depressed person to a high-pressure job. A growing industry of hundreds of consulting firms administering these tests also provided employers a means of protecting themselves from resentful employees because employers could say their management decisions were based upon the tests.

But Myers wondered what would happen “if she could design a test that generated only positive results?” She thought she would call it an “indicator,” not a test. Her instrument would provide information about the individual’s personality without judgment or criticism. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was born. Today it is given to two million people a year. Nearly all the Fortune 500 companies and U.S. colleges and universities, the army, the navy, community centers and churches continue to use the type indicator and defend its credibility to answer fundamental questions such as: What is a personality? Who am I?

Katherine Briggs had been developing and writing a book on her personal theory of types when she first read Carl Jung’s book Psychological Types in 1923.  So awe-struck was she by Jung’s type theory that she set aside her notes and book, eventually burning them. Around that time, Jung appeared to her in a dream. “Dr. Jung symbolized a psychological reality—something within me, something that actually has called upon me!” She spent the next five years trying to understand how Jung’s dichotomies (i.e., introvert-extravert) explained the various aspects of her life. Jung became her ‘personal God’ who walked in the world beyond the conscious world, where “the unknown, shapeless material of the mind flowed in dreams and fantasies.”

For five years, five of the most exciting and interesting years of my life, friends laughingly referred to Jung’s Types as my Bible . . . And indeed I did use it much as my father and mother used the Good Book—as a means of salvation—always understanding my life a little better because of what I read, and my reading a little better because of what I lived.

The American psychologist John B. Watson, who popularized the theory of behaviorism, wrote a review of Jung’s Psychological Types. He said the book sought to reinstate the psychoanalyst as a spiritual healer, “a god among mortals.” In his attempt to do so, Jung invented the opaque notions of “type” and type pairs,” suggesting that the souls of humans could be classified along three binaries: extraverted and introverted types, intuitive and sensing types, and thinking and feeling types. Watson dismissed Jung’s types as nonsense; a metaphysical ruse that defied serious critique because it was so flimsy.

Watson claimed he could not critique Jung’s psychology. It was what a “religious mystic” would write in order to justify certain factors his training forced him to believe existed. Watson thought Psychological Types was borne of “unproven assumptions about inborn dispositions and inherited constitutions.” He concluded Psychological Types offered no tools for the scientific study of personality.

Jung himself did not believe his conjectures in type theory could be validated by modern science. He thought objective psychology could only go a little way toward giving an adequate picture of the human soul. And yet, the MBTI is still in use and popular in corporate America. Despite the popularity of the Myers-Briggs, it is regularly criticized by psychologists as unscientific, meaningless or bogus.

“How Accurate Is the Myers-Briggs Personality Test?”  said the main problem psychologists have with the MBTI is its lack of scientific support. Adam Grant, a University of Pennsylvania professor of psychology, said in social science there are four standards: Are the categories reliable, valid, independent and comprehensive? “For the MBTI, the evidence says not very, no, no, and not really.” Some research indicates the MBTI is unreliable because the same person can get different results when they retake the test. Other studies question its validity, and the ability of the MBTI to link “types” to real world outcomes—such as how well certain types will perform in a given job.

There are some additional limitations of the test resulting from the conceptual design of the MBTI. Personality “types” are treated as black-and-white, categorical variables, placing the person into distinct groups. You are either an extravert or introvert. But people don’t fall neatly into categories on any personality dimension; there are many different degrees within a dimension. Personality is on a continuum—a continuous sequence whose adjacent elements are not noticeably different from each other, while the extremes are quite distinct. Most people are closer to the average measure of a dimension, with relatively few individuals at either extreme. Placing people in categorical boxes separates individuals who are in reality more like each other than they are different.

Another shortcoming comes from the complex, messy nature of human personality. “Neat categories of MBTI make personality look clearer and more stable than it really is.” Finally, the MBTI is missing additional nuances by assessing only four aspects of personality differences. Michael Ashton, a professor of psychology said, “Several decades ago, personality researchers had determined that there were at least five major personality dimensions, and more recent evidence has shown that there are six.”

We’ll take a look in Part 2 of this article at what personality researchers believe the MBTI missed and reflect on how personality tests can lead to the miseducation of children, the mismanagement of companies and the misunderstanding of ourselves.