‘What’s Your Type?: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing’, by Merve Emre.
What’s it about:
How the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (not a test!!) came to be developed by a mother-daughter team in the early-mid 20the century.
What Lynn learned:
Obv the strange history.
I like how the test results seem to be consistent over time, yet chanting, ‘Type never changes’ at the research centre that is the guardian of the test seems rather much.
Katherine was an advocate of ‘baby training’ so people did not grow up to be ‘slow’ or ‘average’ (p. 13) and she was one of ‘America’s most influential sources of parenting advice’ (p. 16).
There was recognition of the value of ‘women’s work’ dating back to 1914 – why has its value taken so long to be realised!
There is a rather sinister side to testing which uses it as a way of ‘checking upon people’ with it being most popular with ‘self-assured men with ready access to power’, rather reinforcing inequalities.
In assessments for jobs, don’t be yourself, ‘One’s goal should be to project the essence of complete and total mediocrity’. Well, be yourself if you are average (p. 171).
Creativity is not a novel skill to be used in the workplace – it’s value was seen in the protection of Soviet Threat in 1950’s/60.
Fave quotes:
‘type performs an insidious slight of hand. It convinces people of their status as rounded and exceptional beings. Yet, it does so by flattening behavior into a static, predetermined set of traits’ (p. xvi)
Quoting Isabel’s suitor’s letter, ‘She has character, personality, brains, imagination (exact, piercing, subtle – yet unromantic, and very real and practical). She’s not an ethereal dream creature, but a very real and useful person’ (p. 26)
To her eager classmates, Isabel presented a smile as a commodity: a good that could be manufactured, bought, and sold’ (p. 30).
‘Meeting yourself… could be a profoundly lonely endeavour. As it liberated you, so too did it sever the bonds you had established with other people, other ways of living and loving life’ (p. 82)
‘there exists some necessary trade-odd between genius and grace’ (p. 189).
Why relevant right now:
The assessment is still widely used (a lot by me) whether in dating or jobs and this gives insight to the history that the 4-letter acronym is connected to.
Interest factor: 2/5
Coffee table cred: 2/5
Ignorance of external world while reading: 3/5
Book cover design: 4/5
Help the existential crisis: 2.5/5
