The Personality Brokers
The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing
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Narrated by:
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Ellen Archer
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By:
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Merve Emre
About this listen
A New York Times critics' best book of 2018.
An Economist best book of 2018.
A Spectator best book of 2018.
A Mental Floss best book of 2018.
An unprecedented history of the personality test conceived a century ago by a mother and her daughter - fiction writers with no formal training in psychology - and how it insinuated itself into our boardrooms, classrooms, and beyond.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by Fortune 500 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language of personality types - extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving - has inspired television shows, Online dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. Yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $2 billion industry, have struggled to validate its results - no less account for its success. How did Myers-Briggs, a homegrown multiple choice questionnaire, infiltrate our workplaces, our relationships, our Internet, our lives?
First conceived in the 1920s by the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of devoted homemakers, novelists, and amateur psychoanalysts, Myers-Briggs was designed to bring the gospel of Carl Jung to the masses. But it would take on a life entirely its own, reaching from the smoke-filled boardrooms of mid-century New York to Berkeley, California, where it was administered to some of the 20th century's greatest creative minds. It would travel across the world to London, Zurich, Cape Town, Melbourne, and Tokyo, until it could be found just as easily in elementary schools, nunneries, and wellness retreats as in shadowy political consultancies and on social networks.
Drawing from original reporting and never-before-published documents, The Personality Brokers takes a critical look at the personality indicator that became a cultural icon. Along the way it examines nothing less than the definition of the self - our attempts to grasp, categorize, and quantify our personalities. Surprising and absorbing, the book, like the test at its heart, considers the timeless question: What makes you, you?
©2018 Merve Emre (P)2018 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"In this riveting, far-reaching book [Emre] brings the skills of a detective, cultural critic, historian, scientist and biographer to bear on the MBTI and the two women who invented and promoted it.... She is never condescending to or dismissive of the people who find their four-dimensional profiles illuminating and helpful. That is why, when Ms. Emre describes her book as being 'for the skeptics, the true believers, and everyone in between,' she is absolutely right." (Wall Street Journal)
“Merve Emre’s new book begins like a true-crime thriller, with the tantalizing suggestion that a number of unsettling revelations are in store.... It takes a while to realize that Emre has gotten you hooked under arguably false pretenses, but what she finally pulls off is so inventive and beguiling you can hardly begrudge her for it. The revelations she uncovers are less scandalous than they are affecting and occasionally (and delightfully) bizarre.... The Personality Brokers is history that reads like biography that reads like a novel - a fluid narrative that defies expectations and plays against type.” (New York Times)
“[A] brilliant cultural history of the personality-assessment industry.” (The Economist)
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In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist. The people he writes about have an awesome intelligence, in most cases, but that is not the secret of their success.
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Not Really Sketches
- By DAVID on 11-04-11
By: Walter Isaacson
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Butterfly in the Typewriter
- The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of a Confederacy of Dunces
- By: Cory MacLauchlin
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. In Butterfly in the Typewriter, Cory MacLauchlin draws on scores of new interviews with friends, family, and colleagues as well as full access to the extensive Toole archive at Tulane University, capturing his upbringing in New Orleans, his years in New York City, his frenzy of writing in Puerto Rico, his return to his beloved city, and his descent into paranoia and depression.
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Worth it! Good biography. Informative.
- By French Quarter on 07-09-13
By: Cory MacLauchlin
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At the Existentialist Café
- Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
- By: Sarah Bakewell
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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The Secret History of Wonder Woman
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Jill Lepore
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she has also has a secret history. Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator.
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Narration ruined it for me
- By Julia on 11-09-14
By: Jill Lepore
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The Gift of Adversity
- The Unexpected Benefits of Life's Difficulties, Setbacks, and Imperfections
- By: Norman E. Rosenthal M.D.
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The noted research psychiatrist explores how life's disappointments and difficulties provide us with the lessons we need to become better, bigger, and more resilient human beings. Adversity is an irreducible fact of life. Although we can and should learn from all experiences, both positive and negative best-selling author Dr. Norman E. Rosenthal believes that adversity is by far the best teacher most of us will ever encounter.
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Book ruined by the narrator
- By David C. on 12-07-22
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The Republic of Imagination
- America in Three Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marnò
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination.
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Love
- By Rebecca on 05-29-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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The End of Men
- And the Rise of Women
- By: Hanna Rosin
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Men have been the dominant sex since - well, the dawn of mankind. And yet, as journalist Hanna Rosin discovered, that long-held truth is no longer true. At this unprecedented moment, women are no longer merely gaining on men; they have pulled decisively ahead by almost every measure. Already "the end of men" - the phrase Rosin coined - has entered the lexicon as indelibly as Simone de Beauvoir’s "second sex", Betty Friedan’s "feminine mystique", Susan Faludi’s "backlash", and Naomi Wolf’s "beauty myth" have.
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Great book, don't care for the reader's style
- By Darren on 12-05-12
By: Hanna Rosin
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And So It Goes
- Kurt Vonnegut: A Life
- By: Charles J. Shields
- Narrated by: Fred Berman
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times best-selling author and biographer Charles J. Shields crafts this fascinating portrait of literary icon Kurt Vonnegut. The first authorized biography of the influential American writer, And So It Goes examines Vonnegut’s life, from his childhood to his death in 2007, and explores how the author changed the conversation of American literature.
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Probably only for die hard Vonnegut fans
- By Watery M on 12-22-12
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Going Clear
- Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
- By: Lawrence Wright
- Narrated by: Morton Sellers
- Length: 17 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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A clear-sighted revelation, a deep penetration into the world of Scientology by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, the now-classic study of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack. Based on more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists—both famous and less well known—and years of archival research, Lawrence Wright uses his extraordinary investigative ability to uncover for us the inner workings of the Church of Scientology.
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Shockingly Great
- By Michael on 01-27-13
By: Lawrence Wright
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Inga
- Kennedy's Great Love, Hitler's Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover's Prime Suspect
- By: Scott Farris
- Narrated by: Scott Farris
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In addition to her romance with Kennedy, Arvad married four times - including to an Egyptian prince, the brilliant filmmaker Paul Fejos, and the famed cowboy movie star Tim McCoy. She had affairs with Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the noted surgeon Dr. William Cahan, and Winston Churchill's right hand man, Baron Robert Boothby. But by all accounts her admirers among the European and American elite loved Inga not for her physical beauty, but for her joie de vivre.
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Excellent Kennedy Read
- By James P. Barraza on 04-14-17
By: Scott Farris
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Inside Scientology
- The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion
- By: Janet Reitman
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 15 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Scientology, created in 1954 by a prolific sci-fi writer named L. Ron Hubbard, claims to be the world's fastest-growing religion, with millions of members around the world and huge financial holdings. Its celebrity believers keep its profile high, and its teams of "volunteer ministers" offer aid at disaster sites such as Haiti and the World Trade Center. But Scientology is also a notably closed faith, harassing journalists and others through litigation and intimidation, even infiltrating the highest levels of government to further its goals.
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My cup of tea.
- By MWMcCabe on 08-09-11
By: Janet Reitman
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One Simple Idea
- How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life
- By: Mitch Horowitz
- Narrated by: Mitch Horowitz
- Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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From the millions-strong audiences of Oprah and The Secret to the mass-media ministries of evangelical figures like Joel Osteen and T. D. Jakes, to the motivational bestsellers and New Age seminars to the twelve-step programs and support groups of the recovery movement and to the rise of positive psychology and stress-reduction therapies, this idea - to think positively - is metaphysics morphed into mass belief. This is the biography of that belief.
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Outstanding Popular History of New Thought!
- By Robert Ready on 01-11-14
By: Mitch Horowitz
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Georgette Heyer
- Biography of a Bestseller
- By: Jennifer Kloester
- Narrated by: Phyllida Nash
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
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Georgette Heyer remains an enduring international best seller, read and loved by four generations of readers and extolled by today's best-selling authors. Despite her enormous popularity, she never gave an interview or appeared in public. Georgette Heyer wrote her first novel, The Black Moth, when she was 17 in order to amuse her convalescent brother. It was published in 1921 to instant success, and 90 years later it has never been out of print.
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Heyer as a person
- By Jerri C on 06-15-15
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A Mind at Play
- How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
- By: Rob Goodman, Jimmy Soni
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
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Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.
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I wanted more information about Information Theory
- By Bonny on 05-08-18
By: Rob Goodman, and others
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So good, I had to stop listening.
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So good, I had to stop listening.
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What listeners say about The Personality Brokers
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Gremlin
- 07-25-21
great book that pitches past the W
well reported and written, the book tears apart the mbti, but makes too broad claims about personality testing. there are reputation based clinical and nonclinical tests that, unlike the mbti, have test-retest validity, convergent validity and are psychometrically sound. the underlying gender bias and racial bias and poor psychometric properties, make it unconscionable to use the mbti for selection, assignments or anything more serious than fortune telling. it would have been interesting hear from it's corporate or organizational psychology defenders
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- Karl Indigne
- 07-06-20
Insightful especially for practitioners
Very useful and even compulsory stuff for practitioners. Respectful, honest and critical! Sorry to hear the author had to experience a zelotic instructor. But that is what is meant by the 'believers'.
It is not a religion and it is from a scientfic point of view outdated. I know that and I tell it to all people who do the test. I will not call them my subjects. Still, it is more fun than astrology or the big five test. And since it so popular in the workplace and sports you need to understand what your dealing with... and what not. And that is why I liked the research. The story was sometimes difficult to follow when new characters were introduced and I couldn't grasp their significance.
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- KellysHero718
- 03-24-19
Type This
If the obvious isn’t enough to make you question the validity of MB, this excellent book ought to seal it for you. The research is outstanding.
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- My Best Life Ever
- 09-15-18
Loved Myers-Briggs Already - Wonderful Backstory
I've taken a life long interest in studying Personality Types. This book is a heart warmer, told romantically. A great choice for those who are attracted to the raising of children, homeschooling. This is the progression of Katharine Cook Briggs' natural interest in her family and children, observational learning of the neighborhood children, and keeping written accounts of all (not just her own). And it blew up from there. I was sympathetic to Briggs' inability to untie the apron strings to her adult daughter, Isabel Myers, yet she had raised her so well that the daughter was not desperate for her approval. I loved that no man could measure up to the ability of the matriarch of the 1900s to speak parenting so fluently as did Mother Briggs. The author portrayed both Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers as a couple of intense ladies and I loved the depiction. Both of their husbands seemed largely supportive of them through their crazy journey. This book could make a great movie, with Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Hitler, Jean Piaget, John F. Kennedy, Nixon and the BFF of Isabel in her senior years making their appearances in this story. I'm inspired by the lives of these two women. Narration is excellent.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Marvin Young
- 06-19-20
A deep dive into the history of type indicators
Great book. Very historical and introspective look on type indicators, and their future in society.
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- NMwritergal
- 09-19-18
INTJ says...
Oh, how sad to know that the Meyers-Briggs was invented by a religious nut case and her equally crazy daughter.
When I took the test when I was 17, it changed my life. I wasn't a circus freak! It's just that I was one percent of the population. It described me so well. And it hasn't changed over all these decades.
I'm not sure what to make of test now, considering all I learned in this book, which was really quite interesting and detailed.
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5 people found this helpful
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- James McCroan
- 12-18-18
I'm still a believer! Fascinating story!!
What an incredible story! Mother and daughter biography with American history and psychology all intertwined! a very good read/listen
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1 person found this helpful
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- Qats reads
- 05-19-24
Provocative
Surprisingly objective story behind MBTI creators and a social and historical context of its development. Enabled me to trace a 50 year association with the instrument and why it can be found in so many religious, industrial, and professional settings. It’s resilience over the years to help people consider how to live together productively is it’s main function, though the mother and daughter adherence to a white woman’s place in society was startling And off putting. Yet their powerful tool works to get all types of people around the table. Very thought provoking and recommended to users and adherents.
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- Sabrina
- 09-14-18
A biography that reads like a novel.
The book’s title ‘Personality Brokers’ was likely designed to target the U.S. market. It goes by the understated ‘What’s Your Type’ in the U.K. One might glean from reading the various online articles that the book would be a scathing, condescending view of the women. That’s hardly the case. The author does an excellent job of SHOWING how this mother-daughter team paved the way for the people who downplayed or tried to diminish their contribution to typology.
A few notes and mild spoilers:
Methodology: Katherine’s so called ‘non-scientific’ methods were sound. The author describes the details of her ethnographic record-keeping and the painstaking process Isabel faced trying to validate the instrument using the psychometric methods demanded of her. Most research using the MBTI shows statistically significant correlations between the dichotomies versus the MBTI type. Not looking to debate this point or get into a diatribe about cognitive functions. I just find it interesting that for all of the stress they put her through, this fact wasn’t enough. The BIG 5/NEO are similar with the added element of conscientiousness. Makes me wonder what was REALLY up.
Racism: There were some racial overtones in the instrument’s’ development. There was (is) a perception (by some) that people of color (darker races) were all Se. This actually comes from some of Jung’s early work. One of the researchers (not Myers or Briggs) actually makes a comment in a study that occurred when they had the opportunity to test a large African American population. “I hope they are all sensors”. CAPT keeps their stats online which shows no one has a monopoly on the NT temperament. This was something that was later acknowledged by Jung, all types can be found in all races/cultures but there may be some values that are held in higher esteem and therefore fostered for the good of the group. Isabel also wrote a book where a group of family members entered a suicide pact when they are lead to believe they have ‘negro’ blood. Without reading it, I would not assume that she’s advocating that mindset. My guess is that she was exposing the level of hate it would take to commit suicide to prevent “spreading those genes.” The book is not in publication.
Sexism: They were the equivalent of women in STEM today but the mindset of their time. They persevered.
Mysticism: There were elements of religion interspersed in the theory and it’s held that the initial goal of Katherine was to help people find their rightful roles to produce a better society.
Classism: They were middle/upper middle class women of their time oblivious to the plights of the lower classes. However they had their own demons. Both women lost children, experienced marital problems and felt the pull of wanting to pursue creative endeavors yet meet societal expectations of women of the time.
The author (and narrator) keep you captivated to the end.
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- 11-11-18
A great read on what could have been a dull subject
This biography reads like a novel and probably because it portrays with honesty the fallibility of human condition and even of those who dedicated their lives to help us capitalize on our strengths. Surprisingly, the author -and perhaps unintentionally- manages to somehow validate the relevance of the MBTI and not because of its scientific rigor, but because it opens the door to inquiry.
#biography #typology #TagsGiving #sweepstakes
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