The Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (personality test)

The Myer-Briggs Type Indicator (personality test)

How is it that the world’s most popular personality test could have been created by two women who had no formal training in psychology, statistics, or psychometrics? The story of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, its creation, and its rise to popularity is a remarkable one, and a testament to the determination of its creators: Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs.  Free Test at:www.free-career-test.com

Katharine and Isabel lived in an era when women were not encouraged to develop their minds, and a traditional career path for a woman was nearly out of the question.

They were devoted wives and mothers, but they were also highly intelligent, independent, and curious women who needed an intellectual outlet. When they weren’t tending their homes and families, they read, wrote, and studied a wide variety of topics, including the subject that would eventually make them famous: the theory of personality types.

Although Katharine and Isabel sometimes struggled to have their work taken seriously–whether because of their gender or their lack of formal credentials–their theories of personality type have come to define the way we think about people and the differences between them.

The Birth of a Theory

The family’s interest in personality type began with Katharine Briggs, an educated and intellectual woman who had a lifelong love affair with knowledge.

Katharine came of age in the Victorian era, when it was believed that too much education could harm a woman’s reproductive capability. Fortunately for bookish Katharine, she came from a family of academics who believed in the value of education for women and men alike. She earned a degree in agriculture and worked as a teacher, and after college married a physicist, Lyman Briggs.

Katharine Cook Briggs

Katharine was an avid reader and writer. One room of her home was designated her study, where she wrote articles and essays on child-rearing and education.

As she cared for her only daughter, Isabel, she formulated strong opinions on the proper methods for raising children. She believed children were innately curious and that education should foster their natural instinct to learn. After a brief and unsatisfying encounter with traditional schooling, she brought Isabel home to educate her daughter herself, and encouraged her to spend long hours reading and writing on whatever topics interested her.

Katharine was also an aspiring fiction writer, and this is where her interest in personality types was born. She wanted to discover the fundamentals of personality and behavior, so that she might create better characters for her stories.

Katharine’s interest in personality types intensified when Isabel entered college and met the man she would marry, Clarence “Chief” Myers. Katharine felt that Chief was different from the rest of the family, and turned to her study of personality types in an attempt to quantify what that difference might be. This was a crucial endeavor for Katharine, as she sensed that her ability to appreciate Chief was essential to her continued closeness with her daughter. Rather than judge or reject Chief, she set out to understand him.

Dr. Carl Jung

Katharine’s search for a definitive theory of personality type continued over many years, and led her to study the works of philosophers, psychologists, and scientists. She found no unifying theory of type in her studies, and eventually she began to formulate her own. However, in 1923, she read C.G. Jung’s Psychological Types and found the system she was looking for. The text described personality type in a way that she found definitive and complete, and she abandoned her own attempts at creating a theory of personality in favor of studying Jung’s work.

Katharine contacted Dr. Jung personally, corresponding with him over several years and even meeting him when he visited the United States. He provided her with additional notes on his work in the field, and she consulted with him in the application of his theories. At the same time, she began to use Jung’s theories in her writing. She composed a novel incorporating the concepts of personality type, and wrote an article for the New Republic magazine which explained to readers how they might attempt to classify themselves and the people around them.

While Katharine pursued her studies, Isabel was keeping busy as a wife and mother. She and her husband Chief had two children, and Isabel plunged herself enthusiastically into the task of raising them well. What time she had left over was occupied with her own interest in writing.

After winning a mystery-novel contest, Isabel enjoyed some success as a writer of novels, short stories, and plays. During these years, Katharine tried to interest Isabel in type theory, without much success.

Isabel’s Indicator

Things began to shift in the early 1940’s, as Isabel’s children grew older. She felt compelled to help with the war effort, but the usual volunteer activities did not challenge her intellect. Her search for a meaningful contribution took a turn when she read a magazine article describing the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale, a psychological test designed to place people in the appropriate type of work for their character. She wrote excitedly to her mother, expressing her desire to become involved in the task of allocating workers to the right niche within the labor force.

Isabel Briggs Myers

Isabel sought out a position within a personnel department which was already using the Humm-Wadsworth on their staff. She learned to score it and gathered empirical data on its effectiveness, but was disappointed when her data showed that the instrument was not a useful predictor of job performance. She discussed the problem with her mother Katharine, who proposed an alternative: to develop a new assessment, based on the theories of personality type that she had been studying for so many years.

With her children now in college, Isabel threw herself into the project of creating this “people-sorting” tool. Her mother contributed the enormous amount of knowledge she had amassed over decades of study, and Isabel went to work creating a questionnaire that could effectively sort people into personality types.

Isabel wrote hundreds of questions, testing and re-testing them with people she knew and meticulously collecting data. Eventually, she selected 172 questions which she determined were the most effective at sorting people into personality types. These composed Form A of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator.