bjorn2bwild
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Debuting in 1943, the MBTI - Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world.
Many if not most here are familiar with the ‘test’, yet what do you know about the secretive, Jung channeling, co-creators - mystery writer Isabel Meyers-Briggs and her mother Katherine Cook Briggs? This interesting, not exactly favorable, and very long piece uncovers the story. For the impatient or time constrained ‘type’ (not that there is anything wrong with that) I have included a second link to a shorter synopsis.
Who Was Isabel Briggs Myers? -- Science of Us
Many if not most here are familiar with the ‘test’, yet what do you know about the secretive, Jung channeling, co-creators - mystery writer Isabel Meyers-Briggs and her mother Katherine Cook Briggs? This interesting, not exactly favorable, and very long piece uncovers the story. For the impatient or time constrained ‘type’ (not that there is anything wrong with that) I have included a second link to a shorter synopsis.
Yet though her creation is everywhere, Myers and the details of her life's work are curiously absent from the public record. Not a single independent biography is in print today. Not one article details how Myers, an award-winning mystery writer who possessed no formal training in psychology or sociology, concocted a test routinely deployed by 89 of the Fortune 100 companies, the US government, hundreds of universities, and online dating sites like Perfect Match, Project Evolove and Type Tango............
Its populism is most clearly demonstrated by MBTI's astonishing geographic reach: Last year, two million people took the test, in seventy different countries, and in 21 languages.
.......one in five of the Fortune 1000 companies uses personality testing to screen job candidates. I have heard bemused stories of how applicants to elite, cultish hedge funds and Silicon Valley startups are asked to take a Myers-Briggs test early in their job searches, only to be weeded out as unfavorable candidates based on their type.
Across all languages and continents, however, the first rule of speaking type remains the same. You do not, under any circumstances, refer to MBTI as a "test." It is a "self-reporting instrument" or, more succinctly, an "indicator." "People use the word 'test' all the time," Barb complains. "But what you're taking is an indicator............
Each test costs $49.95 per person, more if you want a full breakdown of your type, and even more if you want an MBTI-certified consultant to debrief your type with you. No one questions the sheer ingenuity of this sales scheme. We are paying $1,695 to attend a course that authorizes us to recruit others to buy a product — a product which tells us nothing more than what we already know about ourselves.
......and repeat this mantra — "Type Never Changes" — to our future clients. "We will brand this into your brain," she vows. "The theory behind the instrument supports the fact that you are born with a four letter preference. If you hear someone say, 'My type changed,' they are not correct."
Uncovering The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs - DiggOnly now her racialized judgements were dressed up in the language of psychoanalytic authority. When a female office worker advocated for human equality across all races and ethnicities, Isabel declared her to be immature and typologically under-developed. "The very warm evidence on the colored woman to whom one could talk exactly as to equals is another case in point," she wrote. "Members of a dark and supposedly inferior race are standard symbol for the suppressed and considered-inferior part of one's own psyche."
Who Was Isabel Briggs Myers? -- Science of Us
Last edited: