The Racist Origin of the Popular Myers-Briggs® Test
The famous pseudoscientific personality test
What’s your Myers-Briggs® personality type? In the corporate workplace, many people receive a four-letter personality type. Subcultures on the internet exist for the sixteen different personality types. Some workplaces even use these results to help make hiring decisions. Human resources managers and executives in Fortune 500 companies swear by the test.
The test is owned and licensed by a company. To get your hands on one of those bad boys, you’d need to attend a weeklong course costing $1695. Its enthusiastic proponents swear by the test. Its training sessions are both popular and profitable. But where did the Myers-Briggs® test come from? Or more specifically, who created it and how?
Like many other personality tests, I presumed the creators were psychologists. I thought that there would at least be preliminary studies used to develop the metric. To my surprise, the test was created by a mystery novel writer. Merve Emre was also curious, going on a nine-month journey to discover more about the creators.
Emre had to attend a certification program just to access these documents. Journalists would refer to the creator Isabel Briggs Myers but didn’t know much else. Briggs Myers developed the test during the…
