The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing Audiobook (Free)

*A NY Situations Critics’ Best Publication of 2018*

*An Economist Best Publication of 2018*

*A Spectator Best Reserve of 2018*

*A Mental Floss Best Book of 2018*

An unprecedented background of the personality test conceived a century ago with a mom and her daughter–fiction writers without formal training in psychology–and how it insinuated itself into our boardrooms, classrooms, and beyond

The Myers-Briggs Type Signal may be the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by about The Personality Agents: The Unusual Background of Myers-Briggs as well as the Birth of Personality Screening Fortune 500 businesses, universities, hospitals, churches, as well as the armed forces. Its vocabulary of personality types–extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving–has influenced television shows, internet dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. However despite the test’s widespread adoption, experts in neuro-scientific psychometric screening, a $2 billion industry, have battled to validate its results–no much less account for its success. How do Myers-Briggs, a homegrown multiple choice questionnaire, infiltrate our workplaces, our relationships, our Internet, our lives?

First conceived in the 1920s with the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of dedicated homemakers, novelists, and amateur psychoanalysts, Myers-Briggs was designed to bring the gospel of Carl Jung to the masses. Nonetheless it would take on a life completely its own, achieving from your smoke-filled boardrooms of mid-century New York to Berkeley, California, where it was administered to some of the twentieth century’s very best creative minds. It could travel around the world to London, Zurich, Cape City, Melbourne, and Tokyo, until maybe it’s found just like easily in primary academic institutions, nunneries, and wellbeing retreats as with shadowy politics consultancies and on social networks.

Drawing from original confirming and never-before-published documents, The Personality Brokers takes a critical go through the personality indicator that became a cultural icon. Along the way it examines nothing at all less than this is from the self–our efforts to grasp, categorize, and quantify our personalities. Astonishing and absorbing, the publication, like the check at its heart, considers the timeless question: Why is you, you?