Michael: Over two million people take the Myers-Briggs test every single year. It’s used by the CIA, the majority of Fortune 500 companies, and probably your own HR department at some point. Here’s the secret: it was created by a mother-daughter duo of mystery novelists with absolutely no formal training in psychology. Kevin: Hold on, really? Mystery novelists? Not, say, PhDs from Harvard? That can't be right. I’ve taken that test. My whole office took that test. We based a whole team-building retreat on our four-letter codes. Michael: It’s not only right, it’s just the beginning of one of the strangest and most influential stories of the 20th century. And that's the bizarre, fascinating world we're diving into today with Merve Emre's book, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. Kevin: Which has a pretty polarizing reception, right? I’ve seen it described as 'riveting' and 'a thrilling narrative,' but it definitely challenges a tool that millions of people, myself included, have taken and maybe even trusted to tell them who they are. Michael: Exactly. And Emre comes at this from a completely unique angle. She's an Oxford-trained literary critic who, for a brief time, worked as a consultant at a top firm where she first encountered the MBTI. So she has both the insider experience of being subjected to it and the critical distance of a scholar to unpack its story. And what a story it is. Kevin: Okay, I’m hooked. A personality test invented by novelists that took over the world. Where do we even start? Michael: We start where Emre did: trying to get access to the truth. And finding out it's guarded like a state secret.

Michael: Emre's investigation begins like something out of a spy novel. She's a researcher, an academic. She just wants to see the historical archives of the Myers-Briggs test, which are held by the Educational Testing Service, or ETS. Simple enough, right? Kevin: Yeah, sounds like a pretty standard academic request. Go to the library, look at old papers. Michael: Not quite. When she arrives at the archives—seven months pregnant, by the way—she finds that the staff is immediately wary of her. A key folder of letters has been removed from the collection she requested. When she asks for it, the archivist consults with a lawyer and denies her access, citing 'sensitive information.' Kevin: Sensitive information? In the files of a personality quiz? What could possibly be so sensitive? Michael: It gets weirder. Later that day, an ETS employee who was assigned to watch her, to surveil her, posts on Twitter: "Today I’m creeping on a pregnant lady as part of my job." He even included a link to a critical article Emre had written. Kevin: Whoa. That is incredibly creepy. It’s not an archive, it’s an intelligence agency. Why on earth were they so paranoid? Michael: Because, as Emre discovers, the MBTI isn't just a product. For its guardians, it's a kind of gospel. And to get access to its inner sanctum, you have to prove you're a true believer. After being stonewalled at the archives, she’s told by another organization, the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, that to see Isabel Myers's personal papers, she first needs to undergo a "re-education program." Kevin: A re-education program? You're kidding me. Michael: I am not. It was a nearly two-thousand-dollar, four-day Myers-Briggs accreditation session in Manhattan. She had to pay to be indoctrinated. Kevin: That sounds like a cult. You have to pay for the first level of enlightenment before they'll show you the sacred texts. What happened in this... session? Michael: It was a masterclass in ideological enforcement. The leader, Patricia, taught them the rules of "speaking type fluently." Rule one: Never, ever call it a "test." It's an "indicator." A test has right and wrong answers; an indicator merely reveals what's already there. Rule two: You must accept that your personality type is innate, fixed from birth, and never changes. At one point, Patricia had the whole room chanting, "Type never changes! Type never changes!" Kevin: Chanting? Okay, this is officially a cult. This is beyond just protecting a brand. This level of secrecy and control feels completely disproportionate for a personality quiz. What is the big secret they're protecting so fiercely? Michael: That's the million-dollar question Emre sets out to answer. And the secret isn't some dark, malevolent conspiracy. It's an origin story so strange, so homespun, and so scientifically questionable that it threatens the entire facade of the MBTI as a legitimate psychological instrument.

Michael: To understand the secret, you have to go back to the beginning. Not to Carl Jung in Switzerland, but to a house in Washington, D.C. at the turn of the 20th century, and a woman named Katharine Cook Briggs. Kevin: So this is one of the mystery novelists. Michael: The mother of the duo, yes. And she was a fascinating, brilliant, and deeply troubled woman. She grew up torn between her father, a scientist who taught evolution, and her devoutly religious mother. She spent her life trying to reconcile science and salvation. She concluded that the purpose of life was to cultivate one's personality to achieve a kind of personal salvation. Kevin: That’s a heavy burden to put on personality. It's not just about being outgoing or shy, it's about saving your soul. Michael: Precisely. And after she married and had children, this abstract idea became a very concrete, and very intense, project. After losing two infant sons, she became obsessively focused on her surviving daughter, Isabel. She decided to turn her home into what she called a "cosmic laboratory of baby training." Kevin: A 'cosmic laboratory of baby training.' That phrase alone sends a shiver down my spine. What did that involve? Michael: It was an all-consuming experiment to mold Isabel into the perfect, most "civilized" human being possible. Katharine developed a method she called "obedience-curiosity" training. It involved drills, stories, and constant observation, all designed to instill perfect obedience and boundless curiosity. She kept meticulous diaries of Isabel's responses. Kevin: So this wasn't about understanding a child's innate personality, but about installing one? It sounds like she was programming her daughter. Michael: In a way, yes. Katharine believed that most people were, and I quote, "utterly worthless or worse than worthless," just dead weight on civilization. Her baby training was a way to ensure her child would be a high-functioning, specialized contributor to society. This was deeply tied to the popular, and now deeply disturbing, eugenic ideas of the time—improving society by creating "better babies." Kevin: Wow. Okay, now I'm starting to see why the modern-day MBTI corporation is so secretive. The foundation of this whole thing isn't Carl Jung's respectable psychology, it's this incredibly intense, borderline-creepy mother-daughter experiment rooted in some very dark early 20th-century ideas. Michael: Exactly. Katharine even developed her own personality typing system years before she ever read Jung. She sorted people into meditative, critical, sociable, and spontaneous types. The goal was always the same: to sort people into their proper place for maximum efficiency and contribution. Kevin: So when Jung's work finally came along, it wasn't a revelation, it was a confirmation? Michael: It was more than that. It was a salvation for her. In 1923, after Isabel had grown up and left home, Katharine fell into a deep depression. Her life's project was over. Then, she discovered a translation of Jung's Psychological Types. She said it was like finding her religion. She spent the next five years obsessively studying it, seeing it as the scientific framework that could validate her lifelong obsession with sorting human souls. Kevin: And Isabel, the daughter who was the subject of all these experiments, what did she think of all this? Michael: Isabel was brilliant in her own right. She went on to write a successful mystery novel, Murder Yet to Come, which actually won a major contest. She was trying to forge her own path. But she was always her mother's daughter. The idea of sorting people, of finding the right fit for everyone, was baked into her from birth. When World War II came around, and she saw women entering the workforce, she saw the perfect application for her mother's theories. Kevin: To help people find the right job. Michael: Exactly. To create an "indicator" that could sort all of humanity into its proper, most productive place. The home experiment was about to go global.

Kevin: It's one thing to use these ideas to sort people into jobs. But you mentioned it became political. How does a personality quiz jump from the office to the world of politics and war? Michael: Because the underlying impulse is the same: the desire to understand, predict, and control human behavior for a specific outcome. And in the 1940s, there was one person everyone wanted to understand and control: Adolf Hitler. Kevin: They used personality typing on Hitler? Michael: They certainly tried. Emre uncovers this fascinating parallel. On one hand, you have Katharine Briggs, the amateur, writing an unpublished essay where she types Hitler as an "ET"—an Extraverted Thinker. She argued his personality was to blame for Germany's political state because he persuaded people to abandon their "feeling judgments" and moral obligations. Kevin: That's a pretty bold claim. To reduce the horrors of Nazi Germany to the leader's personality type. Michael: It is. But at the same time, the U.S. government was doing the exact same thing, just with a more scientific gloss. The OSS, the precursor to the CIA, commissioned a top psychologist, Henry Murray from Harvard, to create a detailed personality profile of Hitler. Kevin: Murray. We've heard his name before. He was also a Jungian, right? Michael: Yes, and he ran his own assessment center, Station S, to screen spies for the OSS. His report on Hitler was an attempt to predict his behavior. Would he fight to the death? Would he retreat? Murray's team analyzed everything from his speeches to rumors about his sexual perversions to build a psychological model. They were trying to get inside his head to win the war. Kevin: So you have the amateur novelist and the Harvard scientist, both using the same fundamental idea—that you can map a person's inner world to predict their actions. Did it work? Did they predict Hitler's end? Michael: Not accurately. Murray's team laid out several scenarios, but they didn't predict his suicide in the bunker. It shows the limits of personology, especially in such complex situations. But the key takeaway is that the idea of personality had become a tool of the state. Kevin: And after the war, that tool didn't just go away. Michael: It boomed. It pivoted from the battlefield to the boardroom. This is the era of the "Organization Man," as sociologist William H. Whyte called him. Corporations were growing, and they needed a way to manage their new white-collar workforce. They wanted employees who were loyal, content, and, above all, predictable. Kevin: And personality tests were the perfect tool for that. Michael: Perfect. They were used to screen for conformity. Whyte was deeply critical of this. He saw these tests as loyalty tests, not personality tests. He even published a guide in his book on how to cheat on them. His advice was essentially to give the most bland, middle-of-the-road, company-man answers possible. Don't be too creative, don't be too assertive. Just be average. Kevin: Wow. So the test that was supposed to celebrate your unique type was actually being used to enforce a single, uniform type: the compliant employee. Michael: Precisely. And this is the world Isabel Myers's indicator was born into. She genuinely believed her indicator was different. She argued it wasn't about finding what was wrong with people, but about celebrating their unique gifts. The motto on the test was "Each type has its own special advantages." Kevin: But it was still used for the same purpose, right? To sort people. To decide who gets hired, who gets promoted. Michael: Absolutely. And that's the central tension of the book. The noble, self-help dream of the creators versus the cold, pragmatic reality of how their creation was used by institutions of power. It started in a mother's laboratory to perfect a child, was used to try and understand a dictator, and ended up as a tool to build a more efficient, more compliant, and more profitable workforce.

Kevin: So when you strip it all away, what is the Myers-Briggs, really? It's not science, it's not objective psychology... what's left? Michael: Emre argues it’s a 'technology of the self.' It’s a story we tell ourselves about who we are that feels true, that gives us a vocabulary for our own internal weather. It gives us a language for our identity and a sense of belonging with others of our 'type,' even if the foundations are built on a mother's spiritual anxieties and a novelist's imagination. Kevin: So its power isn't in its accuracy, but in its narrative. Michael: Exactly. It succeeded not because it was scientifically right, but because it was a compelling, simple, and deeply self-affirming story in a world that was becoming more complex and alienating. It tells you that you're not weird or broken, you're just an INFP. And there's a whole category of people just like you. There's a comfort in that. Kevin: But there's also a danger. The book makes it clear that this sorting mechanism, however well-intentioned, can be used to limit people, to put them in boxes, to justify existing biases. We saw that with the "Organization Man" and the advice to cheat. Michael: Without a doubt. Emre is very clear-eyed about that. The book ends with her attending one of those certification sessions she was forced into. She sees people having genuine epiphanies—"This explains my divorce!" or "Now I understand my mother!"—right alongside a system that dismisses concerns about racial and gender bias by basically saying, "That's just the world, learn to adapt." Kevin: It makes you wonder, how many other 'truths' in our lives are just really good stories we've bought into? From self-help trends to corporate jargon. It's a powerful question to sit with. Michael: It really is. The story of the Myers-Briggs is the story of our modern desire to be understood, categorized, and ultimately, to belong. It’s a flawed and fascinating mirror of ourselves. Kevin: We'd love to hear your own experiences with the MBTI or other personality tests. Did it feel liberating? Or did it feel like being put in a box? Find us on our socials and share your story. We read everything. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.