In , Myers sold the Indicator to a psychometric test publisher and the theory became marketable. The assessment soon caught on with employers who were looking for an inexpensive, standardized test to match workers to the jobs that were right for them.
As use of the assessment became more widespread, new applications were discovered in career coaching, team building, and employee development. She founded Truity in , with the goal of making quality personality tests more affordable and accessible. She is an ENTP, a tireless brainstormer, and a wildly messy chef. Find Molly on Twitter at mollmown.
Skip to main content. More married women in particular had entered the workforce as men went off to fight the war. Her first client ended up being the Office of Strategic Services, which had a group of wartime psychologists who wanted to match covert operatives to the secret missions best suited to their personalities during World War II. They used dozens of personality tests on people, including the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and live-action assessments to figure out which OSS job would be best for them e.
By the mids, the Myers-Briggs entered the corporate world. The Home Life Insurance Company used the test to both determine whether a job applicant would make a successful life insurance salesman, and to calculate whether a life insurance applicant should pay a larger premium on his insurance. General Electric also asked Isabel to type their highest-ranking executives.
Each one had its different strengths. Many companies still use the system to help them type employees. The CPP introduced a self-scoring form instead of having people send in their answers to be scored by computers or interpreted by trained psychologists. But while researchers have documented flaws with the system, Isabel did genuinely want to design a valid instrument that would help people, Emre noted.
The way in which it was being sold to people who had no understanding of the theory behind it. Initially Cook Briggs wanted to make a landmark contribution to the practice of child-rearing. In this model, kindness, warmth and play were won only after authoritarian orders to study and work had been complied with.
Before reading Briggs Myers bedtime stories, Cook Briggs required her to complete a demanding programme of study. By her early 30s, Briggs Myers was an accomplished polymath and award-winning writer of formulaic but engaging detective fiction. A breakthrough came at the end of the war, when the test was embraced by the Office of Strategic Services a short-lived forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency as a tool for assigning intelligence operatives in newly liberated Europe.
By the mids, she had persuaded more than 45 medical schools to use it for admissions and clients such as General Electric, Standard Oil and Bell Laboratories to inform recruitment and promotion decisions. Today, the MBTI is deployed widely, although its uses remain largely corporate: building a team or recruiting for an executive-training programme.
Moreover, because it produces profiles that are always positive, it proves perenially palatable to consumers. Whyte in his best-selling text of the same name. This fed into hire-and-fire managerial prerogatives while also extinguishing the appetite for collective resistance. For all its light and liberal pretensions, the MBTI thus has a dark and deeply conservative heart. This is a tool of status quo, not social change. Indeed, its political functions are plain to see, precisely because the research that underpins it is so poor.
She might have done more to help readers understand how the Myers-Briggs instrument and industry relates to, and departs from, theories and methodologies of contemporary psychological science. She should have avoided name-dropping psychologists, such as Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, whose work is neither relevant nor helpful to her cause. Rather, it is to explore two particular selves.
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