The Rise Of The Myers-Briggs, Chapter 1: Katharine

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4.8 • 610 Ratings

🗓️ 17 August 2021

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you’re one of the 2 million people who take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator every year, perhaps you thought Myers and Briggs are the two psychologists who designed the test. In reality, a mother-daughter team created the test essentially at their kitchen table. In this episode, we look at the unlikely origins of the Myers-Briggs, going all the way back to the late 1800s when Katharine Cook Briggs turned her living room into a “cosmic laboratory of baby training” and set out to raise the perfect child. In this three-part series, we uncover the strange history of the most popular personality test in the world, and how two women revolutionized personality testing—for better or for worse. Guest: Merve Emre is a writer and English professor at the University of Oxford. Footnotes & Further Reading: Read Merve Emre’s book, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. Credits: This episode was produced by Johanna Mayer, Chris Egusa, and Elah Feder. Our music was composed by Daniel Peterschmidt, who also mastered the episode. Fact checking by Danya AbdelHameid. Archival audio was provided courtesy of Peter Geyer. Nadja Oertelt is our Chief Content Officer.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In the late 1950s, a quirky older woman started turning up at the offices of the Educational Testing Service.
0:08.0	She looked harmless enough.
0:10.0	Glasses, nylon dresses, comfortable shoes.
0:14.0	But the service's employees did not care for her.
0:19.0	Some of them even started requesting the day off when they knew she'd come
0:22.7	around. See, this woman did odd things. She'd walk the halls late at night, rifle through their
0:30.8	papers, leave sticky fingerprints. She was always drinking this homemade energy mix. She called
0:36.6	Tiger's Milk, a blend of Brewers yeast milk and Hershey bars that she would smash with her own fists.
0:43.8	Hence, the sticky fingers.
0:46.0	The employees of the Educational Testing Service, or ETS, called her the little old lady in tennis shoes.
0:53.3	Or just that horrible woman.
0:58.0	The men at ETS just despised her.
1:02.2	Mervais Emre is an English professor at the University of Oxford and the author of The Personality Brokers.
1:09.0	So whereas the men of ETS had graduate degrees, many of them had PhDs, this woman did not.
1:16.5	They made fun of her behind her back and also to her face about her lack of formal training
1:21.6	about the fact that she wasn't an expert.
1:25.3	ETS is a company that runs the SATs, and in the 50s, they needed this woman.
1:31.8	Or so the boss said.
1:33.4	Because although they already dominated academic testing, ETS was ready to conquer new territory.
1:41.1	Personality testing.
1:43.2	A good personality test could revolutionize child care, marriage, work. Think about it.
1:52.2	What if you could hire not just the person with the best medical knowledge, but the person with the best
	...

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