29 Sep 2018

Cult of personality? Myers-Briggs and the 'cosmic laboratory of baby training'

From Saturday Morning, 10:04 am on 29 September 2018

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator continues to be used by employers, the military, educators and churches the world over despite having no scientific validity.

In her new book The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing*, author Merve Emre looks at why the personality test and others like it remains so pervasive.

She also explores the harms of its continued use, and investigates its origin as a passion project by mother-daughter team Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers.

Merve Emre

Merve Emre Photo: supplied

Dr Emre tells Saturday Morning's Kim Hill that the indicator is still used by many Fortune 500 companies for example, to screen employees, to shuffle them around, or just as a team building exercise to try to improve collaboration."The argument that I make in the book is that we should take it seriously because people continue to believe in it despite all of the evidence that it isn't scientifically valid or reliable … that it persists in the face of all of our doubts about it," she says.

"I am concerned that this idea about personality continues to be marked by all kinds of social hierarchies surrounding race and class and gender, and it continues to be used by employers and even by universities to flatten out people and to shuffle them around.

"I worry too that it is used especially by corporate capitalism, to convince people that they should be working longer and harder at things because those are the things or the jobs or the tasks that are best suited to their personalities.

"We have started to treat as natural the idea that work should be a place for self-actualisation, that we should love what we do, and I want to sort of encourage people to step back from that fantasy that our labour should be a source of psychological and even spiritual satisfaction.

Mother-daughter duo: The cosmic laboratory of baby training

Dr Emre says she thinks the biography of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers is essential to understanding the problem.

"I actually think it's impossible from being able to separate the biography from the design of the indicator ... the biography to my mind just so perfectly indicates the tensions inherent in the indicator."

Katharine and Isabel Briggs

Katharine and Isabel Briggs Photo: supplied

She says Katharine was an extraordinary woman.

"She went to college at the age of 14 - this is in the late 19th century - she graduated top in her class from Michigan Agricultural College and she married the man who graduated second.

"When she finished school there was never any expectation that she would do anything with her life other than becoming a mother and a wife, and she had three children - two of whom died in very early infancy.

"One of the things that this motivated her to do was try to figure out what kind of experimental settings might be most conducive to raising children - not just so that they would survive but so that they could flourish - and so that's when she opens what she calls her 'cosmic laboratory of baby training'.

Katharine decided to teach her remaining child - Isabel - as well as the neighbourhood children to figure out how they could grow up to be the best possible versions of themselves.

"She believed that if one can excavate a child's innate personality then you can figure out at a very early age how that child should specialise in their life … and that this will not only ensure their happiness but it will also ensure their 'salvation' - there was a religious angle to this as well."

Dr Emre says Briggs believed that obedience and curiosity were the most important disciplines that a child could cultivate.

"She didn't quite realise that those are diametrically opposed ways of interacting with the world … she believed that you could be obedient - say, to your parents or to the authorities at school - and at the same time within those parameters of obedience you could find ways to be creative."

"From a very young age she has Isabel doing all sorts of drills - one of which she calls the 'no no' drill: so she takes baby Isabel's hand and places it above an open flame and if the baby tries to grab the flame she slaps her hand and she says 'no, no' - and if she doesn't - if she resists … rewards Isabel with stories about the furniture and the objects around the house.

"So, in some ways curiosity was the reward for being an obedient child."

She would also administer questionnaires for the parents of the children.

"So like 'is your child calm or impulsive', 'does he get very upset when you leave the room or not that upset at all', 'is he social with other children or does he prefer to play on his own.

"You can see the ways in which these questions map quite nicely on to the categories that the my B type indicator is looking for like 'introversion and extroversion' or thinking and feeling.

"So I think its origins really lie with those child-rearing tools that Katharine was developing in her home well before the indicator was ever really patented in the 1940s.

Dr Emre says Katharine then discovered the writings of Carl Jung.

"Jung believes that … people are born - or they develop very early on in infancy - certain habitual attitudes towards life, certain psychological mechanisms … that really set people's personalities.

"The way that these categories were arrived at was by a mother and a daughter's obsessions with Jungian theory - which isn't based on anything, itself - and then the way they instrumentalized Jung's theory was really by sitting around their tables asking their friends and family members the kinds of questions that are on the indicators."

She says her scepticism is partly informed by knowing that this was how the instrument was designed, but says she doesn't blame Briggs or her daughter.

Carl Jung

Carl Jung Photo: Public Domain

"One thing that I really want to stress is the discipline of psychology was really very, very new at the time they started out.

"At the time, what Isabel and Katharine were doing wasn't really all that different from what the men at the psychological clinic at Harvard were doing and it's certainly no less scandalous than what Carl Jung was doing with his patients."

"The argument that people often make, that 'oh these were just two housewives and that's why we shouldn't take the indicator seriously' is incredibly sexist."

A flawed tool

Dr Emre says there's various criticisms of the MBTI going right back to its design phase.

"When the Educational Testing Services was vetting the instrument and thinking about whether or not they should be publishing it, the head of ETS at the time - a man named Henry Chauncy - writes to his statistical team and the statisticians say 'we can't validate this, it's not valid, it's not reliable'.

Dr Emre says it's not just the origin of the indicator which show how problematic it is.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is based on Carl Jung's theory of psychology, and has no scientific or statistical validity.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is based on Carl Jung's theory of psychology, and has no scientific or statistical validity. Photo: Public Domain

"It doesn't actually measure the things that it claims to measure, so for instance extraversion and introversion are often just measures of talkativeness, thinking and feeling often operate as measures of liberalism in one's feelings about the world.

"To claim that extroversion and introversion are innate aspects of one's personality seems already flawed because as categories these are always man made - they're always socially constructed and their definitions shift based on what institutional setting they're being used in."

She says this is partly based on the definition of personality - as the characteristics that make a person distinct - which she says is a 19th-century idea.

"The 15th century is that which distinguishes human beings from animals or from objects … and even earlier the 13th century understanding of personality is a theological one, it's the three aspects of God that come together in the holy trinity are his personalities.

"What's interesting to me is how those earlier definitions of personality do kind of wind their ways through Katharine and Isabel's understanding.

"[Katherine thought that personality] is what distinguishes what she calls 'enlightened men' from the 'lower orders' of men, and of course there's a kind of racist and classist angle to her thinking here."

She says when Isabel was designing the indicator in the 1940s she also believed there were "certain kinds of people who do not get to have personalities" including for example people with an IQ under 100.

"This is something that only becomes apparent much later on, with critiques of psychometric testing or intelligence testing, is that many of these tests and indicators are reaffirming the social hierarchies that already exist in the world.

"For the longest time there had actually been two separate answer keys for men or for women, because Isabel Briggs Myers had believed that women are more biologically disposed to … feeling than men were, and so you had to evaluate them using two different sets of answer keys.

"It's no accident that it's the men who are white and wealthy and have access to power that are the ones who seem to have the most differentiated personalities - they're the ones who are often doing the jobs where they are told 'you are a strong individual, you are a creative individual, you get to stand apart from the crowd'."

No caption.

Photo: 123RF

There's another problem with the test too - despite the claim that personality types are unchangeable, people taking the test a second time can get radically different results.

"Isabel Briggs Myers ... her argument was that the questionnaire is so powerful that it actually reveals to you your type … where you become aware of your psychological functions in a way that you never were before and that's actually why you change.

Astrology, cults and personality indicators

Dr Emre says she thinks the MBTI has about the same amount of scientific validity as astrology, but there's a major difference.

"I don't see it as different on a scientific level … I think the reach of the type indicator and the kind of ardour with which people cling to it as a useful tool makes it quite different from astrology.

"If I go into a workplace, nobody tells me 'oh you're a Virgo, so you might not work especially well with this person who is a Gemini'.

Indeed, it's an almost religious ardour people defend the Myers-Briggs with. Dr Emre describes how when she was trying to get materials for her book, she was trying to get access to Isabel's personal papers, but needed permission from the Centre for the Application of Personality Type.

"I had gone through an almost year-long negotiation that ended with CAPT asking me to go to a re-education programme so that I could learn to 'speak the language of type properly'.

"It was a week-long Myers-Briggs training, where we were taught how to, as they said 'speak the language of type'.

"There were certain rules of type that one had to learn: the first was that type never changes, the second was that all types are created equal and the third was that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is not a test, it is an indicator - because a 'test' is something that has right or wrong answers and an 'indicator', they said, 'only indicates to you what you have told the questionnaire'.

She gives another example - during the course they were asked to draw their personality as a room - being an English professor with a knowledge of interpretation she could see where that was going.

"Any objection is actually immediately absorbed into its theory of type," she says.

"I wanted to draw a room that would defy interpretation so I drew this tent with this woman parachuting onto it and these fat little saw-tooth hamsters surrounding the tent.

"I have to give credit to the instructor who came up to it and she immediately said 'this is so appropriate for your ENTJ type, you just want to parachute in from above and you want to change and reorganise everything and you don't want to do the work of building consensus from the ground up'."

Despite this doggedness for explaining how - despite all its problems - the indicator could work, she doesn't see it as cult-like.

No caption

Photo: Supplied

"I don't think it's totally immersive in the same way that most cults are, I mean to join a cult you really have to belong in a much more sort of daily, ritualistic way.

"This is a form of belief with no charismatic leader at its head, I think it's only very recently since I've written the book and since it's come out that people have discovered who it is that was behind the indicator.

"What makes the Myers-Briggs indicator interesting to me is that it is much more dispersed - people take it once or twice - and yet the hold that it has on their imagination endures and it's precisely that kind of dispersal combined with the intensity of the belief that in some ways makes it even more interesting to me than a cult."

Indeed, much of that continued appeal is because of the kind of answers it gives and the enticing explanations it offers.

"It offers both the stability of something essential or innate - a fantasy of the self as unchanging - and it also offers the possibility of change within reason based on that personality type.

"Here is a way to anchor yourself in the messiness of the world and the incomprehensibility of the many of the decisions that we make or the desires we have."

It's something that was recognised by the ETS head, Henry Chauncy, when he was considering the indicator for publication.

"He writes to his statistical team and says 'maybe it doesn't matter [that it's not statistically valid] … because people are so compelled by the type descriptions and they find it so useful for understanding their lives that maybe we could just offer it as a kind of self-help tool and what would be wrong with that?"

She says she has seen that usefulness at work with individual people in their lives too.

"When I was at that programme I became quite good friends with a woman who worked with the Department of Defence who had gone through what sounded like a fairly acrimonious divorce.

"She started talking to me about how the programme and the entire language of type had really made her feel so much better about the divorce, or it had given her a framework to help her understand why she and her husband could not be reconciled.

"Having that kind of clarity can prove very, very … liberating, can teach you or train you how to say 'look, this is who I am, I don't want to apologise for who I am and I'm no longer going to'.

Changing the paradigm

Dr Emre says the difficulty is balancing out the socially pernicious aspects with the individually useful or liberating ones.

"I've had people write to me to tell me how the indicator was used to deny the jobs or promotions … how it was used by their college counsellors when they were graduating from college and it set them on the path to the wrong job.

"It is interesting to me that it activates people's imagination in that way, that it inspires this incredible investment of energy - either positive or negative - in it."

However, she suspects her book will not deter employers from using Myers-Briggs.

"In some ways my book is much more sympathetic than earlier books on the topic, and it's definitely more sympathetic than the articles that come out regularly - like once every six months - talking about why the Myers Briggs type indicator is garbage.

"I don't think that those articles or those previous books have really made a dent in the use of the indicator, I think if there's anything that would make a dent it's that we seem to want to move away a little bit from typological thinking in corporate settings and towards more fluid or narrative ways of thinking."

She says it's possible change will come about in a different way, however.

"Part of me just wonders if the type indicator will be supplemented by something that seems to offer more flexibility and nuance but I don't see the book itself as having any kind of impact really on sales of the indicator."

 

Merve Emre completed her PhD at Yale, her BA at Harvard and is currently Associate Professor of American Literature at Worcester College, Oxford. She is Senior Humanities Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and has written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine and The New Republic, among others. Her first book was Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017).

 

* The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing is also available under the title "What's Your Type: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing".