*A New York Situations Critics’ Best Publication of 2018*

*An Economist Best Book of 2018*

*A Spectator Best Reserve of 2018*

*A Mental Floss Best Reserve of 2018*

An unprecedented history of the personality check conceived a hundred years ago by a mom and her daughter–fiction writers with no formal trained in psychology–and how it insinuated itself into our boardrooms, classrooms, and beyond

The Myers-Briggs Type Indication is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used frequently by about The Personality Agents: The Unusual Background of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Examining Fortune 500 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, as well as the military. Its vocabulary of personality types–extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving–has inspired television shows, internet dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. However despite the test’s common adoption, experts in neuro-scientific psychometric tests, a $2 billion sector, have struggled to validate its results–no much less account for its achievement. How did Myers-Briggs, a homegrown multiple choice questionnaire, infiltrate our workplaces, our romantic relationships, our Internet, our lives?

First conceived in the 1920s by the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, a set of dedicated homemakers, novelists, and amateur psychoanalysts, Myers-Briggs was designed to bring the gospel of Carl Jung towards the masses. But it would take on a life completely its own, reaching from the smoke-filled boardrooms of mid-century NY to Berkeley, California, where it was administered for some from the twentieth century’s most significant creative minds. It would travel across the world to London, Zurich, Cape City, Melbourne, and Tokyo, until maybe it’s found just like easily in elementary colleges, nunneries, and wellbeing retreats as in shadowy political consultancies and on social networks.

Sketching from original confirming and never-before-published files, The Personality Brokers takes a critical go through the personality indicator that became a cultural icon. Along the way it examines nothing less than the definition from the self–our attempts to understand, categorize, and quantify our personalities. Amazing and absorbing, the book, like the check at its heart, considers the classic question: What makes you, you?