Let’s say that you’re alive in the US in about 1942 and you read a magazine article about how some people seem to “fit” particular jobs better than others. You’re thinking about your country is preparing to send troops to war in various places in the world, and you have the idea that if only there was a way to figure out which people would be better “fits” for various jobs, that might help.
You’re hampered by not having any relevant experience. Your college degree, which you earned more than twenty years ago, is in political science. You can write pretty well — you won a contest in 1928 to write a mystery novel that was serialized in a national magazine, and you even wrote a second novel. You didn’t continue after your second novel was very harshly reviewed. But you remember that your mom, while not a psychologist or anything like that, enjoyed reading about the ideas of Carl Jung. Maybe she’d be able to help!
You write to your mom and she likes your idea. She suggests some Jungian ideas, and you decide that the “people sorting instrument” you’re going to create will assess whether people are introverts, whether they tend to think things through before acting, and whether they rely on their intuition. Those are right out of Jung. You wonder whether three factors is enough, so you add another one; whether people tend to reach judgements about things right away.
Then you decide that your “people sorting instrument” would be better if each of your factors was a pair of things — Jung’s work helps out again, because he paired thinking with feeling, introversion with extraversion, intuition with sensing, and judging with perceiving. Perfect! Everybody must be one or the other in those pairs, and that will yield sixteen kinds of people! Surely that’s more than enough to sort people into all the categories the army is going to need.
You work with your mom and your husband and come up with a paper-and-pencil test in which people report their tendencies to be one or the other of each of the pairs you’ve dreamed up. You come up with memorable, even witty descriptions of the types you can sort people into. People actually seem to like your new “people sorting instrument,” and you have some very good luck: the dean of a big college lets you give your test to all the first-year students for several years in a row!
You end up with over 5,000 tests, and you also whether the students who took the test were successful at college or dropped out. You pore over these tests for years, trying to find patterns. Your name, of course, is Isabel Briggs-Meyers, and your “people sorting instrument” is called the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). You were born on October 18, 1897, and after your passed away in 1980, you leave the copyright to your son. He continues to work what has become the family business, and builds it up into today’s Meyers & Briggs Foundation, which has the motto “Fostering human understanding through training, publishing, and research.”
The Foundation really does do research, although since the MBTI has been repeatedly shown to be pseudoscientific nonsense. But two million people per year take the test, and that results in a lot of cash, so the Foundation simply created their own “scientific” journal: the Journal of Psychological Type. The research is conducted by their own Center for Application of Psychological Type, which also administers the annual Isabel Briggs Myers Memorial Research Awards in MBTI research. The awards are a mere $2000, which isn’t much these days, but at least it’s something.
Corporations, which seem to love pseudoscientific nonsense as long as it comes with a good spiel, really do try to use the thing as a “people sorting instrument.” Isabel Briggs-Meyers claimed that she was an INFP.
