The Personality Brokers Quotes

“Not only psychologists, but otherwise intelligent people, quickly become consummate jackasses when they are asked to develop a child’s character,”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Yet with the end of World War II and the explosion of the labor force, she and Hay both knew that this division no longer dominated conversations about work. What was needed was a test for all the new men and women in the workplace that did not punish them for their perceived vulnerabilities but convinced them and their employees that they had none—only a set of interests and preferences that were better suited to some jobs over others.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Yet the reality of the test was that, while it was one of the most-talked-about personality inventories on the market, the theory behind it a flashy convergence of nineteenth-century literature and psychology, it was not, strictly speaking, valid in any sense of the word.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“At the same time, there were hundreds of psychological consulting firms that had created an industry out of administering these tests—a logistical convenience, to be sure, but also a means of protecting the employers from whatever hostility might develop as a result of demoting or firing people based on the test results. But what if she could design a test that generated only positive results? It would not be a test at all but an “indicator”—a device that provided information about one’s personality free from judgment or opprobrium.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Murray wrote. “The assessment of men… is the scientific art of arriving at sufficient conclusions from insufficient data.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“They counted in their ranks chemists, economists, historians, physicists, political scientists, and zoologists, but no minorities or women. “We did not take any Oriental students, of whom there were several, feeling that since they came from a different type of background, they would require special consideration,” MacKinnon explained in his research briefing. As for women, he could admit only that “the problem of the successful woman in what remain largely male professions has not been much discussed by us”—an “unconscious omission,” he claimed, on the part of his staff. Black-and-white photographs of the first test subjects confirm that life inside 2240 did not look all that dissimilar from life inside the fraternity house it had once been. Here was a group of elite white men handpicked to “participate in games and other competitions and collaborations, engage in social conversations, and submit to organized interviews.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Scientific or not, the indicator had always managed to spark a sudden and ecstatic perception of self-knowledge in its subjects, no matter their age, sex, education, occupation, or political leanings, no matter their initial skepticism toward its operations.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“What Isabel and her mother had done was to take a complex philosophical explanation for human subjectivity and flatten it into unrecognizable caricatures of psychological theory: the self dwindled into a four-letter acronym, the world compressed into a 4 × 4 type table.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“The test offered its subjects more than just the possibility of meeting themselves; it offered them a chance at redeeming themselves, pulling them back from the shame of psychological abnormality, celebrating their differences while also preserving their similarities.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Although the world has come a long way since Katharine opened her cosmic laboratory of baby training, the link the language of type helped forge between self-discovery and self-creation stays intact. Self-awareness remains a precious psychological offering no matter the end, and the painless knowledge peddled by the indicator can seem more appealing than other, more chaotic processes of self-excavation, ones that do not fit neatly into a 4 × 4 type chart or a four-letter acronym.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“It never occurred to her that her interference in the Tuckerman family’s affairs could constitute a risky and profound ethical violation—the kind the American Psychological Association sought to prevent two decades later by indicting the spirit of amateurism that Katharine championed and would continue to embrace as she and Isabel started their work on the type indicator.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Concerned for her daughter, Una forbade Katharine from seeing her and took Mary to a psychiatrist—an “extravert Freudian who had a deadly hatred for me,” Katharine complained to Jung. She believed that she and Jung were fighting Una and Freud for Mary’s soul, a fight in which she was on the side of the righteous—the side of her god and other introverts—and Una, her mind scandalized by Freud’s suggestions of sexual impropriety and deviance, was on the side of evil.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Beyond all the pseudoscientific talk of “indicators” and “instruments” was a simple but subtle truth: the questionnaire reflected whatever version of yourself you wanted it to reflect, whether consciously or unconsciously. You could quickly become attuned to the pattern of the questions, their basic idiom of sociability, creativity, rationality, impulsivity. If you wanted to see yourself as odd and original or factual and direct, it required only a little bit of imagination to nudge the answers in the right direction.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“because she knew she had to find a way to reconcile the woman’s inconsistency with her indicator. She was hopeful, she told Hay, that this act of crossing over meant that the indicator did more than just passively reflect the true self; it provoked the emergence of a better self from within the mind’s cocoon of uncertainty and self-hatred, preserving modes of perception (like sensing) and judgment (like feeling) that society had debased as inefficient, weak, or feminine. “The revelation, the discovery, is a discovery of value in the undervalued, in the part of her psyche which she and others have undervalued,” Isabel concluded. Her interpretation of dreams represented a striking extension of her mother’s racialized imagination, now preserved by the indicator across the generations.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“The rest of the week was busy, crowded with tutorials and tests, group exercises and games. It ended on a rousing note with a sales pitch delivered to us by two executives who had flown into New York that morning from Sunnyvale, California, home of Consulting Psychologists Press (CPP), the current publisher of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. They urged us to use our accreditation status to purchase as many Myers-Briggs products as we could afford and to attend as many workshops as our schedules could accommodate. Then, in a graduation ceremony of sorts, they presented each of us with a pocket-sized diploma and plated metal pin with the words “MBTI Certified” embossed on it.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“The final rule of speaking type was, to my mind, the most important and the most unsettling: you had to conceive of personality as an innate characteristic, something fixed since birth and immutable, like blue eyes or left-handedness. “You have to buy into the idea that type never changes,” Patricia ordered us, and she asked that we chant after her: “Type never changes! Type never changes!” “We will brand this into your brains,” she promised. “The theory behind the indicator supports the fact that you are born with a four-letter preference. If you hear someone say, ‘My type changed,’ they are not correct.” Her insistence on a singular and essential self—a self whose moods and mysteries were crystallized by four simple letters—seemed to me impossibly retrograde amidst the cheerful promises of self-transformation through diet, exercise, travel, therapy, and meditation that I encountered in popular culture every day. Yet it also struck me as an irresistibly attractive fiction. There was a certain narcissistic beauty to the idea, a certain luminance to the promise that, by learning to speak type, we could learn to compress the gestures of our messy, complicated lives into a coherent life story, one capable of expressing both to ourselves and to others not just who we were but who we had been all along.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“There is probably no one who has a better understanding of human character than the successful fiction writer,” Katharine observed. “Perhaps there is no better way of developing the understanding eye than to attempt the creation of fictitious characters which shall be true to life and step out of the covers of a book as the well-executed portrait seems to step from the canvas.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Isabel and Katharine both read The Great Gatsby shortly after it was published in 1925;”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“It all ended quite badly for Gatsby, of course—his curated personality was, ultimately, a dangerous, deadly gimmick. But Fitzgerald’s story about personality’s intangible, imaginative dimensions showed how one could, over time, assemble and disassemble the self until it was virtually indistinguishable from something inherent, something eternal, something true.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“The Great Gatsby afforded its readers a remarkably vivid example of putting one’s personality to work, trading “those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“For Gatsby, personality was also a necessary fiction, a gimmick that served a very particular purpose: the accumulation of wealth, power, and prestige.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Written in 1924, around the same time that Isabel started “Diary of an Introvert Determined to Extravert, Write, & Have a Lot of Children,” The Great Gatsby offered its readers a glimpse into the largely invisible work that went into making one’s personality cohere as a unified entity. “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away,” Fitzgerald wrote of Jay Gatsby, perhaps the most enigmatic fictional personality of the twentieth century. By Fitzgerald’s account, one’s personality was neither innate nor inert but seismographic: a transcription of the millions of precisely calibrated actions and activities one undertook from day to day, an etching into human form of one’s deliberate encounters with an unpredictable and unforgiving world. Personality was something you practiced over and over again”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Katharine sent the story to several publishers but only heard back from one, a disgruntled editor who told her that her intimations of homosexuality were undignified and her digressions into Jungian psychology were boring. After his harsh rebuke, she stopped writing novels altogether.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“She turned first to writing fiction, staying up late to compose private, erotic stories about Jung and the practice of analytic psychology. Her longest one was a novella titled The Man from Zurich, and it was narrated by a character she referred to as “Sterling”: a handsome, cultured resident of Washington, D.C., who had fallen into a deep depression. After a near suicide attempt,”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“In writing “Meet Yourself,” Katharine had placed her finger on the nerve center of type’s appeal: the promise that, within each person, there lived a coherent individual who was master of her own life. This was by no means an original sentiment. Western philosophy had, for centuries, set forth a similar argument, from the Socratic dialogues to the writings of the Cynics, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and even the early Christians.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Jung had invented the frustratingly opaque notions of “type” and “type pairs” to suggest that the “souls of men” could be classified along three binaries: extraverted and introverted types, intuitive and sensing types, and thinking and feeling types. Watson dismissed the whole enterprise as nonsense, a metaphysical ruse so flimsy that it defied serious critique. “One cannot go into a criticism of Jung’s psychology,” he spewed. “It is the kind the religious mystic must write in order to find justification for certain factors his training has forced him to believe must exist.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Psychoanalysts could not peer into the soul and read its secrets. They were not augurs or oracles.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“type and its people-sorting instruments had not created this state of affairs. They were merely a symptom of a more invasive psychological disease: social modernity. The rise of industrial capitalism and the division of people into classes—owners versus workers, white collar versus blue collar—had left an indelible imprint on the souls of men and women, stamping certain predictable ways of thinking and feeling onto their psyches. Those who believed in the sanctity of the individual had been conditioned to do so by their class positions.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“the impulse to categorize people gestured to a basic rigidity of thought, an anti-humanist, anti-enlightenment propensity for flattening individuals into predetermined classes so that they could be managed and manipulated with greater ease.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

“Katharine was a self-diagnosed introvert and proud of it. She was on a “quest for the Self,” she announced to her husband and daughter in 1925, and as such, she believed she was incapable of moving through the world in a conventional manner. “I have never been imitative.”
― Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing