Isabel Briggs Myers (born Isabel Briggs; October 18, 1897 – May 5, 1980) was an American writer who co-created the pseudoscientific personality test known as the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) with her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. The MBTI is one of the most-often used personality tests worldwide; over two million people complete the questionnaire each year. When Briggs Myers died in 1980 she left the copyright to the MBTI (which was little known at the time) to her son Peter.

Fiction

In August 1928, she participated in a mystery novel writing contest jointly offered by McClure's magazine and Frederick A. Stokes Company. Her novel Murder Yet to Come won the contest and was published periodically in the monthly magazine The Smart Set (which had absorbed McClure's in March 1929) between August 1929 and January 1930. It was later published in book form by Frederick A. Stokes Company on January 2, 1930.

The contest prize included a $7,500 () cash award and a contract for a second work of fiction. Briggs Myers fulfilled her obligation by writing the novel Give Me Death, which revisits the same detectives from Murder Yet to Come. In it, a Southern family commits suicide one by one after learning they may have "Negro blood". The novel was published in 1934 and received harsh treatment from critics. Briggs Myers implemented the ideas of Carl Jung and added her own insights. She then created a paper survey which would eventually become the MBTI. The test was to assess personality type and was fully developed after 20 years of research by Briggs Myers with her mother. The three original pairs of preferences in Jung's typology are Extraversion and Introversion, Sensation and Intuition, and Thinking and Feeling. After studying them, Briggs Myers added a fourth pair, Judging and Perceiving.

In 1975, Briggs Myers co-founded the Center for Application of Psychological Type with Mary McCaulley. CAPT is a non-profit organization run by the Myers & Briggs Foundation, which maintains research and application of the MBTI, also existing to protect and promote Briggs Myers' ideology. Its headquarters are in Gainesville, Florida, and its motto is "Fostering human understanding through training, publishing, and research". Most of the research supporting the MBTI's validity has been produced by CAPT and published in the center's own journal, the Journal of Psychological Type, raising questions of independence, bias, and conflict of interest.

, although the MBTI is widely used by businesses, coaches and psychologists, the MBTI has been found to have significant validity issues, and is not widely endorsed by academic researchers in psychology.

Publications

  • Myers, I. (1980, 1995) Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type. Davies-Black Publishing, U.S.
  • Gifts Differing is written by Isabel with her son, Peter Briggs Myers. It is about human personality and how it affects several aspects of life such as career, marriage, and meaning of life. It speaks about all sixteen personality types.
  • Myers, I. (1990) Introduction to Type: A Description of the Theory and Applications of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Center for Applications of Psychological Type Inc.
  • Myers, I. and McCaulley, M. (1985) Manual: A Guide to the Development and Use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Consulting Psychologists Press.

Further reading

Saunders, F. W. (1991), Katharine and Isabel: Mother's Light, Daughter's Journey, Davies-Black Publishing, U.S. (biography of Briggs Myers and her mother)

References

  • Profiles of Briggs Myers and her mother on the Myers & Briggs Foundation website
  • "The Remarkable Story of the MBTI: How Two Unlikely Theorists Created the World's Most Popular Personality Test"
  • "The Story of Isabel Briggs Myers" on the Center for Applications of Psychological Type website
  • Myers Briggs 16 Personality Types Profiles