The Capitalist Origins of the Myers-Briggs Personality Test
I am putting up below the opening blast of a history of the MBPT. It makes some useful points. The curious thing about the MBPT is that it has intuitive appeal to a lot of people and many take its categorizations semi-seriously as applicable to themselvres.
That is rather a pity as the test is a psychometric disaster area. It is not internally consistent and often fails to give the same answer twice when it is administered on more than one occasion. It psychometrician's terms it lacks both validity and reliability.
There are now however now a lot of personality tests which do have good scientific credentials -- the "Big Five" etc.
I might declare an interest here. I have been a very active psychometrician. I suspect that I have had published more tests than anyone else. In just one article I published six different measures of six separate concepts -- all reliable and valid. Most of my work, however, was in the field of attitude measurement, not personality measurement. I did however make contributions to the measurement of anxiety, dogmatism and ambition (achievement motivation). See my categorized list of articles here. My measure of achievement motivation has proved particularly popular with other researchers
We tend to think of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a frivolous internet distraction, akin to the hundreds of BuzzFeed quizzes that help us pass the time and think about ourselves in new (if not especially serious) ways. But in the mid-20th century, businesses used it as a powerful tool in hiring and management, changing the trajectories of many workers’ lives. What most of these businesses’ executives didn’t know was just how arbitrary the “science” behind the indicator was.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was the brainchild of a mother and daughter, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. They had no formal background in psychology or statistics, but they did have a fervent belief that their experiences as mothers and wives had taught them all about the innate, immutable power of personality types. Born in 1875, Katharine Briggs had always been fascinated by the idea of personality. She became a minor celebrity in the 1920s while writing parenting columns about how she educated her daughter, Isabel. When Isabel left for college, Katharine fell into a deep depression. It was then that she discovered the writings of Carl Jung, whom she called her “savior,” her “maker,” the “author of her life.” Over time, Katharine developed a way of categorizing people’s personalities using a variation of Jung’s theory of psychological types: introversion/extraversion, intuition/sensing, feeling/thinking, and to this she added perception/judging.
Her system never really caught on until her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, developed it into a 117-question marketable “indicator” — never a “test,” since there were no right or wrong answers, no good or bad types. Myers sold it to Edward N. Hay, a family friend and one of the first personnel consultants in the United States. With the rise of the labor force during and after World War II, newly established consultancies like Hay’s were warming to the idea of using cheap, standardized tests to fit workers to the jobs that were “right for them,” a match made under the watchful eyes of executives eager to keep both profits and morale high.
Personality tests spoke for more than just an individual person or company; they represented an emergent culture of white-collar work.
From the end of World War II to the beginning of the arms race in the early 1950s, news of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator thundered through Pennsylvania, New York, and Washington, D.C. As men built bomb shelters and children practiced attack drills, Isabel picked up accounts, and these accounts began to double, even triple, in size. She took on large orders from colleges, government bureaus, and pharmaceutical companies; from Swarthmore, her alma mater; from her father’s longtime employer, the National Bureau of Standards; from the First National Bank of Boston, Bell Telephone, and the Roane-Anderson Company — a subcontractor for atomic weapons her father introduced Isabel to through his contacts on the Manhattan Project. She was not shy about asking for help or using her family’s connections.
Never one to miss out on an opportunity for self-promotion, Edward N. Hay wrote to his corporate client list on Isabel’s behalf, taking the credit for the indicator’s success despite his apparent lack of familiarity with its origins or the theory behind it. “The test is based on Jung’s Psychological Type-Mind,” he informed one client. “It was developed by Mrs. Isabel Briggs-Myers out of an experiment she did with me in 1942. I have used it in my consulting work quite a little.”
By the mid-1950s, Isabel’s clients were the largest utilities and insurance companies in the United States. They regularly spent upwards of $50 a year on test booklets and answer sheets. The Home Life Insurance Company of New York purchased it twice—first to determine whether an applicant would make for a successful life insurance salesman, and then to calculate whether a life insurance applicant should pay a larger premium on his insurance. (According to Isabel’s summary of her results, extraverted intuitive types — ENTPs and ENFPs — were more likely to exhibit risk-taking behavior.)
More here:
https://forge.medium.com/the-capitalist-origins-of-the-myers-briggs-personality-test-309187757d4e
**********************************************************Fascist women's marchers
Violence to achieve political ends comes instinctively to Leftists. Hitler's Brownshirts were the same
Thousands of pro-abortion activists gathered in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to rally with the Women’s March following the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
The Daily Signal spoke with many attendees about the post-Dobbs landscape, asking whether attendees support any restrictions on abortion. Most of the Women’s Marchers that The Daily Signal spoke with said that they did not support a single restriction on abortion, even if the unborn baby could feel pain or was able to survive outside the womb.
One Women’s Marcher acknowledged that “having abortion banned means that…now I have to be more careful when I have sex.”
Multiple activists who routinely protest outside the homes of the Supreme Court justices also attended the event — activists whose illegal protesting I had exposed in a report for The Daily Wire over the summer. Both Maryland and Virginia law prohibits picketing at the residence of an individual to disrupt or threaten to disrupt that individual’s “tranquility in his home.” Federal law also prohibits such behavior.
We observed some of these activists (including Nadine Seiler) harassing pro-life activists who attended the march. The pro-abortion demonstrators repeatedly screamed at the pro-life activists, loudly blared megaphones right into their ears, and trampled on their pro-life banner.
Some of these Supreme Court activists recognized me from my coverage of their demonstrations and proceeded to harass myself and my video producer until we left the Women’s March, screaming and swearing at us, shoving their hands in front of our cameras, ringing bells in our faces and yelling into our ears with megaphones.
One activist repeatedly blew into a whistle so vigorously, and so close to my face, that her saliva landed all over my face.
“Sucks when that happens, doesn’t it,” shrieked activist Sadie Kuhns, as she followed us to the police line. Kuhns also accused me of doxxing her through my coverage, which illustrates how she herself frequently posts about her activities at the homes of the justices.
“Bye b—-!” the activists screamed when we departed
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/10/09/womens-march-2022-protesters-harass-daily-signal-reporters/
***************************************************Gabbard leaving the Democratic Party frightens ‘elitist cabal’ in Washington, D.C.
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement on former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii leaving the Democratic Party:
“Former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s decision to leave the Democratic Party should send shivers down the spine of what she calls an ‘elitist cabal’ that controls it. Gabbard is no conservative; she is what the Democrat leadership fears most, an honest liberal. And the former DNC Vice Chairperson from Hawaii is not alone in rejecting the warmongering totalitarian left in expressing dismay at where the liberal elites have gone. Author Naomi Wolfe and former New York Times Editor Bari Weiss are two more examples of liberal opinion leaders who have chosen to speak out against the anti-free speech mantra that has overrun the party of Jefferson and Jackson.
“But the GOP should not become sanguine due to these important defections. Unfortunately, they have their own problems with too many leaders that are either too tepid or blindly accept narratives from the very elitists that Gabbard rejects. Additionally, many of Gabbard’s comments about the elitist cabal on the left sound eerily familiar to those of us who were around during the tea party movement where similar concerns were openly voiced about GOP leadership.
“Americans are sick of uni-party rubber stamp government. The election in November will reflect that rejection of the elites. It will be up to those who replace them to prove that they are not just a new boss who is same as the old boss, to paraphrase The Who song, ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’.”
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Who will defend the white Christian male?
Did you hear about the Muslim who got the sack because of his Islamic beliefs and the Indian who was similarly dismissed because he was a Hindu?
How about the Aborigine who was shown the door because of his traditional beliefs?
You didn’t because these events never occurred and if they had, there would have been shrieks of outrage while accusations of Islamophobia, racism and religious intolerance echoed around the nation and social media erupted in an explosion of condemnation.
If, however, you happen to be a white Christian male with conservative views that don’t align with the woke-Left view of the world and you have your employment terminated because of your religious beliefs, then sorry, mate.
Suck it up. It’s your fault for being a holy-roller and not running with the mob.
My late father once told me that when he was growing up in Brisbane in the 1930s and looking for work as an apprentice, it was not uncommon to see advertisements offering employment, which carried the qualification that “Catholics Need Not Apply”.
Bigotry was entrenched back then and thankfully we now live in a more enlightened age, one in which inclusiveness has become the mantra of the times. Sexual and gender preferences of every alphabetic combination are welcomed.
Corporations laud their inclusiveness and point proudly to their ongoing pursuit of gender balance and a multicultural workforce, but what happens when a white bloke gets the chop because he belongs to a particular Christian church?
Not much, as Andrew Thorburn discovered when he was forced to resign as chief executive of Essendon Football Club the day after he was appointed when the AFL club discovered that the church to which he belonged preached that homosexuality was a sin and was anti-abortion.
Professional football clubs, of course, are paragons of virtue unless you count the revelations of domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse and public affray in which their players so regularly feature.
I’ve no brief for Thorburn. He was forced to step down as head of the National Australia Bank after a royal commission blasted the bank for charging customers $650m in fees for which there was no service.
The issue, however, is not about the man’s business ethics, but about being a Christian in today’s society.
Former prime minister Scott Morrison was regularly lampooned because he openly practised his Christian faith, as was former PM Tony Abbott.
When Dominic Perrottet became NSW Premier, the focus was not of his qualifications for the role, but that he was a Catholic and had six and now seven children.
Had he been a Muslim with a large family, it would have gone unremarked. Rugby player Israel Folau suffered the wrath of the woke Left and paid a price for standing up for his beliefs.
Essendon thought Thorburn, a passionate and long-time supporter of the club, was the right person for the job, but then in a heartbeat, it didn’t. It folded at the first hint of faux outrage.
Thorburn’s church, the City on a Hill, is hardly the only one to have unfashionable views.
According to the Australian National Imans Council: “From the Islamic standpoint, homosexuality is a forbidden action; a major sin and anyone who partakes in it is considered a disobedient servant to Allah that will acquire His displeasure and disapproval.”
Does this mean that all those who have applauded the actions of Essendon, including, to his external disgrace, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, regard Muslims as unsuitable to hold responsible office?
Andrews is a professed Catholic and the Catholic Church is anti-abortion so how can he justify supporting Thorburn’s treatment?
The answer, of course, is that he is a politician with an election coming up and is trying to curry favour with Left-leaning inner-city electors.
The hypocrisy is staggering. Will Essendon now interview all its players and demand to know their views on abortion and homosexuality, tearing up the contracts of those whose beliefs do not coincide with what is believed to be acceptable?
You know the answer.
There’s an ugly undercurrent tugging at our society, one seeking to sweep away those who would stand up for their right to hold Christian beliefs. If we fail to fight against it, we do so at our peril.
Philosopher John Stuart Mill put it succinctly when he wrote: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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