The Mother-Daughter Duo Behind The World's Most Famous Personality Test
Today, most of the personality tests we see online are silly little quizzes that will tell you if you're a Gryffindor or Hufflepuff. But they haven't always been that way. Isabel Myers, The co-creator of the iconic Myers-Briggs personality assessment, said before her death in 1979: "I dream that long after I'm gone, my work will go on helping people." And though her wish may have come true, her idea of "helping" people isn't as nice as it sounds.
Not Original
Isabel and her mother Kathrine weren't the first to dream up a personality test. The first was called the Army Alpha, which was created in 1917. Designed to make recruiting for the armed forces easier, the program was born from the idea that a simple assessment could determine what a person was like and what role in the workforce best suited them.
Mother-Daughter
Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, couldn't resist the urge to categorize people. Assessing personalities, they thought, had so many useful applications, but no test quite accomplished the feat in a way they thought was most practical. That's what led them to create a metric that millions of people around the world would grow to use daily!
Meet Mother
That metric would eventually be used to determine who a person was and what job they were best suited for. What influenced the test's creation is clear: Just consider the kind of family Katharine Cook Briggs comes from. Born on January 3, 1875, in Ingham County, Michigan. Her family was peculiar, especially for the times.
An Educated Family
The Briggs's believed firmly in education. Katharine's father, Albert Cook (below) was a well-known entomologist and zoologist, and a professor at Michigan State University. Her mother had attended Oberlin College, but one big difference between mom and dad had a major influence on Katharine.