Kyle Harrison
to-read
The Personality Brokers
The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing
- Author
- Merve Emre
- Published
- 2018
- Pages
- 322
- Recommended
- Once
Why it’s on the list: Emre’s history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator — a mother-and-daughter pair with no clinical training, and how their instrument became a corporate industry.
Where I saw it: In the reply thread to @WillManidis’s question, “what is the single best book you can read that will explain an entire industry?” (June 2, 2025) — a crowd-sourced list Kyle recovered by hand and saved to his Apple Note “Books To Read”; the full set of replies lives on what is the single best book… (tweet). It was listed there as “The Personality Brokers”.
Connections
- Psychology — The discipline the test borrowed from.
- Management — Where the instrument actually got used.
- what is the single best book… (tweet) — the thread this recommendation came from.