World's Most Popular Personality Test Was Created With An Ulterior Motive In Mind

Today, most of the personality tests we see are harmless little quizzes on social media platforms. But they haven't always been that way. The creator of a very popular personality assessment, Isabel Myers, 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, you'll never guess how she and her mother made it a reality.

Rewind

Personality tests have been around for over a hundred years. 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 a big difference between mom and dad had a major influence on Katharine.