This article is part of a series of obituaries about people who died but weren't reported.
In the early months of World War II, as Hitler's armies tore through Europe, a part-time crime writer and mother of two in Pennsylvania found a Reader's Digest article with the headline, "Fitting the Worker to the Job."
The article caught the attention of a lot of people. She was a nurse with the Red Cross and a spotter for the Civil Air Patrol. Matching the right people with the right jobs is a crucial process in the run up to U.S. intervention in Europe.
She wrote to her mother, a magazine writer with a passion for the ideas of Karl Jung, who was a mentor to Freud.
The mother and daughter threw themselves into the task, asking questions to identify people according to their personality types.
One of the most widely used personality assessments in the world is the M.B.T.I. There are more than two million people who take the test.
The popularity of the test is due to the ingenuity of the two women and their commercial instincts. America was starting to feel its industrial power and needed to measure it. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Thematic Apperception Test, and the Rorschach inkblot test were all used.
The others didn't have the same quality of the test. The tests concluded that a person's personality category had a positive or a negative answer. Each personality type had strengths and weaknesses, according to the man. She didn't build a test that favored one over the others. She and her mother talked about their strengths and gifts and how they could be used to help determine if a person was a good fit for a job, a career or a social affair. It gave people a way to describe their best selves.
The Center for Applications of Psychological Types, an M.B.T.I. research center, says that Isabel was the first positive psychologist. What is right with a person is more important than what is wrong with a person.
The mother-daughter team was also a sales force. Her product was promoted while she was looking for animals. Incoming students and her son's high school class took the test. Dozens of medical schools were added to her list soon. She scored all the tests by hand after writing all the questions.
She fought against sexism and skepticism. Critics pointed out that neither of them had a degree in psychology, they were just amateur house wives. The critics said that their personality indicator had no peer-reviewed research to back it up. It wasn't more effective than reading a person's horoscope.
The M.B.T.I. was published in 1956 by the Educational Testing Service and was based on the four dimensions of personality.
If an individual is an I or E, that's the first dimensions. The second is the way a person sees the world. A third looked at how an individual makes decisions, either in a thinking or feeling way. A person's final dimensions are based on how they deal with the outside world. There is a structured, organized approach to judging and a different approach to perceiving.
She described herself as an I.N.F.P. who did not pass judgement on others. She was an I.N.F.J. child.
More institutions began to use the test after it became fun. The M.B.T.I. was available in 29 languages and was used in 115 countries.
Albert and Mary (BaldWIN) Cook had a daughter named Katharine Elizabeth Cook. She was encouraged by her parents to read, think about the world and try new things.
Among almost 100 men, she was one of nine women. She finished second in her class. The theory of evolution was taught to her father by a professor at the school. She considered how to balance societal expectations of her gender with her intellectual ambitions.
She was caught in a restraining net woven of sexism, cultural conditioning and her own brilliance.
In 1896, she married an engineer and physicist, and instead of pursuing a career in that field, decided to focus on her family.
Merve Emre wrote in "The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing" that after the birth of her daughter, Isabel McKelveyBriggs, her living room became a "cosmic laboratory of baby training". She home-schooled Isabel and kept her observations in a notebook.
She used a pseudonym for herself, Elizabeth Childe, and wrote essays about child rearing for The Ladies' Home Journal. She began writing "The Education of Suzanne" in 1910.
She was given a structure with which to expand her ideas after she discovered Jung. She met him when he visited America. She explained how readers could use the box to learn about themselves in an article she wrote for The New Republic.
The earliest iteration of what would become the M.B.T.I. was her concept.
Isabel became as devoted a mother as her own had been after she married a lawyer. In 1929, she entered her first novel, "Murder Yet to Come," in a contest and won. She lost all of her money in the stock market crash.
The book "Murder Yet to Come" became a best seller. A murder mystery set in Philadelphia after the 1929 stock market crash was published by IsabelMyers in 1934. Both were very unsuccessful.
When she started working for the Pennsylvania Company for Banking and Trusts, she learned that the personnel director had knowledge of job performance ratings. Her husband helped her file for a copyrighted work.
The M.B.T.I. was the best-selling product after she signed a contract with a California publisher.
There was a death on July 10, 1968. On May 5, 1980, he passed away at the age of 81.
The test's appeal to managers has made it a target for researchers. The documentary suggested that using personality tests on a large scale was dangerous. The film suggests that test givers may be influenced by unconscious biases and that they are given too much say in who gets a job.
In an email, Emre said that institutions that use type enable structural racism and other forms of discrimination to persist.
Kathleen Hughes, a journalist, said that her grandmother took pains to make sure that her work was inclusive, as evidenced by the title of the book that she wrote with her son.
She hoped the indicator could help prevent another Hitler by giving as many people as possible a greater understanding and respect for individual differences.
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