![]() ![]() Following the deaths of two of her children, Katharine Briggs was determined to closely monitor her surviving child, Isabel, and conducted experiments on her and other neighborhood children. The business of personality typing as we know it was seeded in 1901 in a Washington DC living room. “I wanted to understand how these two women who had no formal training in psychology had come to design the world’s most popular personality test,” Emre says in the film. Persona is informed by the 2018 book The Personality Brokers by the Oxford University professor Merve Emre – also one of the documentary’s executive producers – which traces the history of the two women who created the namesake Myers-Briggs instrument. Hawkins’ new HBO Max documentary, Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests, investigates America’s infatuation with personality testing, revealing the surprising origin story behind the MBTI while surfacing ethical questions and criticisms that these seemingly harmless instruments are profoundly discriminatory and reflective of larger troubling issues of who exactly is considered worthy and valuable in society. The pop-culture element, the fact that it was still being used currently in dating apps, and the fact that it was this power structure that was brought to bear on people’s lives without people maybe even noticing” – a theme that resonated with his 2019 documentary XY Chelsea about Chelsea Manning – “that all made me think this was something that I really wanted to look into”. “It dawned on me that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was actually derived from Jung’s work, and that absolutely fascinated me. The four letters appeared again a few years later when Hawkins was reading about Carl Jung. The four letters issue from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the world’s most well-known personality quiz, which categorizes everyone into 16 distinct types gleaned from four binaries: people are either introverted or extroverted, sensing (relying on evidence from one’s senses) or intuitive, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving.
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