The $2 billion question is Who are you at work?

Isabel Myers-Briggs: What was wrong with a person? The M.B.T.I. test for different types of personality

The others didn’t have an intrinsic meaning that theMyers-Briggs test did. Most existing tests concluded that each personality category had a positive and a negative: An extrovert was good, an introvert was bad, for instance. But Myers felt that each personality type had strengths and weaknesses. Rather than build a test that favored one over another, hers was judgment-free. She and her mother described their personality types in terms of strengths and “gifts” and how those could clarify whether a person was the right “fit” for a job, a career or even a social affair. It gave people a way to describe their best selves.

“We sometimes say that Isabel was the first positive psychologist,” Elizabeth Styron, chairwoman of the nonprofit Center for Applications of Psychological Types, an M.B.T.I. research center, said in a phone interview, referring to a branch of psychology that took off in the 1980s. What’s right with a person is not what’s wrong with a person.

The mother-daughter team became a creative sales force as well. She was trying to find some guinea pigs and promoted her product. Incoming students to the George Washington University medical school took the test as did her son’s high school class. Dozens of medical schools around the country were added to her list. She scored all of the tests by hand because she wrote all the questions.

Myers kept going nonetheless, and in 1956 she started working with Henry Chauncey, the president of the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, to publish the M.B.T.I. The tool posited that the four dimensions of personality produced a total of 16 possible types, all noted with initials.

The first dimension is whether an individual is an introvert (I) or extrovert (E). The first is how a person sees the world by using two words, either S or N. A third focused on how an individual makes decisions, either in a “thinking” (T) manner or a “feeling” (F) manner. The final dimension is based on how a person deals with the outside world, either “judging” (J) or “perceiving” (P). Judging is a structured, organized approach, while perceiving means someone has an adaptable, flexible, spontaneous relationship with the outside world.

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Myers herself was a proud I.N.F.P., which she described as someone with a “great faithfulness to duty and obligations” who did not pass judgment on others. Her mother was from I.N.F.J.

At Scotiabank, which has 90,000 workers, executives decided in late 2020 to stop looking at résumés for applicants coming out of school. The campus hiring program is now focused partly on Plum results, and the new approach is bringing in more diverse candidates, the bank said, because hiring managers are looking beyond familiar credentials. The percentage of new hires that are black rose to 6 percent from 1 percent, and over half of the hires are women.

In recent years, personality testing has been more rigorous. Assessments developed by psychologists are more fair than they used to be. There are some personality tests that use the “Big 5” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

“Human behavior is complex, people are complex, situations are complex,” said Ben Dattner, an organizational psychologist and executive coach, noting that studying personalities in all their complexity is still helpful for career development. Psychometrics can help identify where a person might need feedback or coaching, and where they may have blind spots.

The tests can be used to look at things other than a diagnosis but they are also a great place for people to talk about their relationships in the office. Identifying as a Blue, through the Color Code, might not feel all that relevant to quarterly sales quotas — but at least, among teammates, it can be a conversation starter.