What do Tim Tebow and Tom Petty have in common?
No, not Gainesville or the University of Florida. They’ve both exhibited the ISFJ personality type, according to the Personality Database.
This four-letter combination is one of 16 personality types in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the most widely used test for personality. Millions of people take the test each year.
Millions more take online quizzes to learn which Harry Potter house they’d belong to or what race from “The Lord of the Rings” best fits them.
From Snape and Hagrid to elves and ents, online sites give play answers to random quizzes. But the desire to peer deeper into what makes us tick is real, and researchers have dedicated careers to establish solid ground.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was developed over decades by a mother-daughter team. Their first copyright came in 1943, and on the ground persistence led to thousands of initial test results and further refinement.
Katherine Cook Briggs and daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, lived and worked primarily in the northern United States, but like Petty and Tebow, they’ve also got a Gainesville and UF connection.
That’s why the Myers & Briggs Foundation, the exclusive public MBTI Certification Program administrator of the MBTI, sits nestled behind Gainesville City Hall in a single-story brick building.
The reason: University of Florida researcher Mary McCaulley and a 2023 merger.
Mark Enting, president of the Myers & Briggs Foundation, said people are often surprised to learn that MBTI is headquartered in Gainesville, but he’s trying to increase awareness and local impact.
“We have a super-rich history, and this organization, I think, just adds to the uniqueness of Gainesville, Florida,” Enting said.
Myers and Briggs
Always interested in personalities, Briggs had developed her own theory on the matter, grouping thinking types, executive types and more, but an English translation of Carl Jung’s “Psychological Types” in 1923 supercharged the work.
Briggs burned her notes (which Jung later told her she shouldn’t have done) and dove into his theory. Briggs ate, drank and slept types in the following years, and Myers and her husband, Clarence, followed suit. Then World War II started, and their work seemed too important to keep in the family.
“It seemed to us that a much more useful use could be made of available manpower if the people got the right jobs,” Myers recalled at a 1973 talk in Gainesville. “It would be easier to assign them to jobs where they would be content and effective if you knew their type.”
The two filed a copyright for the first version of MBTI in 1943. Starting with family and friends, the pair tested thousands of people in the next 20 years.
In the same 1973 talk for the American Association of Medical Colleges, Myers notes that the original test was called the Briggs Myers Type Indicator. It seemed proper, she said, that the elder should be named before the younger.
But they ran into trouble. With marriage, Myers’ full name included her maiden name—Isabel Briggs Myers. This led to people thinking the test was just named after Isabel, and some started to put a hyphen between Briggs and Myers on the test.
“So, to make perfectly obvious the fact that my mother was in on it, I turned it around and made it Myers Briggs,” Myers said. “Now people don’t know what to call me. So now you know all about it.”
Myers and Briggs hit a milestone in 1962 when the Educational Testing Service agreed to use the MBTI. Myers, wanting to start as early as possible, personally approached high schools to give the test to juniors and seniors.
She ended up with 10,000 test results to comb through and took the printouts to her family vacation in Bermuda. MBTI kept getting taken, piling up the data.
In 1968, Briggs passed away at 93. The next year, a new partner joined.
Mary McCaulley and MBTI’s growth
McCaulley was a clinical psychologist at UF, and she reached out to Myers in 1969 about the MBTI. A close collegial friendship formed.
Myers and McCaulley started the Typology Lab at UF and a data bank for the research. McCaulley helped spearhead research and development for MBTI and personality types.
The lab turned into a nonprofit, the Center for Applications of Psychological Type (CAPT), in 1975. The organization continued the work outside the university and would eventually contain the Isabel Myers Library.
In 1975, another partnership would grow MBTI’s use worldwide. After struggling to work with publishers to print the test, Consulting Psychologists Press and Jack Black reached out from California and wanted to publish the MBTI.
Publishing with the company allowed the test to be accessible to qualified users through a catalogue. The MBTI was now on the way to becoming the most widely used personality assessment.
Myers carefully thought about how the MBTI was distributed, specifically not allowing its use behind the Iron Curtain. Her concern was a twisting of the instrument to find dissenters, and an incident in the United States drove the point home.
Frances Wright Saunders wrote about the incident in her biography, “Katherine and Isabel: Mother’s Light, Daughter’s Journey.”
“An unfortunate experience was still fresh in her mind when a bank, after giving the MBTI to its employees, fired all of the intuitives ‘because they were trouble makers’,” the book records.
During this time, Myers began work on a new manual for the test. However, she also told Black that McCaulley would have some ideas for the manual. Eventually, she also acquiesced to formatting decisions by Black and Consulting Psychologists Press.
With the new publisher, the MBTI took off just a few years before Myers’ death in 1980 at age 82, leaving the work to her family, McCaulley, CAPT and Black.
“[Myers] lived to see the Indicator, her life’s work, at last in the hands of a publisher who valued its potential almost as much as she thought it deserved,” Saunders wrote in the biography.
McCaulley would work in the coming decades to guide CAPT and to bridge the gaps between people through training, publishing and research into personality types. She helped create the Atlas of Type catalogs and the Selection Ratio Type Table for type distribution in groups.
In Myers’ last days, she and McCaulley worked on the Step III version of MBTI, and McCaulley would later move to computerize the test.
“If not for McCaulley, MBTI personality type would not have the depth of legacy that it enjoys today,” the Myers & Briggs Foundation notes on its website.
The foundation
In 2003, Myers’ remaining family started the foundation to further the research and training of MBTI. It worked in parallel with CAPT for nearly 20 years before merging in 2023.
Enting said two organizations, both nonprofits, did the same work. Merging allowed reduced overhead, and the Myers & Briggs Foundation absorbed CAPT. Since combining, Enting said the foundation is working through a new evolution.
“Part of that evolution is focusing on where, how, what we feel our responsibility is to MBTI and type in the world as the owners of the MBTI, and where we see that work happening is through education, through research and through community building,” Enting said.
The merger also coincided with a move. The Myers & Briggs Foundation and CAPT have been in Gainesville for decades, but were located off NW 13th Street in the Bank of America building.
Enting said the only sign on the street said CAPT. Easy enough for someone searching for the sign, but not helpful to Gainesville residents coming past.
When a building on NE 1st Street opened, the foundation moved. Enting said it served to bring the nonprofit closer to the community than the fourth floor of a bank building.
The new location displays the Myers & Briggs Foundation on the outside and serves as marketing. Enting said the foundation wants to use its expertise to help nonprofits, companies, educators and others.
He said the foundation already has strong roots in research and education. Hosting the largest library on psychological types, the foundation helps researchers around the world access data and information. The foundation also has grants to further type research.
But the community piece, assisting where the foundation is located, is still a work in progress, Enting said.
The foundation hosted an open house with the Greater Gainesville Chamber of Commerce in February. Enting said its part of making connections and looking for opportunities to help.
“We’ve got big ideas,” Enting said. “Don’t know how we’re going to get there, but again, we know we’ve got something that is unique and can go through people’s lives in so many different ways.”