Water Cooler: Personality theories — Where do you fall?
Who are you? Really? There are thousands of quizzes online that will tell you what type of wine, sandwich, Hogwarts house, chair or color you are. Two personality theories that have gained a big following, especially in the internet age, are the Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. You may be big into horoscopes and secretly assess your relatives and friends thinking to yourself, “Oh that is such a Capricorn thing to say.”
None of these measures of personality is based in modern scientific research but that doesn’t stop organizations and individuals alike from using them as tools for assessing people in day-to-day life to do things like determine what career best suits you or to analyze why someone seems more prone to drama. Personality tests are fun, but is there any validity to any of it? Does evidence-based psychology have something to offer instead? Where did the idea of personality even come from and is it even reasonable to type them into commonly occurring groups?
In ancient times, Greek physician Hippocrates believed humans could fall into categories of four temperaments: sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic. Who wouldn’t want to be typed as phlegmatic? These were based on the ancient medical concept of humorism which asserts that human personality was influenced by a balance of blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Appetizing.
Ayurvedic medicine holds a similar concept, that three elementary bodily humors, the doshas of vata (space or air), pitta (fire) and kapha (earth and water) influenced a person’s psychology. Traditional Chinese medicine attempted to explain personality with a balance of the five elements: earth, wind, water, metal and fire. Freud thought of personality as something determined by the battle of id, the unconscious energy; superego, the internalized ideals; and ego, the consciousness that made peace between the id and the superego. More recently Abraham Maslow thought that self-actualization was found through a fulfillment of hierarchy of innate human needs.
All of this is to say that humans have long sought to answer why they are who they are and what really is the “self.” Personality theories and quizzes are often entertaining and there is nothing inherently wrong with them. People love to compare results and relate to whatever category they fell in. As long as they are taken with a grain of salt and not used in place of evidence-based psychology to make fixed determinations about a person’s nature, they seem to be relatively harmless.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, seems to be the most popularized assessment these days as corporations embraced it as a sort of team-building mechanism to determine workplace preferences and natural abilities. It likely gained footing because it is based on early personality theories put forward by Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, who aimed to integrate empirical science into Freud’s psychoanalytic theories.
His work on personality, published in his book “Psychological Types,” sought to add a typed classification to the concept of personality by identifying four “functions of consciousness.” These four functions are broken into two groups, perceiving and judging.
Perceiving referred to how a person preferred to gather information. He theorized that the functions involved with perceiving were sensation and intuition. A person that preferred sensation was one who trusted tangible and concrete information taken in by the five senses. A person that preferred intuition trusted insight from the unconscious mind that was abstract and theoretical.
Judging referred to how a person preferred to make decisions. The functions he thought to be involved in judging were thinking and feeling. Those who preferred thinking seemed to use their gathered information to make decisions in a way that was logical, detached and consistent. Those who preferred feeling seemed to use their gathered information to make decisions based on empathetic and emotional assessments.
The English translation of Jung’s “Psychological Types” was published in 1923. An American woman, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, studied Jung’s work extensively and during WWII they began to create a personality indicator that would help women entering the workforce identify which sort of wartime jobs best suited them. Neither Briggs nor Myers had formal education in psychology and was self-taught in psychometric testing in order to aid the construction of their testing methods and development of their indicator.
Because of their lack of formal training and Jung’s lack of controlled scientific studies in the development of his psychological type theory, MBTI has been overwhelmingly discredited by the scientific community. One of the largest critiques of this theory is how much it leans on binary concepts and the irrelevancy of the personality indicators it uses.
In modern personality psychology, trait theory, which is one approach to the study of human personality, uses what is called the Big Five personality traits. This theory has identified five recurring factors which were found over time across multiple studies and different cultures. They are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Within each factor there are several associated qualities, such as assertiveness, warmth, activity, positive emotions, etc. This theory considers the influence of situational context on a person’s personality as well as family life and upbringing. Instead of being assessed in a binary fashion, they are measured on a spectrum and avoid the pitfall of asserting that one person experiences only the extremes of each trait. You can find online tests for this theory, but they usually don’t tell you which type you are, just the individual aspects of your personality.
Not having a specific type to which you identify yourself may not be as appealing to some, but this is the current model with the most evidence-based research behind it. Of course no one theory can determine just exactly who you are or predict accurately how you will behave in every scenario, but the study of personality has very wide appeal. Whether you use these theories just for fun or for more in-depth self-reflection, there is a lot to choose from and a lot to consider. At any rate, it can be an entertaining way to whittle away some more time in quarantine.