Outline for april 14, Club of
Personality types and your
brain
The human
mind is a complex machine with according to some just some hardware-software
and wetware, others see quite a virtual part to it. Mind and brain are (at
least) related, and it has been a fascination of psychologist (and HR
specialists) to see how a person uses his or her brain, how that relates to
thinking, feeling and acting, especially in relation to others and the world.
We like systems and classifications, so many typologies have evolved over time, from the Ayurvedic, the astrological and Greco-Egyptian four temperaments or humours, which Galen named "sanguine", "melancholic", "choleric" and "phlegmatic" to the modern Big Five, the MBTI, the left/right hemispheric brain model, the now discarded MacLean Triune Brain theory, the A/B type of leader/follower and more esoteric forms like the enneagram. In contemporary psychology the most accepted is, apart from Right/Left separation, the "Big Five" factors (or Five Factor Model; FFM) model of personality, with five broad domains or dimensions of personality, openness (intellect), conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (OCEAN, or CANOE if rearranged). The neuroticism factor is sometimes referred to as "emotional stability". These factor are clusters of more specific traits that correlate together. For example, extraversion includes such related qualities as gregariousness, assertiveness, excitement seeking, warmth, activity. There is no underlying neurological or systematic model, it is a language-based factor-analysis statistical model, like the somewhat more elaborate 16 Personality Factors, by psychologist Raymond Cattell. The Big Five approach does have a positive correlation with the DSM-IV and all five factors show an influence from both heredity and environment around the 50/50 nature/nurture level. The HEXACO model of personality structure summarizes human personality characteristics in terms of six dimensions, or factors: Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), Extraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (O). Higher levels of Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness factors are believed to represent two different aspects of a tendency toward reciprocally altruistic behavior, whereas higher levels of Emotionality represents a tendency toward kin altruistic behavior (and toward personal and kin survival more generally).
In the sixties it
was asserted that personality tests could not predict
behavior with a significant
correlation as attitudes and behavior
were not stable, but varied
with the situation. Predicting specific behavior by personality tests was then considered to be
impossible, but later it was accepted that patterns of behavior
by aggregating would yield some insights and that a “personality” does in fact
exist.
It was Jung who, based on his observations in therapy, came up with another classification or typology of thinking styles, which was later more or less confirmed by brain-research. His four basic criteria in two axes: Sensing - Intuition (which turned out to be more willing) and Thinking - Feeling can be mapped on the neocortex, and his Extraversion - Introversion adds the behavioural component towards the world. It is remarkable, that the thinking-feeling opposites in brain-structure terms have no direct link (there are no diagonal links in the brain), Jung must have been a very good observer.
The Meyers-Briggs approach adds Judging/Perceiving to the Jung approach and is used a lot in de USA (military etc.) and has 16 types, but again no underlying model apart from Jung’s insights.
A typology with a systemati
c approach is the enneagram, using
body-heart-mind and extrovert-denial-introvert to give 9 types with a specific relationships between the types, based on
the figure 7. It has been used
by Gurdfieff and Ichazo, but it’s
origing remains clouded.
All these typologies have some
value, it’s the practitioner who makes it useful, but it must be noted that
there are two major problems;
First, typology
tend to be used as a framing tool, narrowing the broad possibilities of
each individual. In modern times, with large databases, this also has the
danger of privacy degradation and profiling. Profiling is using various
characteristics to identify narrow subgroups, like potential criminals,
psychopaths, health-risks, insurance risks and is more and more used, in
marketing, law&order and medicine. Social media,
government databanks, email files, voice prints are potential “shadows” in this
respect.
Secondly, none of the typologies gives a good account of the development
of the psyche as one grows up and matures. The lack of a broad psychological or
neurological model or theory that describes how we grow and change, how nature
and nurture interact, how morality, ethics, happiness, ambition, belief,
intention and ability are related to behaviour has lead to many books and great
ideas, but not (yet) to a commonly accepted idea.
I believe, that we have to dig deeper into how the relation between inner
world (our mind) and outer world (ideas & tangible or virtual and real)
works, how mind and matter interact and how information in a very broad sense
is what links us (I), all and everything together.
The question whether a typology can help identify more effective or more
creative people in the working environment remains open, it helps as a tool in
HR-work and for therapeutic analysis, but has no absolute validity.
Ir. Luc Sala is a physicist and economist by training, but worked all
his life in the media as entrepreneur, television maker, writer, journalist and
publisher. He has written thousands of articles and a dozen books about many
subjects, from ICT to the esoteric. His fancy is understanding
information and how humans use information. His website is www.lucsala.nl