4 Personality types, only 4?
By now, I’m sure many of you have read about the 4 personality types that have come out of the research from Profs. Amaral and Revelle at Northwestern University. I think it’s interesting to see engineering and psychology come together for a study like this.
September 19, 2018
Di Cleverly, have you seen this video?
September 19, 2018
3 options high in extroversion and only one that’s not very extroverted. Apparently people with social anxiety or introversion aren’t people.
September 19, 2018
Chad Haney lol I shared it a few days ago! Great minds think alike!
September 19, 2018
Di Cleverly I knew you shared something about the study. I wasn’t sure if you saw the video.
September 19, 2018
The video was embedded in the article, yeah.
September 19, 2018
…/ reclusive /
September 19, 2018
Jess Nut …/ there are people–where there isn’t culture–you have…confusion.
September 19, 2018
Di Cleverly I missed that part.
September 19, 2018
I’m not one of the “lumps in the batter,” though I’m closest to ‘reserved’ … I just have a high ‘openness’ score. But it’s kind of amazing how much discussion I’ve seen about their work where people are assuming that because they found 4 clusters that therefore everyone must belong to one of them.
September 19, 2018
Mark Mocarski enlighten me
September 19, 2018
Michael J. Coffey if you are making a statement of “there are 4 of x” like “there are four types of dogs” then of course people are addressing it as all dogs have to fit in those four groups, because that’s what you are stating.
This doesn’t say “we found the 4 most common” this states that there are 4. If you have people who fall outside of those 4 groups, then you don’t have 4 groups, you have 5, your four groups and everyone else.
September 19, 2018
Jess Nut — That’s a failure of either the reporting, or of people actually paying attention to what the research says. The video points out “You can call them ‘types’ but they’re not clearly separable types. They’re lumps in the batter…” In other words, there are 4 clusters, but that doesn’t mean everyone fits into one of the clusters. The fact that people jump to that conclusion is what I’m surprised by.
And, like I said above, I don’t fit in any of those clusters. It’s just that many people do. And many people have other patterns than those four clusters.
In other articles about this study, they quote the authors talking about it like the fact that most people in the US live in big cities, but you can’t assume that everyone lives in a city. You can still say “There are X big cities in the US” doesn’t imply “Everyone lives in one of the big cities.”
Edit: From the study itself: “We can obtain a more nuanced view by addressing the question of the degree of clustering by visually exploring densities in suitably defined 2D hyperplanes (Supplementary Fig. 5). Although there is a considerable overlap between different clusters, we not only find that individual cluster centers are located in regions of higher-than-expected density but also identify neighboring significant volumes of ‘void’ space in which the density of individuals is much lower than expected.” So even these four substantially overlap…meaning you can’t clearly place some people into one group. They’re in the overlap in a Venn diagram.
If you follow the “Nature Human Behavior” link in the second paragraph here, you can see the full paper for free: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/09/17/scientists-identify-four-personality-types/?utm_term=.1035851bf278
September 19, 2018
Jess Nut … No–you lose./
September 19, 2018
I would like to take this time to remind everybody that Myers-Briggs is unsupported bunk, and so is Jung.
That doesn’t mean they’re 100% wrong, that would be fairly unlikely… but they’re not something to compare to or use with any evidential value.
September 19, 2018
I’m skeptical since they basically said they used college aged boys on account of being very highly self centered (which I dont’ really disagree with, lol) to calibrate this.
I scored… not really reserved, not really role model. Low neuroticity, so not average, low in extroversion but high in open, so… ?
September 19, 2018
Michael J. Coffey so it’s a bad conclusion based on bad data, got it.
September 19, 2018
Cindy Brown — We’re both not part of the clusters. I’m also high in openness. The only possibility for that trait would be Role Model, but that requires being high in everything except neuroticism which needs to be below average. Basically it says to me that being open minded is uncommon, therefore it’s not where people cluster.
September 19, 2018
Jess Nut — No, it’s bad reporting and people not actually reading the study. Reality isn’t clear-cut. There are statistical clusters, but they overlap with each other and don’t include everyone. The authors of the paper never claimed anything otherwise–just that there are patterns in the data where some people thought there wouldn’t be.
September 19, 2018
Jess Nut What if “introverted” translates fairly frequently to “reserved”?
Personally, I think “introverted” sounds like a disease, when really it’s just “not being an invasive loudmouth” (and I admit I am probably one of the latter).
September 19, 2018
Michael J. Coffey That’s how I read it, too–they found patterns, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s in those patterns. I did find it interesting, and I did find the parameters they listed as matching. I just don’t match to any of those particular clusters.
September 19, 2018
Michael J. Coffey Ah yeah. The common problem with scientific studies. Someone tries to dumb them down and ends up changing the whole point of the study.
September 19, 2018
Andreas Geisler Sure, but they only had on possibly group “reserved” for all introverts everywhere to fit in. I hang with a pretty reclusive crowd and we have plenty of loudmouth jerks, they just need the right social scenario (like the anonymity of the internet) to speak up.
September 19, 2018
Jess Nut A “type” in a non-woo classification is just a combination that is common. It doesn’t have to be an exhaustive list, it doesn’t have to cover all combinations, and not everybody needs to belong to a type.
That, if anything, speaks favorably of the study. A woo-artist would want something neater, something more symmetrical, with some nice oppositions.
But that’s that Jung crap we know to be bunk.
September 19, 2018
The common problem with scientific studies. Someone tries to dumb them down and ends up changing the whole point of the study.
Jess Nut it’s amazing how many times the PR department at a university will exaggerate or grossly misreport the findings of a study. I kind of expect that from main stream media but I’m still surprised and disappointed to see it at the universities.
September 19, 2018
Chad Haney They are interested in getting funding, not spreading knowledge.
September 20, 2018
Founder of Hogwarts: Okay, so we all know there are four types of kid: Brave, Smart, Evil, and Miscellaneous…
September 20, 2018
An additional thing to the previous discussion of introvert/extrovert, the Big 5 uses a slightly different definition than the layman’s “where you get your energy” — it’s more about stimulation lever. Extroverts seek out stimulation (bright lights, loud sounds, lots of people doing exciting things) and introverts seek to limit or constrain the amount of stimulation they’re getting. Both ends of that particular range are happier when they’re interacting with people, as long as it’s at the right stimulation level. Introverts want to be away from people because it’s easier to manage stimulation in that kind of situation, not because they don’t want to be around people. They (we) just don’t want to be around lots of loud and unpredictable people all at once. We’d rather be around a few people who we can roughly predict how they’ll behave.
September 20, 2018
In America being self centered is the average. Omg my selfie had 3,000 likes!!!