People Tend To Cluster Into Four Distinct Personality 'Types,' Says Study (arstechnica.com) 214
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A new study has sifted through some of the largest online data sets of personality quizzes and identified four distinct "types" therein. The new methodology used for this study -- described in detail in a new paper in Nature Human Behavior -- is rigorous and replicable, which could help move personality typing analysis out of the dubious self-help section in your local bookstore and into serious scientific journals. What's new here is the identification of four dominant clusters in the overall distribution of traits. [Paper co-author William Revelle (Northwestern University)] prefers to think of them as "lumps in the batter" and suggests that a good analogy would be how people tend to concentrate in cities in the United States. The Northwestern researchers used publicly available data from online quizzes taken by 1.5 million people around the world. That data was then plotted in accordance with the so-called Big Five basic personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The Big Five is currently the professional standard for social psychologists who study personality. (Here's a good summary of what each of those traits means to psychologists.) They then applied their algorithms to the resulting dataset. Here are the four distinct personality clusters that the researchers ended up with:
Average: These people score high in neuroticism and extraversion, but score low in openness. It is the most typical category, with women being more likely than men to fit into it.
Reserved: This type of person is stable emotionally without being especially open or neurotic. They tend to score lower on extraversion but tend to be somewhat agreeable and conscientious.
Role Models: These people score high in every trait except neuroticism, and the likelihood that someone fits into this category increases dramatically as they age. "These are people who are dependable and open to new ideas," says Amaral. "These are good people to be in charge of things." Women are more likely than men to be role models.
Self-Centered: These people score very high in extraversion, but score low in openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Most teenage boys would fall into this category, according to Revelle, before (hopefully) maturing out of it. The number of people who fall into this category decreases dramatically with age.
Average: These people score high in neuroticism and extraversion, but score low in openness. It is the most typical category, with women being more likely than men to fit into it.
Reserved: This type of person is stable emotionally without being especially open or neurotic. They tend to score lower on extraversion but tend to be somewhat agreeable and conscientious.
Role Models: These people score high in every trait except neuroticism, and the likelihood that someone fits into this category increases dramatically as they age. "These are people who are dependable and open to new ideas," says Amaral. "These are good people to be in charge of things." Women are more likely than men to be role models.
Self-Centered: These people score very high in extraversion, but score low in openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Most teenage boys would fall into this category, according to Revelle, before (hopefully) maturing out of it. The number of people who fall into this category decreases dramatically with age.
Average? (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds like this article is calling out basic bitches.
Shame because the phenomena crosses the genders.
Weird. I saw it the opposite (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks like the article is calling males Average, self-centered, or betas; it's promoting that most organizations should be run by older women.
Look. They even bias the categories by labeling one of them "Role Models". Fuck that noise; I think extroverts are not role models; I think the world would be better served by promoting the reserved to higher positions—and you'll note that's the only category where they conveniently leave out gender.
Re:Weird. I saw it the opposite (Score:5, Interesting)
'Role models' are the people that have figured out the 'right' answers to personality test questions.
Why it increases with age, people learn to lie better.
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Here is how it works, average people, people who don't understand what is going on but are trying to socially participate as much as possible, believing it is the right thing to do, maybe. Reserved, people who understand what is going on but only want to participate as much as is necessary because yeah, most of what is going on is utter bullshit based in empty beliefs. Role models, don't think high level role models, think low level role models, how to cook, clean and look after yourself, the value of good
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Downright anti-autistic and sexist, you are.
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It looks like the article is calling males Average, self-centered, or betas; it's promoting that most organizations should be run by older women.
What are you reading? It specifically says, in the summary no less, that females are more likely to be average. And the word "beta" appears nowhere in any of the linked articles or the summary or anywhere except in your post. And why would it? A/B personality theory has been pretty soundly rejected, it mostly only persists in pop psychology.
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It's just a shit study, I wouldn't read any more into it than that.
Alpha/beta males aren't even a thing. Even the guy who invented the term has disowned it and wrote a whole book correcting himself.
Re: Weird. I saw it the opposite (Score:2, Insightful)
Capitalism rewards a small subset of objectively good human qualities, and some objectively bad qualities. Financial success is not a good indicator of how well an individual fits into society.
Two examples: Being close to your children helps them mature into well rounded adults, but often requires you to work less. Being self-centered and opportunistic makes you money but no friends.
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If you weren't AC, I'd say mod parent up.
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Sounds to me like it's downright sexism. Women are average, teenage boys are selfish and evil.
Reliable data source (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a reliable data source, free from built-in bias ("INQPTJLMNOP!") and hidden assumptions ("INTROVERT!")
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in the post truth world, its creditable that they attempted to actually find a data source, that they actually might have even used to support their conclusions.
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Yeah. Even if most personality quizzes were answered honestly, rather than giving ridiculous answers being practically the point of taking them, the data set would still suffer a horrible selection bias in that it only evaluates the sort of people who like taking obviously nonsensical personality quizzes.
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I agree that there's a question about the reliability of the data if they're gathering it from online quizzes, but that's not even the first thing that comes to mind. What I always wonder when they have these kinds of personality tests is, how are they even coming up with these things?
These personality tests always seem suspect to me. They question will be something like, "Consider the statement, 'I care deeply about other people's emotions.' Do you strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, somewhat agree,
humors me (Score:2, Insightful)
>largest online data sets of personality quizzes
LOL, no wonder there's a replication crisis in the social sciences field.
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Please, we've been over this. (Score:3)
The four personality types are: moist and warm, warm and dry, dry and cold, and cold and moist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism
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What about moist and crumbly? Thixotropic?
There are two types (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who divide people into two types and those who don't.
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Damn, I fail at the original and now I fail at this too, because I use either less or more...
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To me there are 11 types of people. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
(If you reply, think again before you reply.)
Indeed.. and they are called... 00, 01, 10 and 11 (0, 1, 2 and 3, very fitting since an array also begins at index 0) :-)
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But the article says there are 100 types. Didn't you RTFA?
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there are 100 types
I only counted FF types. Which one did I miss?
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Let me guess; those who understand binary and those who don't?
They never reveal who the other 8 are. :p
slashdotters...5th type? (Score:5, Funny)
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We don't show up on surveys because pollsters never encounter us: we are in basements trolling around on Slashdot eating delivered pizza.
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Misandric Much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lot of male hating going on in this so called study. Self centered especially.
Also women are more average and role models? So what is it? Can't have more of each unless they're 50/50.
With all due respect, most women make terrible role models, especially for boys. They tend to be stuck in their ways and offer advice from their own feminine perspective discounting what boys really need to do in order to strike out on their own.
Sorry mlds for the unpopular truth. I'll take a hit in karma because that's the reality of what I've seen.
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First, you misunderstood what the summary said. The statements "women are more likely than men to be average" and "women are more likely than men to be role models" do not contradict, because they do NOT imply "most women are average" and "most women are role models". Nor does stating that "most teenage boys are self-centered" automatically imply misandry, especially if the stats back it up.
Second, don't confuse their definition of "role model" with your commonsense use of the term. For example, agreeabl
Re:Misandric Much? (Score:5, Interesting)
Teenagers are self centered, duh. Calling out boys is what makes it misandry.
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Funny how, if data apparently supports that women do not suit tech roles, it's just the facts. But if data apparently supports that boys are self-centered, it's misandry.
It's always been okay for society to go soft on women and hard on men. Modern society is nothing new.
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What data? All I see is bold assertions by 'researchers' with an obvious axe to grind.
Re:Misandric Much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude have you ever seen a single chick flick in your entire life. If teenage boys are simply self centred then teenage girls are frankly sadistic in comparison.
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Re:Misandric Much? (Score:2, Informative)
Dude have you ever seen a single chick flick in your entire life. If teenage boys are simply self centred then teenage girls are frankly sadistic in comparison.
Dude have you seen a single horror flick in your entire life? If teenage girls are sadistic then teenage boys are either suicidally stupid or bloodthirsty psychopaths wearing clown masks.
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Maybe the lesson is that the human race is full of narcissistic self-centered assholes that are selfish for a variety of reasons. If we don't kill ourselves off (relatively) quickly via war, we'll kill ourselves off slowly via general negligence. Ultimately we are fucked, and arguments about whether or not chick flicks or horror movies showcase worse psychosis is like arguing whether or not the band on the titanic was religiously insensitive for playing "Nearer my God to Thee" as their last song. On the o
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Maybe the lesson is that the human race is full of narcissistic self-centered assholes that are selfish for a variety of reasons.
The lesson is that films are not a good way to judge the behaviour of large groups of people.
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Dude have you ever seen a single chick flick in your entire life. If teenage boys are simply self centred then teenage girls are frankly sadistic in comparison.
Genders are not self centred... Individuals are.
The problem is that in American teen society, being self centred is rewarded, the quarterback and homecoming queen are positions held above all else. Meanwhile being kind and helpful ends up with you being abused.
Popular media has simply picked up on this and ran with it.
Re: Misandric Much? (Score:2)
So then don't use a term like role model to describe this then. It's shit like this that gets spun by the less informed to mean X when the researchers meant Y.
Do you really think the average layperson is going to spend 5 minutes deciphering that? Get outta here with that.
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Women being more average is pretty well-known. Of course, it is a distribution and the extremes are pretty much the same, which is why you get the occasional women who is a world-class scientist and the occasional women who lives on the street, but of both you get less than of equivalent men. You do not get a lot of either though and it is not suitable as a basis for any discussion of superiority. It is not clear to me whether that is done by conditioning by society though, and I think it may well be.
The co
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Note to moderator that voted me down: "I do't agree." is not a valid reaction to a scientific fact, however much you dislike it.
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The 5th type: male Slashdotters with a chip on their shoulder.
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Also, self centredness decreases with age? That doesn't seem very likely in light of recent political events.
The whole study is a joke.
So Myers Briggs (Score:1)
Thanks for repeating old news.
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Hahaha!
Four is the magic number. (Score:2)
This four type of people also sounds like that. But one thing about grandma's nutrition, if you balance all the four things, you find you also get a reasonably balanced meal by modern standards. Not so su
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My grandma had watermelons, earthmelons, firemelons and airmelons. The four elemelons.
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Re:Four is the magic number. (Score:2)
This four type of people also sounds like that. But one thing about grandma's nutrition, if you balance all the four things, you find you also get a reasonably balanced meal by modern standards. Not so sure this four type of people sorting would match that performance.
I tried eating the four types. They didn't taste good and I got constipated because of the lack of fiber. BRB cops here
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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For real.
-Anonymous Coward
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I'm so glad you signed your post -jcr, otherwise I wouldn't have had a clue from your username who posted it.
Seems high in trait neuroticism.
A neural net applying stats to psychology. (Score:1)
Science you can trust.
Introvert / extrovert is symmetrical (Score:2)
Psychology today refers to it as extroversion. [psychologytoday.com]
It's symmetrical that way (introversion - extroversion) to reflect opposite meanings in the subject of human personality.
The Jung thing references a German text [scientificamerican.com]. It's not bad Latin any more than extrude or external are.
You know how naming variables is important? That the variable name itself is supposed to convey meaning? Intro- and extro- are more likely to be linked - thus conveying meaning - than 'intro' and 'extra':
int intro;
int extro;
vs.
int intro;
int extra
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Then why don't you name your variables introversion and extroversion?
There is a huge deal of people on the planet that actually speak a roman language (or got bored to death by it in school), so obviously we use intro and extra, but more precisely we would intra and extra ...
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* The -version is in common.
* Short variables with meaning > long variables with same meaning.
* Less likely to screw up typing short variable names.
* Hopefully the context in which the variables are used would provide the "-version" meaning. If not, then I could see typing the full "introversion" and "extroversion."
* I'm not opposed to typing long variable names, if it adds useful meaning.
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As I pointed out the original terms are extra and intra
So using abbreviations with the wrong ending makes no sense.
Every modern IDE will give you an auto complete after either entering i or e ... you seem not to be a programmer I want to hire.
* Short variables with meaning > long variables with same meaning. ... I hope I never have you on my team, unless you change that attitude
Definitely wrong, as extra and intra and extro and intro can mean anything which starts with intr and extr
It's because of stuff like this that (Score:1)
.. psychobabble is a real word that most people recognize.
Read the Article Yesterday (Score:4, Informative)
The 'Average' category was criticized by some of the authors for being 'weak', as it's the largest cluster yet not particularly descriptive. It has yet to be proven that these 4 categories actually correlate with anything important, although follow-up research is checking if Role Models have greater career success.
Also, these are just clusters, individuals can fall outside of these combinations. One bright spot is that the clusters were named after they were found, rather than before, so they weren't trying to hammer data to fit preconceptions of personality types.
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Clusters can actually be a by-product of the way the tests are designed.
I agree with this assessment. The clusters are likely a result of the traits the test was designed to measure. Are their more traits the test doesn't measure? Do some traits overlap? Does the test measure the traits accurately?
I've been hearing this crap for years (Score:5, Insightful)
My point is this personality crap is usually just an excuse to sell corporate seminars.
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You can hope that at least they were using the Minnesota personality assessment test.
The really stupid places farm this testing to fucking scientologists. If that's you, the answers are mostly obvious. For some reason you should read/memorize bus schedules when not otherwise busy, remember that, plus tell them what they want to hear and you should score 100%
If you run into the scientology test, it's a sure sign there is a clam with rank in the organization. Flee.
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We did one of these assessments in our group, with my normally level-headed boss making a big deal of us gaining this assessment as some kind of benefit.
I was the first to raise my hand and ask what kind of academic or scientific validation this personality test had. Of course it had none, it was snake oil being pushed by a management consultant who wanted to validate his BS with with "objective" data management could use to reinforce their own biases and petty personality conflict.
Nobody likes the guy who
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Was this test created by Senn Delaney? (https://www.senndelaney.com/Default.aspx)
I've done my own study... (Score:5, Funny)
And have concluded that:
The majority of people are unsalted peanuts. This is the biggest category of people, because salt costs money.
The second largest category is salted peanuts. This category is filled mostly with middle age humans, as they have had a few years to gather enough salt.
The third and final category is candied peanuts. This category is 100% comprised of drug dealers and sex workers.
There is also peanut butter, but that is an unrelated category.
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No more comments from the peanut gallery!
It's due to the four predominate hormones (Score:2)
No they don't (Score:2)
They don't.
Of course there are only four types of people (Score:3)
This extrovert thinks... (Score:2, Funny)
that the study authors should be beaten to within an inch of their life and tossed in a dungeon and forgotten about. They are political douche-bags and need to be excommunicated from civilization. They are garbage.
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Extraversion? (Score:2)
Hold the press! Four is the new Twelve!!! (Score:3)
Here I was thinking that there are twelve distinct personality types! Then along came the sixteen Meyers-Briggs Personality Types.... And I was all like "whaa..." And now this... I thought there'd be more, not less!
Twelve was wrong. Sixteen was wrong...
But hang on a sec... What do Twelve and Sixteen have in common?
THE FACTOR FOUR!!! Yes!!! It all makes sense now! Yes!!! I've been so blind all my life!
And looking around, thinking about my family, friends, colleagues, relatives... Indeed, they are essentially four personalities. Yup, this explains EVERYTHING!
I can be all - depending on the circumstances (Score:2)
I trust people I know, but I don't trust strangers. I dislike being the centre of attention, but I am not necessarily easy to satisfy.
Most times I have positive emotions, but I dislike large parties.
I like order (in my life) but I am untidy. I work hard but I don't always follow the rules. I try to avoid mistakes but I put off doing chores.
I like art, have a good imagination and can deal with complex probl
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We did this in high school in the 90s. (Score:2)
A sort of variant on the MBPT,
Average: These people score high in neuroticism and extraversion, but score low in openness. It is the most typical category, with women being more likely than men to fit into it.
This person was BLUE, or a dove, typical emotional female, uses phrases often like, "I feel", are very concerned about the aesthetics of the inside of their home
Reserved: This type of person is stable emotionally without being especially open or neurotic. They tend to score lower on extraversion but t
5th Type (Score:2)
The 5th type is the one I'm in. It's called "better" ;-)
Say what they want, doesn't make it right (Score:2)
only 1 introvert category? (Score:3)
There are only two types of psychology research: garbage and complete garbage.
Astrology (Score:2)
This reminds me of Astrology a lot. Lumping people into a few generic groups based on a few traits doesn't seem to have much value. Especially when there is more than 1% outliers. The only use I can see is to predetermine that someone is more suited for a specific job, but if it isn't 100% accurate, then its as unfair as racism and sexism.
They forgot one... (Score:2)
Don't put your labels on me, dad! (Score:2)
I'm going to read the underlying scientific paper where you describe, in detail, how this is all mostly meaningless.
And then label you a Self-Centered ...
The 4 types (Score:2)
The 4 types should have been called "Leonardo", "Donatello", "Rafael" and "Michelangelo"
Population sample (Score:2)
It seems that all this can really tell you is that there might be 4 clusters of personality type amongst the type of people who do online personality tests.
Missing the point (Score:2)
What this is ACTUALLY showing is something very different than what everybody is focusing on.
There are 5 cross-cultural, scientifically supported and well researched personality traits. They are Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism (sometimes referred to by its opposite, Emotional Stability), and Conscientiousness. These are well supported, and much more valid than your Myers-Brigg personality stuff or enneagram or astrological sign or whatever.
What these researchers have done is just a cluste
Not looking at the test, but... (Score:2)
Basically, whenever I've looked at one these psychobabble personality classification things, they've demanded yes/no (or at best, multiple choice) answers to questions that require at least a paragraph to properly answer. I get about as far as the first or second of these questions, shout "Oh *HELL* no!" and fling the test across the room. (Or wish I could.)
A valid evaluation would require ... oh, I don't know... maybe actually talking to and interacting with someone, rather than flinging an op-scan form
10 kinds of people: ones who understand binary... (Score:3)
"The Northwestern researchers used publicly available data from online quizzes taken by 1.5 million people around the world."
There's actually a fifth kind of person: the kind that doesn't take online personality quizzes.
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'Neuroticism' not 'neurotic'.
That mistake is about the only legit crit of Damour's memo.
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'Neuroticism' not 'neurotic'.
If this is your problem, then you are being fucking neurotic.
Seems that he nailed it.
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Demonstrably incorrect.
Extroverts process externally, and because of this fact, are more visible doing whatever they do because: external processing is more visible and audible compared to introverts. This has the appearance of being more demonstrable, but is only emotive reaction visible to others because it's on display for all.
It's actions that count, and both do about the same actions in terms of sympathy and empathy, e.g. "caring". Some process inside. Others do not. They both care.
tl;dr: Extroverts ca