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Invent Your Own Typology

mpn

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In thinking about where Jung's typology came from, I naturally started to try to rebuild it from the ground up.

I asked -- if I were to make my own typology, would I end up with the same divisions as in MBTI/Jung?

You could start with something like "funny vs. unfunny", but it seems to get you off balance from the start. It seems like an obviously very "random" place to start. You probably want something more abstract, something that encapsulates "funny vs. unfunny".

(Although, "funny vs. unfunny" seems to be more about personality type than psychological type. A distinction you might want to consider when making your typology.)

Introversion/Extraversion is pretty damn abstract. It divides the world into the classic Subject/Object division and then asks which way your "energy" is directed. It's holistic.

Anyway, I'm mostly trying to kickstart my own thinking on this. I'm going to see if I can come up some kind of typology, and post any ideas as a response here.

But I want to know: How would you design a typology? The goal (or my goal, anyway) is to have a compact structure which spans a huge range of possible behavior.
 

Siúil a Rúin

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This sounds like a fun thread. I like the idea of poles. The introversion/extroversion one makes sense. Here are some of the poles that come to mind. I should add this is not complete, but just a few notes to consider.

Socialization (There is some distinction between these three poles)
Introversion vs. Extroversion
Intrapersonal vs. Interpersonal
Initiating vs. Observing

Cognition
Holistic vs. Compartmentalized
Structured vs. Unstructured
Concrete vs. Abstract
Distilling vs. Elaborating
 

mpn

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Thanks, Toonia :).
Those could be useful for me too.

I haven't made much progress, gotten much traction, so I'm going to ramble a bit.

I understand there's something called the Big Five. It roughly works like this: Say you created a 1000-question personality survey and gave it to a slice of the population. It would cover a wide territory of questions. After giving the survey, you found patterns: people who marked Question #7 as true also marked Question #19 as true 79% of the time. What you have is clustering. Further, you have 5 major clusters. The Big 5. Then you look at each cluster, try to get at its "character", and give a name to it. In Big 5 they are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. I don't know if that's how the Big Five actually came about, but in any case, it seems like a valid method.

(*goes to read about Big 5* It looks like it has a more complicated history, but that this is essentially right.) So basically, Big 5 is empirical. At least, kind of. It relies a lot of time on self-report questionnaires (although how *would* you objectively know that a person has a certain personality trait?).

OK, now Jung. I tried to read Psychological Types but it was rough going - I didn't integrate it that well. Basically, he seemed to arrive at Introversion/Extraversion, Sensing/Intuition, and Thinking/Feeling, by doing a review of past theories of type, and from looking at "literature, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy" (to steal from amazon), and then refining them where he saw issues. So in the end, his theory was supposed to account for all the past work, while transforming it in places he found to be wrong. I seem to recall him calling it "empirical" in the sense that it was also based on working with his own patients, but that just seems weird to me, since that really means his interpretation of them, not any kind of direct data.

OK, as I said, rambling, but it helped me get a sense of where I am.
 
G

garbage

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Socialization (There is some distinction between these three poles)
Introversion vs. Extroversion
Intrapersonal vs. Interpersonal
Initiating vs. Observing

Cognition
Holistic vs. Compartmentalized
Structured vs. Unstructured
Concrete vs. Abstract
Distilling vs. Elaborating

I think you've got the basis for something great, here.. separating out socialization across multiple axes makes perfect sense in discussing psychological factors.

I'll have more to contribute later, but I wanted to draw more attention to this.
 

Athenian200

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These are the dichotomies I typically use internally. They tend to tell me more about a person than MBTI, IME (though MBTI can hint at these):

Compliant vs. Rebellious
Imposing vs. Tolerant
Formal vs. Casual
Cautious vs. Risk-taking
Independent vs. Dependent
Analytical vs. Holistic
Aesthetic vs. Functional
Expressive vs. Reserved
Active vs. Reflective
Mental vs. Physical
Complex vs. Simplistic
Curious vs. Content
Proactive vs. Reactive

What do you think?
 

mpn

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These are the dichotomies I typically use internally. They tend to tell me more about a person than MBTI, IME (though MBTI can hint at these):

Compliant vs. Rebellious
Imposing vs. Tolerant
Formal vs. Casual
Cautious vs. Risk-taking
Independent vs. Dependent
Analytical vs. Holistic
Aesthetic vs. Functional
Expressive vs. Reserved
Active vs. Reflective
Mental vs. Physical
Complex vs. Simplistic
Curious vs. Content
Proactive vs. Reactive

What do you think?

I see. Is this an exhaustive list? It's like, I make these sorts of judgments, but I wonder if they together can approach fully telling you who a person is. Not that you were trying to do that. I'm just trying to understand / get at my own discomfort with the list.
 

Athenian200

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I see. Is this an exhaustive list? It's like, I make these sorts of judgments, but I wonder if they together can approach fully telling you who a person is. Not that you were trying to do that. I'm just trying to understand / get at my own discomfort with the list.

No, not fully, of course. :) I'd just say they can tell you at least as much as MBTI, and probably a lot more.

If you're uncomfortable with that list, why are you comfortable with MBTI?
 

mpn

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If you're uncomfortable with that list, why are you comfortable with MBTI?

Well. The thing about MBTI is that it is complete, or at least creates the illusion of being complete. You can say "Okay, a person does two things: takes in data (either from the inner or outer world) and makes decisions (mental or actual) based on it." It reminds me of computers, which have data and code. Or physics, which has matter and laws. So maybe it's really the simplicity that appeals to me, the fact that the "data-code" pattern is being activated in my mind, moreso than that it's really a good way of modeling actual behavior of people/their psyches.

That is what I was trying to get at anyway!
 
G

garbage

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Well. The thing about MBTI is that it is complete, or at least creates the illusion of being complete. You can say "Okay, a person does two things: takes in data (either from the inner or outer world) and makes decisions (mental or actual) based on it."

I'd liken it to MBTI Step II. It's more granular, but it still paints a more complete picture.

There's probably a way to categorize those poles so that it's more evident how much ground they cover.
 

entropie

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Do you think its appropiate to type pin-up girls for "hot and not hot" and call it a typology ?
 

Eric B

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Thanks, Toonia :).
Those could be useful for me too.

I haven't made much progress, gotten much traction, so I'm going to ramble a bit.

I understand there's something called the Big Five. It roughly works like this: Say you created a 1000-question personality survey and gave it to a slice of the population. It would cover a wide territory of questions. After giving the survey, you found patterns: people who marked Question #7 as true also marked Question #19 as true 79% of the time. What you have is clustering. Further, you have 5 major clusters. The Big 5. Then you look at each cluster, try to get at its "character", and give a name to it. In Big 5 they are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. I don't know if that's how the Big Five actually came about, but in any case, it seems like a valid method.

(*goes to read about Big 5* It looks like it has a more complicated history, but that this is essentially right.) So basically, Big 5 is empirical. At least, kind of. It relies a lot of time on self-report questionnaires (although how *would* you objectively know that a person has a certain personality trait?).

OK, now Jung. I tried to read Psychological Types but it was rough going - I didn't integrate it that well. Basically, he seemed to arrive at Introversion/Extraversion, Sensing/Intuition, and Thinking/Feeling, by doing a review of past theories of type, and from looking at "literature, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy" (to steal from amazon), and then refining them where he saw issues. So in the end, his theory was supposed to account for all the past work, while transforming it in places he found to be wrong. I seem to recall him calling it "empirical" in the sense that it was also based on working with his own patients, but that just seems weird to me, since that really means his interpretation of them, not any kind of direct data.

OK, as I said, rambling, but it helped me get a sense of where I am.

I always understood FFM as being shaped by Eysenck's PEN model: Psychoticism-Extroversion-Neuroticism. Psychoticism was found to split into Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.

But now, the Wikipedia article on FFM is saying the FFM was first outlined in 1933. (Eysenck's model was generally dated as 1947. But them he may have had the concepts before then).

So then maybe it is as you say.
 

Athenian200

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Do you think its appropiate to type pin-up girls for "hot and not hot" and call it a typology ?

Actually, that's called being politically incorrect and tasteless. Nice try, though.
 

Synapse

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I once tried to make up streaks of personality without finishing it but it went something like this.

What positive/negative, positive/positive or negative/negative features are found when dealing with personalities and I started to list them like this

The Vulture/Vampire streak
The Trickster/Mischief Streak
The Freedom/Control streak
The Truth/False Streak
The Logic/Chaos streak
The Disease/Health streak
The Intelligent/Ignoramus streak
The Humility/Humble streak
The Peaceful/Aggressive streak
The Snoopy/Scavenger streak
The Eaves drop/Gossip streak
The Hoarder/collection streak
The Addiction/Paranoid streak
The Sensitive/Insensitive streak
The Tinker/Curious streak
The Faithful/Promiscuous streak

Then I went on to write descriptions like this, although I only did the one before I abandoned the idea as I thought it wasn't very original.

The Snoopy/Scavenger streak - my mother will be like that bird that wants to keep things and hoard it all, like a collection streak. And she likes to snoop around, she will open crumpled bills, old letters, junk, anything and including private things that are none of her business. Then she collects things, such as old business cards, library cards, shiny things, things that are still usable but are really just clutter. The throw away something that isn't valuable but is valuable to another person, when moving lots of things were thrown out that could have been given to charity. After which people came around and started to scavenge around our bin and the next day things were missing.
 

Siúil a Rúin

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Basing a theory of cognitive processing on the actual hardware in the brain makes more sense to me than organizing observations alone because those are subject to much interpretation. Starting with the brain itself allows for more objective measurement using scans that can demonstrate where certain thought processes are located. It does not rely on self-reporting and the validity problems that creates for a system.

The second important component would be to construct poles that are by nature mutually exclusive. It is important when constructing an either/or category for cognition or behavior, to be sure that the absence of one trait implies the presence of the other. If a person can posses both or neither, then it is meaningless as an either/or category. It is like saying you are either a ballerina or a mechanic. Even though overlap between the two is less common than a ballerina or a tap dancer, still it is a meaningless dichotomy. It does not create a continuum where being less of one makes you more of the other by nature. Those are two skills which are contrasting, but don't share an inherent relationship. Contrasting categories are not by nature mutually exclusive. This distinction is important. I question some of the poles in MBTI for this reason.

There is also some danger in using skill as category as opposed to process as the category. Something like compartmentalized vs. integration does not imply anything about intellectual or emotional skills. It could apply equally to MIT professors or Jerry Springer guests. Measuring cognition based on skill brings the questions of nature/nurture into the equation in a way that defines the cognitive process based on training, which is another subject.

Edit: To clarify the last point, it is important at the get-go to decide if the system you design is going to be measuring skill based or process based cognition. If there is an element of skill mixed into the measurement of process and nature, the outcome will tend to be people assuming relative inherent worth.
 
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