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People Tend To Cluster Into Four Distinct Personality 'Types,' Says Study (arstechnica.com)
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.
Sounds like this article is calling out basic bitches.
Shame because the phenomena crosses the genders.
There's a reliable data source, free from built-in bias ("INQPTJLMNOP!") and hidden assumptions ("INTROVERT!")
>largest online data sets of personality quizzes
LOL, no wonder there's a replication crisis in the social sciences field.
The four personality types are: moist and warm, warm and dry, dry and cold, and cold and moist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism
Those who divide people into two types and those who don't.
Have gnu, will travel.
Where is reserved and neurotic?
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
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.
Pop-psych trivia doesn't belong on /.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
one time at I had to go through one of these personality tests to tell me which group I fit into. I was annoying, but me and my coworkers went from pretty annoyed to pissed when we learned the company paid $2k/each for the privilege. They could have just given us that $2k as a bonus and out moral woulda shot up. This was when I made a lot less money and $2k would have been an event.
My point is this personality crap is usually just an excuse to sell corporate seminars.
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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.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
They don't.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
I don't fall into any of those described categories. I guess that means I'm not a person?
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 can't help themselves be known, as introverts cannot help themselves be less known by listening. You can hear one more loudly than the other. Doesn't mean they don't both care, and equally.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
My grandma had watermelons, earthmelons, firemelons and airmelons. The four elemelons.
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!
Lemon curry???
So there are 3 extravert categories and only 1 introvert? Being an introvert makes you automatically stable emotionally, agreeable and conscientious.
There are only two types of psychology research: garbage and complete garbage.
"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.