Personality is like the Colour Spectrum

1916 Views 83 Replies 11 Participants Last post by l1mbo_01, 2 mo ago

Joe Black

This is just my personal thoughts & musings on personality theory.

This bar of colour represents all the personalities and people in the world as they are. What are these colours? We're not blind (well not everyone)... there's obviously differences between them. How many colours do you see? Maybe we should give them names. If you can't tell that there's a difference between red and green then maybe you're colour blind - or personality blind or whatever.

Colorfulness Rectangle Electric blue Tints and shades Magenta

Personality typing is trying to give names and mapping out this spectrum of personalities. Apparently there;s 7 types of colours!

Colorfulness Rectangle Yellow Font Parallel

Then someone comes along with an alternative way to map out the personalities and draw lines in different places. (is there 6 now?)

Then are super simple systems... 2 types, 4 types... etc.. I can go on (primary colours, secondary, complementary etc) we can talk very deeply about personalities here can't we? (CMYK/RGB Colour breakups)... and it can get super, super heavy once you reach colour profiles for the super colour nerds.

Rectangle Yellow Font Parallel Electric blue

Then there's debates over which colour system is best or accurate.

There are the archetypes who fall neatly in the middle of the spectrum divides, but there are people on the edges of the personality types... neither red, orange… Neither blood orange nor mango... that throws off everyone. There are some that are like… You must be either a red or an orange. There are some that are like, "If I'm not red or orange or even blood orange, If I'm #FF8D00, then what am I?" Then the answer is, well, you're a mix of red and blood orange? You're definitely a warm type though. You're 42% Red and 43.543% Blood Orange.

Then there are those that are like "Well F* giving names to colours! I'm out! Everyone here is toxic! Just sticking to hexadecimal! It's more accurate!" - Then there are those that still see the value in giving colours names. Then we have to keep giving disclaimers like "The primary colour system is just a tool to help you understand where you are on the spectrum, or which area. It doesn't tell you your exact hexadecimal, or your colour exact CMYK/RGBbreakup."

So what's the value of knowing your colour/personality type? Apart from appreciating that there are different colours & personalities and valuing what they bring to the spectrum, I think it's to help you be more self-aware of things you maybe unaware about, so that you can consider improving it, rather than playing out your tendencies - "Well, it's who I am... it's my tribe, no changing me." as if your type gives you permission to act poorly in your particular way - whether it's being overly aloof, impractical, selfish, people pleasing, an A*hole, stuck up, callous, cold, obnoxious, narrow-minded, inconsiderate - whatever.

And guess what... there's actually more ways to self improve than through personality typing alone. Personality typing doesn't cover everything. Like attachment theories, neurology, ethics, skills, beliefs, philosophy, behavioural psychology, parenting styles, psychology. psychiatry... etc.
But out of all these, personality seems to be one of the most fun and colourful ones to talk about

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TL;DR / MAIN POINT
There have been many personality models that attempt to map out human personality by grouping people with similar traits together. However, in attempting to do so, there are inevitably people who aren't sure which group they belong to because they share traits of both groups fairly evenly which can frustrate those on the fringes of an archetype.

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FaeSoleil

· #81 · 2 mo ago

LOL. Was typing up a serious reply and all of a sudden the thread gets silly. :P

ill leave this here anyway

l1mbo_01 said:
Let's even look at such an example of a psychological trait, gender (left or right handedness is also of course still relevant as a common mental categorization that has evolved to be discrete but this should be even more relevant). 97% of people are clearly heterosexual, so it is pretty much concrete (either M or F). Obviously all females or all males do not belong to an archetype, as we'd wanted from a discrete categorization (though they certainly exist for a reason), but still the distinction is very much discrete.

l1mbo_01 said:
For your following example of right handed people being able to do things left handed people can and vice versa, no matter what that will never change their fundamental handedness/personality type. It was decided the moment that particular sperm won the race. And talking about ambidextrous people (and likewise in the gender example, of non binaries) seems disingenuous to me because we all know that the vast majority of people can be neatly categorised. It only makes sense if you believe that’s the extent to which personality theories fail to categorise.

On a deeper level, the fact that it isn't 100% of people a sign that the dichotomy is less fundamental than it seems. Gender and handedness isn't natural law, after all - just an emergent result of genetics and evolutoiin, and that's why about 1% of people actually don't fit well into any category.

This is why people say "gender is a spectrum" in the same way - because the exceptions prove there isn't a fundamental reason why things must fall to one side or the other and thus a spectrum of possibilities exist alongside discrete categories. That most people are drawn towards two discrete fixed points doesn't mean that those fixed points aren't part of an underlying spectrum that non-binary people of various kinds fall in.

I don't personally believe personality is bimodal at all, personally, from my own personal experience. But I can't say I have the best samples to work with, so I'm not going to make an argument here.

l1mbo_01 said:
Like I will always prioritize doing what makes sense to me over other's feelings even if I understand them perfectly well, because of course I will. An Fe dom would be the opposite.

l1mbo_01 said:
I understand the immediate reaction to distance from saying "always" in a discussion about personality, but if we word our principles correctly and keep them general enough we can do so. In particular, if the statement that is claimed to be always true is itself a probabilistic statement. Here first of all many of the examples you gave were of specific behaviours.
For the second, let's consider you being nice sometimes and inconsiderate at other. Now why was that so? It is intellectually disingenuous to leave it as just a quirk of behaviour, an inherent randomness attached to everything we do. Things only ever seem random because we do not fully understand the underlying mechanics, either that or lack information about prior states, that is it (well, except and except only quantum mechanics, that too only for now).

We do cost/benefit analyses every time we act; when you were less considerate perhaps you were thinking that the logical problem here is too glaring to ignore, or perhaps you didn't care about the person as much. Since the processes are subconscious, it seems random to you. We also have personal principles that we build upon through Ti or Fi that may conclude, through their respective logical or value judging processes conclusions stereotypical of the other side. So the result you see is that INTPs are being mature but really they are following a 'theorem' that they derived using their logical process itself, that theorem just happens to say something different. Other than this, there can be external factors that affect us, like say I just watched a movie about spreading love or something and now I'm in an emotional mood which makes me temporarily more considerate before I return to my default. But those are, as said, external factors. So yeah we will need to change the wording a little to "I will always prioritize logic, given all else being equal, or given no external influence is acting upon me" but that's it. Now it's quite impossible to have truly no external influence at any one point, so perhaps this is the source of the apparently inherent (but reduced due to the cost/benefit + personal principle thing explaining a lot of it) randomness. But now that we have identified the source, we can separate the two atleast mentally and see the general underlying principle.
So that explains randomness, but how does the universal behaviour principle come about? For T>F people like me, we've to always logic our way through things (and vice versa for F>T), like every time I would be about to act on Fe my Ti would definitely do a does this make sense check before letting my Fe through (if I'm not stressed) and if it's not it will internally resist. It's just too omnipresent to not.

It's not intellectually disingenuous. We fully understand the mechanics of double pendulums - and yet, we cannot predict their behavior longer term. Some systems are fundamentally unstable and chaotic - where small permutations lead to unpredictable long-term behavior and changes.

... from my own experience, some people are more like a double pendulum than any easily predictable system.

I know that for myself by personal experience, a lot of contradictory forces are in "tension" by default - and that... the result is unstable enough that I can't say I "always" prefer anything over anything - even without external influences.

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l1mbo_01

· #82 · 2 mo ago

FaeSoleil said:
On a deeper level, the fact that it isn't 100% of people a sign that the dichotomy is less fundamental than it seems. Gender and handedness isn't natural law, after all - just an emergent result of genetics and evolutoiin, and that's why about 1% of people actually don't fit well into any category.

This is why people say "gender is a spectrum" in the same way - because the exceptions prove there isn't a fundamental reason why things must fall to one side or the other and thus a spectrum of possibilities exist alongside discrete categories. That most people are drawn towards two discrete fixed points doesn't mean that those fixed points aren't part of an underlying spectrum that non-binary people of various kinds fall in.

Thing is till most subjects are drawn to two fixed attractors, even if there was an underlying spectrum, the larger problem with the post would be mostly unchanged since if there were such fixed attractors any failure of the system won’t really be coming from the fact that there was an underlying spectrum all along like it claimed, it’d only account for a small fraction of the failure since the discrete model already represented reality so well.

FaeSoleil said:
I don't personally believe personality is bimodal at all

I didn’t claim it was bimodal, though I believe each cognitive function nature (Tx,Nx,Fx,Sx) to individually be so

As for your point itself, it’s quite a valid one. However, I believe there is a fundamental why. To start, the problem is with assuming that the bimodal traits are opposing ends of a one dimensional axis instead of labels of the dimensions of a two dimensional axis that each goes from low to high expression of the trait. So as an eg it may be that Tx is a multidimensional entity with Te and Ti as its two independent axis, and so because they are independent, people can only have one or the other but have variable amount for the one they do have.

Now in this the outliers analogous to homosexuals aren’t so because they are the natural middle of a one dimensional axis but because they are genetic abnormalities, having both axis of Tx mixed when it should have been one or the other. (Please try to avoid saying something like it’s wrong to call them ‘abnormal’ they’re just like us or something, rather understand that I don’t think abnormality in one trait doesn’t equate to being a freak of nature and even more obviously doesn’t say anything about their talents in other places)

On the gene level, the difference is something like if a particular group of genes only comes together, like you either have group A or group B, while the specifics of the grouped genes varies between people and gives rise to a smooth distribution within a group (all high level traits emerge as smooth distributions bcs of how many genes contributing to one trait works out). I know this isn’t a high order trait since its not psychological but genetics is blind and encodes all phenotypes high order or low in the same way so its a valid example, but sex for example kind of works this way. You either have the group of genes XX or XY in chromosome 23, and then there are few outliers who’re not in between as much as anomalous like people with Down’s syndrome.

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l1mbo_01

· #83 · 2 mo ago

FaeSoleil said:
It's not intellectually disingenuous. We fully understand the mechanics of double pendulums - and yet, we cannot predict their behavior longer term. Some systems are fundamentally unstable and chaotic - where small permutations lead to unpredictable long-term behavior and changes.

I was calling treating it as inbuilt randomness to be disingenuous, not apparent randomness; double pendulums are not random but still apparently random. And yeah cognition might be like double pendulums in the specific nature of its apparent randomness too but here I was in an earlier step of reasoning, only after establishing that its not inbuilt randomness can I talk about the specifics of the apparent randomness and what we can say about the system globally from it.
(also just saying this was kind of a repeat of what I said about metaphors assuming specific natures of systems in my very first reply in this thread)

There's one thing about any apparently random system, no matter what there are going to be some global laws, the fact that the system had some governing principle locally will make itself apparent in some form in the global behaviour. We see exactly this happening in the laws of thermodynamics. Sometimes they are easier to see and also more illuminating like in thermodynamics but sometimes they’re not though still studied (chaos theory). So it’s really just about the specifics of the system, and for cognition (well just Jx funcns in particular) I believed something like this to be the global principle-

“For T>F people like me, we've to always logic our way through things (and vice versa for F>T), like every time I would be about to act on Fe my Ti would definitely do a does this make sense check before letting my Fe through (if I'm not stressed) and if it's not it will internally resist. It's just too omnipresent to not.”
So if we were to codify it a bit, maybe it’d be that every decision that the aggregate of opposing energies in the brain come to is filtered through your first preference Jx function, either through pre established systems or an immediate internal voice.

And unrelated but thanks for replying, you brought up some good points unlike the other guy and it had taken quite some effort to explain all that the first time so it really felt like a waste seeing their response

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l1mbo_01

· #84 · 2 mo ago

FaeSoleil said:
LOL. Was typing up a serious reply and all of a sudden the thread gets silly. :P

ill leave this here anyway

On a deeper level, the fact that it isn't 100% of people a sign that the dichotomy is less fundamental than it seems. Gender and handedness isn't natural law, after all - just an emergent result of genetics and evolutoiin, and that's why about 1% of people actually don't fit well into any category.

This is why people say "gender is a spectrum" in the same way - because the exceptions prove there isn't a fundamental reason why things must fall to one side or the other and thus a spectrum of possibilities exist alongside discrete categories. That most people are drawn towards two discrete fixed points doesn't mean that those fixed points aren't part of an underlying spectrum that non-binary people of various kinds fall in.

I don't personally believe personality is bimodal at all, personally, from my own personal experience. But I can't say I have the best samples to work with, so I'm not going to make an argument here.

It's not intellectually disingenuous. We fully understand the mechanics of double pendulums - and yet, we cannot predict their behavior longer term. Some systems are fundamentally unstable and chaotic - where small permutations lead to unpredictable long-term behavior and changes.

... from my own experience, some people are more like a double pendulum than any easily predictable system.

I know that for myself by personal experience, a lot of contradictory forces are in "tension" by default - and that... the result is unstable enough that I can't say I "always" prefer anything over anything - even without external influences.

I was not 100% sure if you get alerts if I don't reply to your comment but just quote sections of it, so I'll leave this here in case you didn't

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