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Scientists have discovered four main personality types, but put a damper on your visions of a Harry Potter style sorter. Chances are, you are just average.
Psychologists had already discovered that people tended to differ from one another in terms of five major personality traits known as the Big Five: Extraversion, Consciousness, Accreditation, Openness, and Neurosis. The new study of the characteristics of more than 1.5 million people suggests that some of these traits tend to cluster together, creating predictable personality types.
The researchers reported four main groups on Monday (17 September) in the journal Nature Human Behavior. People in the "average" group are, on average, average on all five traits. They do not score very high or very low on a given trait. People in the "model" cluster are nice to see. They are weak in neurotism, high in consciousness, very pleasant and particularly extroverted and open to new experiences. [7 Things That Will Make You Happy]
Meanwhile, the researchers found that members of the "egocentric" group are quite uncomfortable, unkind and unprepared for new experiences. The final cluster, the cluster "reserved", is full of people little neurotic but little open.
You are probably average
The researchers discovered the four groups using an algorithm to detect trends in the data from the results of 145,388 people on a personality test called the group of international personality elements. At first, the algorithm gave incredible results, including up to 20 groups of different personalities. According to Martin Gerlach, co-author of the study, this makes no sense to experts in the field of personality and represents statistical artefacts.
After refining the calculations, the team was found with the four clusters reported in his new study. To ensure that these errors are not also errors, the researchers tested the calculations on three other huge data sets from three other personality tests: 410,376 Johnson-120 test results; 575 380 myPersonality-100 test results; and 386,375 BBC-44 test results. All of these tests were done in the United States and Great Britain, and all focused on the five major personality traits. The algorithm has also developed the same four clusters in these datasets. [Most Neurotic & Creative States Revealed in US Personality Map]
According to Gerlach, the key to understanding the results is that people are not clearly categorized into one group or another.
"What we find is not that these clusters are well separated or that you belong exclusively to one of these four types," said Live Science Gerlach, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. "That's not the case, people are everywhere."
Metaphorically speaking, Gerlach said that clusters are like pieces in pancake batter. There are flour particles everywhere, but they tend to be a bit denser in some areas. In other words, personality types really follow a continuum, he said.
This makes it difficult to say how many people fall into one category or another. Almost by definition, most people are on average, Gerlach said. They are close to the middle in terms of their extrovert character, they are pleasant and quite typical in terms of consciousness. They are a little open to new experiences and are in the middle of the casual and the fort.
The categories "egocentric", "role models" and "reserved" are smaller than the "average" cluster, but can not really be categorized or quantified, Gerlach said.
Occult information
This messy reality is not as fun as things like the Myers-Briggs assessment, which claims to divide people into 16 distinct personality types. These types of tests are widely used, but they are based on fairly arbitrary dividing lines, said Gerlach.
"One problem is that most people are in the middle, so they are just average, so what does it mean to put them in? [one category]?" he said.
In practice, the new clusters suffer from the same problem, said Michael Ashton, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario, who studies personality but did not participate in current research. Ashton and his colleague Kibeom Lee, of the University of Calgary, said that even one cluster includes a wide variety of people.
"Consider two people who both belong to the" model "type of this study," wrote Ashton and Lee in an email to Live Science. "One of these people can be extremely disciplined and organized, but slightly above average in kindness and generosity, while the other can be extremely kind and generous, but slightly above average. of different personality, but they are both placed in the same type. "
Thus, the types obscure the useful information rather than enlighten the personality, said Ashton and Lee.
"Basically, if you classify people into personality types, you lose most of the information you can get by considering their scores on a few key dimensions of personality," they wrote.
The most likely people can be seen as going from one group to the other. Researchers found that the "model" category was more focused on people aged 40 and over, with relatively few people under the age of 21, indicating that maturity may be an incentive for people to join this group. Similarly, the "egocentric" group had relatively few people aged 40 and over, but a relatively high proportion of people under 21 years of age.
Gerlach and colleagues argue that it is intriguing that Big Five's personality traits can, to some extent, evolve into a group rather than a completely independent one.
"One might ask the question" Why is this the case? "Until now, we have not understood that."
He and his team also want to know if personality types have an impact on people's success in life. Personality traits have been shown to predict how people are doing in life. A conscientious person, for example, tends to succeed in his work, given his high levels of responsibility and organization.
"Now the question is actually:" Can a combination of traits lead to a better vision of the prediction of these life outcomes? "Gerlach said.
Original article on Live Science.
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