Study: People tend to group themselves into four distinct "types" of personality

People like to take quizzes online; Just ask Buzzfeed and Facebook. A new study has reviewed some of the largest online data sets of personality questionnaires and identified four distinct "types". The new methodology used for this study – described in detail in a new paper Human behavior nature-It is rigorous and reproducible, which could help to pass the analysis of personality typology from the questionable self-help section of your local bookstore and to serious scientific journals.

Frankly, the "type" personality is not the ideal nomenclature here; personality "groups" could be more specific. The co-author of the paper, William Revelle (Northwestern University), looks a bit at the very notion of distinct personality types, such as those adopted by the extremely popular Myers-Briggs indicator. Revelle is an "anti-fan" of the Myers-Briggs, and he's not alone. Most scientists who study personality prefer to consider it as a set of continuous dimensions, in which individuals change places and fall into the spectrum of various traits as they grow.

What is new here is the identification of four dominant groups in the global distribution of traits. Revelle prefers to consider them as "big pieces" and suggests that a good analogy would be how people tend to focus in US cities.

"We do not say that everyone is in one of these four categories. "

Divide the country into four regions: north, south, east, and west, and examine the distribution of population density. You will probably find the highest concentration of people living in dense cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Houston. "But to describe everyone as living in one of these four cities is a mistake," he says. Similarly, "what we are describing is the probability of being in some parts of this distribution; we are not saying that everyone is in one of these four categories. "

Northwestern researchers used publicly available data from online questionnaires taken by 1.5 million people around the world. These data were then plotted in accordance with the so-called basic Big Five personality traits: neurosis, extraversion, open-mindedness, amenity and professional conscience. The Big Five is currently the professional standard for social psychologists who study personality. (Here's a good summary of what each of these traits mean for psychologists.) They then applied their algorithms to the resulting dataset.

The four types

Revelle admits that when his colleague and co-author Northwestern, Luis Amaral, presented the first results using traditional clustering algorithms, he found 16 distinct clusters. Revelle was instantly skeptical: "It was ridiculous," he says. He did not think it was at all hidden in the data and challenged Amaral and another coauthor, Martin Gerlach, to refine their analysis better.

"These statistical learning algorithms do not automatically produce the right answer," says Revelle. "Then you have to compare it to random solutions." This second step made all the difference by imposing additional constraints to overcome the results. The researchers resulted in four distinct personality groups:

AverageThese people have a high rate of neurotism and extraversion, but a low openness score. This is the most common category, with women being more likely than men to enter it.

Reserve: This type of person is emotionally stable without being particularly open or neurotic. They tend to get lower results on extroversion but tend to be somewhat pleasant and conscientious.

Role modelsThese people score high on each trait, with the exception of neurosis, and the likelihood of a person falling into this category increases significantly with age. "They are people who are reliable and open to new ideas," says Amaral. "They are good people to take care of things." Women are more likely than men to be role models.

Self-centeredThese people have very high rates of extroversion, but their score of openness, friendliness and awareness is low. According to Revelle, most teenagers fall into this category before thinking (hopefully) of getting out. The number of people falling into this category decreases considerably with age.

The team used a set of data in the first analysis and then reproduced the same result on two other independent data sets, which means that its methodology is replicable, at least on similar datasets. free access. "A study with a data set of this size would not have been possible before the web," says Amaral.

DO I: Human behavior nature, 2018. 10.1038 / s41562-018-0419-z (About DOIs).