I put them into this essay.
we treat people as having persistent inclinations to behave in certain ways. That is, we treat people as having temperaments. In everyday life, we operate with a theory of temperament.
I make no claim to expertise in this area. The essay has an IDW flavor to it. That is, to me, it seems reasonable and sensible, yet it might require a “trigger warning” of some sort.
Yes. In 1980, I would have teased you for writing about such obvious observations; today I commend your bravery for broaching such.
I often think the base discussion comes around to the maxim, “All Men Are Created Equal.” Not really true, but if one starts delineating the inequalities, BAM!; Mein Kampf redux.
That’s actually a perfect example. Your comment expresses a temperment that assumes that either we create perfect justice or we’re doomed to perfect injustice. My own temperment leads me to believe that we’ll probably muddle through with flawed but tolerable justice and only infrequent horrors. Myers-Brigs calls these temperments J and P, respectively.
Much of temperament may be empirically definable, but the inclination to perceive temperament may also be evolutionary. Friend/enemy or Insider/Outsider seems like the primordial model. Our personal responses to perceived traits is probably still moderated heavily by the primordial model. When people celebrate research headlines like “liberals are more neurotic than conservatives” or “conservatives are less open” or “people like me are more X”, that’s the lizard brain in operation again.
Is “working with things” a temperment?
I don’t see that its so controversial to say “people have different temperaments” when temperments are defined like you defined them with your dog examples – “stability, shyness, aggressiveness, and friendliness…” Maybe you could have shared some examples where “amazing emotional heat” was created by such mundane statements. Maybe there are such controversies and I’m just unaware.
Maybe there are such controversies and I’m just unaware.
Do you live in a cave? Go to any college campus and suggest women are less temperamentally inclined for some vocations; you better have a blood chit on a chain around your neck. Ask Larry Summers.
“Women are too neurotic to (fill in the blank).”
Yes, I can see where a blanket statement like that will raise eyebrows.
Larry Summers. I do remember something about that. I will have to refresh my memory.
Prof. Arnold,
You are leading me to finally join Medium, which I’ve been putting off. Next you’ll be prompting me to subscribe to the _Wall Street Journal_.
After I read the article maybe I’ll have a comment.
My guess is that psychologists mostly talk about temperament in terms of the Five Factor “OCEAN” model. Most people who aren’t familiar with OCEAN probably don’t know that the rest of the people in the conversation are using it as a starting point, or tend to fall back on it as a way of organizing their thoughts.
OCEAN is a good model and well supported by data. On the other hand, it doesn’t even try to assess some aspects of cognitive style that some other models, notably Myers-Briggs, do (however imperfectly).
All models are false, but some models are useful. The best model for any particular job may or may not be OCEAN.
The following question may seem obtuse or agressive, but it’s not meant to be.
Is the Myers-Briggs classification well supported empirically in the literature and clinical practice? It’s never been clear to me whether (1) it’s well grounded in reality, or (on the contrary) (2) it is a quirky theoretical construct that spreads by contagion, especially through Psych 101 courses and “ice-breaker” exercises.
Some years ago I read something by Nettle on personality and he seemed to rely on OCEAN. OCEAN makes sense to me intuitively in a way that Myers-Briggs does not.
Probably the book that used it was _Personality: What makes you the way you are_. By Daniel Nettle, published by Oxford.
Yes, the “All models are false, but some models are useful” is definitely the way to go. IQ seems to work that way, and the military finds highly g-loaded tests to be useful.
My difficulty with Myers-Briggs is the 4 letter classification scheme which seemed detailed, ponderous, and a bit too close to astrology.
I pretty much agree. Myers-Briggs has a lot less empirical data backing it up, to the point where it might be reasonably described as a “quirky theoretical construct”. And I think that having 16 different types, all presumed to be equal but having different strengths, seems very flattering to the American cultural paradigm in a way that nature rarely is.
On the other hand, I have noticed that people tend to vary in the degree to which their though focuses on the concrete vs. the abstract (the sensing/perceiving distinction), the emotional vs. the logical (thinking/feeling), and the objective vs. the normative (perceiving/judging). Myers-Briggs is the best model I have for those distinctions. But definitely take it with a grain of salt.