Why Him? Why Her? by Helen Fisher. A family member was reading this at the beach, and I picked it up. An attempt at personality psychology, sort of like the controversial Myers-Briggs with four main types. Think of her Explorer as an SP, her Builder as an SJ, her Director as an NT, and her Negotiator as an NF. Anyway, a couple of excerpts:
The Explorer-Explorer match does not appear to be a good strategy for raising children. Yet here, too, nature has a plan. Since Explorers are more likely to divorce and remarry, they are also more likely to bear children with more than one partner. In fact, it’s commonplace to encounter the man or woman who has married twice and had children with each spouse. I don’t recommend divorce and remarriage, but there’s genetic wisdom here…If ancestral Explorers produced more variety in their young, some of these children would survive hard times–passing on their DNA.
Recall that Robert Putnam talks about bifurcated family patterns. Perhaps a lot of Explorer-Explorer matches produce children out of wedlock.
Much later:
The Negotiator is far more idealistic. As a result, the Director can become annoyed by the Negotiator’s far-flung humanitarian concerns, while the Negotiator can begin to regard the Director’s more technological approach to fixing the world’s problems as narrow-minded and unfeeling.
The Negotiator sounds hard to argue with. To the Negotiator, economic logic just “feels” wrong.
“The Negotiator sounds hard to argue with. To the Negotiator, economic logic just “feels” wrong.”
Morel likely they refuse to even discuss, making “negotiator” an odd label. But why can’t we expect people to look at results and implications and draw the correct conclusions? Why do we have to argue them to the truth when they can just stick their fingers in their ears?
I always hate statements akin to this like when someone who never has to deal with his difficult underlings tells me I need to deal with difficult people. Well, when do they have to learn to deal with me?
And another thing. Only NTs are even capable of caring about this stuff!
I’ve read some pretty dreadful stuff at the beach too. I’m not big enough of a man to tell the world about it.
The explorer-explorer stuff reminds me a bit of the Harpending-Cochran cad/dad split in mating strategies.
That being said, it seems as if one’s ability to succeed and flourish by implementing the strategy embedded in the impulsive dictates of one’s inborn personality type depends greatly on the overall social equilibrium.
If a diverse variety of very different types have to share the same culture and context, then not only will a uniform or political-compromise-generated set of norms leave a lot of people feeling like they don’t fit in, but to the extent the ‘optimal’ equilibria for each type are greatly separated local peaks in ‘norm space’, then the compromise not work well for hardly anyone.
That in itself is a good argument for political competition to enable as much cultural dis-aggregation as possible, which will permit people to choose exit over conflict and sort themselves out to where their type flourishes best.
One problem with this is time-inconsistent preferences, and the fact that even for individuals of a particular personality type, it can still make sense to pursue different strategies at different times in one’s life, as Robin Hanson discusses in this post: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/08/lifes-laminar-endgame.html
I’ve always thought Myers-Briggs is very descriptive, if you stop thinking about it as a personality typology and rather a guide to how people acquire information and make decisions. But P/J is by far the most useful, so not sure the middle two do much.
Does education ever use it? Not that I’m totally comfortable with how they would screw it up, but this is another on my list of examples of how if they aren’t trying then what the heck are they doing in there?
Formal education simply isn’t personalized, barely even tries to be, so it is barely education at all.
I personally use it in education–that is, I can identify students with a strong S preference (because they are antithetical to my N ways of teaching) and often come up with some alternative, more concrete situations and then discuss the differences with them. It’s very informal, and only is an issue because I’m so strongly N that students who are polar opposites might have difficulties, particularly if they are also really weak in math. So it’s just an alternate mindset that I look for if I see a struggling student.
Taken to extremes, this is the “learning styles” that Dan Willingham and others will rush in to tell you “doesn’t work”. I don’t disagree, but what they fail to point out is that there’s no research saying that teachers who *do* use them are harming their kids. (Not that I use learning styles, but you see my point).
“Formal education simply isn’t personalized, barely even tries to be, so it is barely education at all.”
It really isn’t personalized, but you’ve got an odd notion of “education” if “personalized” is a required attribute, as opposed to a preferred one. The nation has been formally educating without personalization for generations.