Accepting Difference

I recently watched the lovely film, A Real Pain, about two cousins (played by Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) who travel to Poland to visit their departed grandmother’s home. In the first 20 minutes of the movie we’re shown two dramatically different personalities, both neurotic in their own way, but one more inward and the other laser focused on other people. It’s in our vernacular to understand the characters as introverted and extraverted, but there is still disagreement over what that means and, more importantly, what to do with that information.

I think we’ve veered off course since Jung’s Psychological Types, now over a century old, the precursor to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and more recently the Five-Factor Model (FFM) or “Big Five.” There are lots of other personality inventories like John Holland’s six Personal-Orientation types, Arthur Brooks’ mad scientists, cheerleaders, poets, and judges, and Martin Seligman’s top five strengths, but MBTI and FFM seem to have sticking power.

We automatically notice the similarities and differences between ourselves and others, which can become shortcuts to establish a connection and a sense of identity; despite the questionable validity of the inventories over these hundred years, they can provoke acceptance of ourselves and others if used wisely.

NOTICING PATTERNS

Jung explains his interest in typology from sheer observation of a pattern: “I have long been struck by the fact that besides the many individual differences in human psychology there are also typical differences.” Specifically, he noticed two general attitudes and four functions. With attitudes of extraversion or introversion, “the fate of one individual is determined more by the objects of his interest, while in another it is determined more by his own inner self.” Of the functions, one tends to dominate to become the overriding principle for a person: “Sensation establishes what is actually present, thinking enables us to recognize its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and intuition points to possibilities as to whence it came and whether it is going in a given situation.”

It’s a matter of recognizing our leaning towards a way of being that’s more comfortable to us:

”Just as the lion strikes down his enemy or his prey with his forepaw, in which his specific strength resides, and not with his tail like the crocodile, so our habitual mode of reaction is normally characterized by the use of our most reliable and efficient function, which is an expression of our particular strength. However, this does not prevent us from reacting occasionally in a way that reveals our specific weakness.”

SHORTCUTS: Type and Neurodiversity

Typology merely collects a group of noticed or self-reported traits under a chosen term. A type can be a quick way to understand ourselves and others, but, like any label, including some in the DSM, it has limitations.

As with other labels created from a checklist, having a recognizable term can give us a useful illusion of certainty about ourselves. People who first get diagnosed with ASD or ADHD as adults, sometimes feel a sense of relief from suddenly understanding why they do what they do. It’s just how they are. Knowing I’m ASD helps to understand why I hyperfocus, like on issues like this, but I still have to find ways to remember to eat. A label of “introverted” can help us understand someone’s need for solitary time as a matter of fact, not an aberration or something to fix. Another benefit is the support groups possible to help feel that sense of understanding from people with similar traits. But it can be a limited relief. Aspects of our personality aren’t our fault, so we needn’t feel guilty about them, but they’re still our problem. We still have to find ways to interact with others who might be radically different, but imagine if everyone understood that some differences could be more innate and work together to find ways to bring out the best in each of us.

Jung said sticking labels on people is “nothing but a childish parlour game”; Bessel van der Kolk calls labels in the DSM, “little crutches that never quite capture what somebody is suffering from,” and Hannah Gadsby said labels “stop people from being curious about people who are different.” A set of initials can’t capture all of who we are. It’s like when we memorize a mnemonic in order to remember a ton of content but then forget to be able to expand on that when asked more in depth questions. We’re stuck with an acronym for a list of words that can lose any nuance, which is a devastating way to perceive another human being.

Difference is a problem when others won’t adapt. In the right company, perceived shortcomings can be the norm or even celebrated. Recognizing people’s more innate traits can be useful to adjust accordingly, but can be dismissive if we’re reduced to a label. Jung explains, “Classification does not explain the individual psyche. Nevertheless, an understanding of psychological types opens the way to a better understanding of human psychology in general.”

If an understanding of type is useful, does it matter which terms and inventories we use??

TIMELINE OF INVENTORIES

A couple decades before Jung, in 1903, Alfred Binet noticed people generally lean towards “introspection or externospection” and in 1909 Heymans & Wiersma rated 2,500 people on distinct traits of passionate, choleric, sentimental, nervous, phlegmatic, sanguine, apathetic, and amorphous, clearly taking a page from Alcmaeon of Croton’s four humours from 2,500 years ago. In 1936, Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert catalogued 18,000 terms and deemed 4,500 stable traits, using military personnel to be able to monitor their temperament over weeks to attempt greater accuracy. Much of the tests and studies in the 40s and 50s focused on reducing Allport’s categories to the fewest categories possible to describe a personality without losing any nuance. In 1943 Raymond Cattell got the basic traits down to a set of 35 clusters of related terms with 16 key clusters in a questionnaire of 164 statements to determine if someone’s lively, bold, dominant, sensitive, vigilant, private, warm, reasoning, perfectionistic, abstract, open, rule-conscious, self-reliant, apprehensive, driven, or stable. These traits could be further grouped and placed in opposition to one another, which is not dissimilar to Myers-Briggs’ four continuums that was first published the following year as the MBTI: extraverted-introverted, feeling-thinking, intuitive-sensing, and judging-perceptive.

Then, in 1961, Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal just focused on one side of the schema with five core traits: surgency, agreeableness, dependability, emotional stability, and cultured. The beginning of the FFM can be seen here, further solidified into NEO: Neuroticism, Extroversion, and Openness, by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae in 1978, with agreeableness and conscientiousness added in 1983 for the more common acronym, OCEAN. They aimed for the most enduring emotional, interpersonal, experiential, attitudinal, and motivational styles. In 1990, Lewis Goldberg’s model was similar, but he aimed to get the 240 questions from the NEO test down to 100 questions.

After years of knowing myself in MBTI terms, as an INTP, I did three FFM tests so see the similarities, expecting to find low extraversion, high openness, low agreeability, and medium conscientiousness. Two of the tests produced similar results but no more could be accessed without paying for a report. The third test was much more in-depth for free, but the score was markedly different, revealing a lack of consistency and validity in these random online tests. Then I hunted down the NEO-PI-3 but was dissuaded by the $700 price tag. The closest version I found provided similar results except agreeableness was much higher. Unlike the other tests, this 120 question test looked at morality and altruism in this category instead of just cooperativeness. A 2010 study had a more thorough look at the variety of FFM tests out there and also found that scales of the same construct were only moderately correlated across tests: “Even among proponents of a five-factor structure, there are different views concerning the facets that constitute each factor.”

Some argue that the FFM is significantly more valid than the MBTI, which is curious to me: The tests and terms are very similar (and equally problematic), and what even is validity in this context?

EVIDENCE FOR VALIDITY?

Jung pointed out the problem of the connotation of words changing over time and place:

”To observe and recognize the differences gave me comparatively little trouble, the root of my difficulties being now, as before, the problem of criteria. How was I to find suitable terms for the characteristic differences? Here I realized for the first time how young psychology really is. It is still little more than a chaos of arbitrary opinions and dogmas.”

The terms “thinking” and “feeling” spark an image that isn’t captured in the original conception of those functions. Similarly, in the FFM, who wants to be called “neurotic”? Jung also recognized the implicit bias in the creation of the terms: “Had I myself chanced to possess a different individual psychology, I should have described the rational types in the reversed way.” We have to be aware of this potential bias in all these inventories and look at the reasoning behind the categories, not just the labels.

A couple of Youtuber-doctors referred to the MBTI as “grossly simplifying” and “astrology” yet called the FFM “actual science” despite that several studies show them to be very similar. A 1994 study compared scores on the MBTI and NEO-PI and found significant correlations. Another in 1996 found moderate to strong correlations, and again in 2003 with the NEO-PI-R, indicating specifically,

”Correlational analysis of the personality measures showed that NEO PI-R Extraversion was correlated with MBTI Extraversion-Introversion, Openness was correlated with Sensing-Intuition, Agreeableness with Thinking-Feeling and Conscientiousness with Judging-Perceiving, replicating the findings of McCrae and Costa (1989).”

However, a couple books came out denouncing the MBTI in 2004 and 2018, and then a 2022 study suddenly found “very little relationship between test scores” on the MBTI and the NEO-PI-R using, and says the MBTI “has long gone out of fashion with personality researchers.”

So curious!

But even if they are markedly different, that doesn’t put one in line with astrology. A quick scan of a collection of terms used for each side (or the factor and its negation) taken from a variety of tests over time, make the correlation of at least one side very obvious. The tests ask similar questions and feed us back a label for those traits, which is dramatically different from creating a personality description based on our date of birth.

Some theories aim to find the most enduring traits, but with any self-assessment test, does that necessarily prove these are enduring traits, or could it point to an enduring self-image? Jung suggested the traits are naturally occurring but with the potential for change. McCrae and Costa assumed these traits are biologically based tendencies that persistently influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, and are likely 40% genetic. However, we like to see ourselves as consistent, which might provoke a bias in that direction. If some terms are perceived negatively, people might see themselves a little more positively, clicking on enjoying parties like introversion is a bad thing. What kind of experiment can possibly weed out that confound? Getting friends and relatives to assess participants as well as a self-assessment could be affected by the others also changing over time, if they’re even still in contact.

Another criticism suggests that the ends of the continuum of the MBTI aren’t competing functions since people between each end (e.g. Thinking or Feeling) could be more similar than within them, but that would also apply to the FFM. It applies to the ends of a gender continuum as well, but that doesn’t negate the possibility that they are different ends. Jung noted, “Investigation of the individual psychologies that fall into one group or the other will at once show great differences between individuals who nevertheless belong to the same group.” It’s just a starting point of identity, not the final analysis.

Over time, theories have tried to find the best names for the categories, but also the best possible number of categories, from 6 to 4,500 then back down to 16 to 8 and to 5. They have also searched for the minimum optimal number of test questions. Interestingly, a more recent test has doubled the number of terms, and the TIPI has it down to just ten questions, overtly acknowledging we can just look at the terms without the test to find where we fit.

The big problem with the MBTI is that it’s presented as a predictive tool to assess an optimal career direction using a fallacy of affirming the consequent (because most architects are INTJs, doesn’t mean INTJs will enjoy architecture). They found a way to cash in on it that eventually people discovered doesn’t work in the real world, but that doesn’t mean the test can’t tell us something about ourselves. Profit seems to be the corrupting influence. In The Hope Circuit, Seligman complained that there isn’t any financial incentive to create therapies because they can’t be patented, and now he sells test results on his VIA site. And I kinda wonder a bit about that $700 cost of the NEO-PI-3 test compared to free online MBTI tests now being overtly but questionably “debunked”.

But anyway…

I defend the MBTI when approached with a Jungian intention because the FFM presents half the continuum of each trait (introvert, sensing, thinking, and perceptive) as necessarily lacking starting with Tupes and Christal’s early FFM in 1961. The chart below indicates five major turns in categorization from the 1920s to 1990s. I’ve indicated who used which terms with numbers, capitalized the terms they use, and all other words are descriptors on one end or another. Some have capitalized words indicating two ends of a continuum, but others just focused on the better end and left the negations nameless.

I can’t help noticing that the terms on one side get increasingly negative over time. It started as a way to recognize and accept our differences, and it seemed to turn into the complete opposite: a way to measure ourselves against the right type of personality. One critic suggests the MBTI made it more positive so people would prefer that test, but their test came out before that shift.

ACCEPTANCE — USING INVENTORIES WISELY

We want to feel like we’re okay, feel seen, and belong. Sometimes people like using personality inventories to develop a sense of connection with others from finding their closest Pokemon or Disney character match. But more often we seem to use these tests to grab on to some innate personality buried within in order to weed out ourselves from the multitude of influences over us. We’re trying to find our immutable core. The test itself seems unnecessary with an understanding of the ends of each continuum and a modicum of introspection to get us on the right track. We do belong, and understanding differences is useful to fill in gaps in our own perceptions and abilities. We need extraverts to cajole us to the party and introverts to make sure we don’t overstay our welcome, and we need thinking types to play devil’s advocate so agreeability doesn’t enable bad policy.

Anthony Stevens sees typology as “not a constraint but a liberation, for it can open up new navigational possibilities in life.” For Jung, although parts of our temperament innately lean to a dominant function, the goal isn’t for that to endure, but to change. If we only do what’s comfortable, then our weaknesses get weaker. Once we’re at a point of stability, we can focus on exploring the less comfortable arenas. Jung’s concept of individuation at midlife (which he starts at 35) is to gradually shift our leaning towards the less dominant side in order to get a wider perspective of the world and the self. In order to do that, we first have to develop profound self-acceptance and understanding of one another.

Jung also recognized that understanding difference is key to healthy relationships.

”I have had to treat innumerable married couples and have been faced with the task of making husband and wife plausible to each others….There are active natures and passive natures…some persons are reflective and others are unreflective…many apparently passive natures are in reality not so much passive as given to forethought…But I soon discovered that the hesitation of the one was by no means always forethought, and that the quick action of the other was not necessarily want of reflection. The hesitation equally often arises from a habitual timidity.”

Recognizing these differences in each other can be important. Maybe your partner’s not willfully ignoring a mess, but actually doesn’t see it. Maybe they find it painful to be around many people in a way that won’t change dragging them to more events in an ad hoc attempt at exposure therapy. Being open to these maybes can potentially save a marriage.

The belief that we have innate differences can help us to better accept who we are and encourage us to be more open to a wider variety of types of people instead of suggesting people are weird because they’re unique or unfamiliar. More important than the exact right names of terms or numbers of terms or numbers of questions, the inventories can be useful to learn about our more natural differences in order to understand and accept ourselves and one another.

It’s not an exact science with proof that we’re forever exhibiting these traits, but we do notice them. The labels don’t tell us who we are with the kind of certainty some are hoping for, but they might help us feel more a little less alone as ourselves, giving us permission to unmask and openly be ourselves.

Cross posted at 3 Quarks Daily.