Talk:Personality type

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Merging and combining articles

The articles on typology are pretty thoroughly confused, and need to be straightened out. Personality type leads one place, Psychological type and Psychological Types lead to another, and Psychological types leads back to Personality type. God knows what other confusions exist. Somebody with a lot of Wikipedia skills and a bit of personality type knowledge needs to work on this. How can that be brought about? Lou Sander 19:26, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Continuum of traits

Yes, there is a continuum of personality traits. There are also continuua of gender traits and of the handedness trait. Yet few people have a problem identifying most people as male or female, or left- or right-handed. So what's the problem with personality types? Lou Sander (talk) 05:17, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Lou. Gender and handedness are usually viewed as dichotomous traits. Yes, the existence of hermaphrodites and ambidextrous individuals could suggest a third, in-between type, but we are still talking about qualitatively different types of people here. Likewise, Jerome Kagan argues that inhibited children are qualitatively different from outgoing children. The notion of "types" in psychology is typically interpreted as qualitative differences between people-- apples and oranges, so to speak. In sharp contrast, most psychometric researchers and trait theorists currently believe that differences in personality are in degree, not in quality. When tested, most people are somewhere in that middle area between extreme introverts and extraverts, not obviously categorized as one or the other. When they talk about themselves, many people spontaneously describe themselves as somewhat extraverted, sometimes introverted, not entirely in either camp. Thus the emphasis on normal distributions and a continuum of traits in this article. Types are a convenient shorthand, but nature exists on a continuum. --Jcbutler (talk) 18:03, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Good stuff. One of Jung's ideas was that yes, there is a continuum, and everybody has, for example, some thinking and some feeling tendencies, but in the end, if feeling for example predominates in an individual, that person will tend overall to make feeling-type decisions. He expressed it better than I am right now, but overall there is the notion that where you are on the continuum matters, even if you're only slightly one way or the other from the center. Lou Sander (talk) 21:09, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I think in general, Jung's ideas were much more complex than what followed in his wake. In fact, I believe he referred to the attempt of trying to assess people's personality types as a "parlor game" at one point. This page could use some additional work, but I wanted to try to at least clarify what generally characterizes a "type" and how it differs from a "trait", as psychologists typically see the terms. Best regards --Jcbutler (talk) 21:51, 5 March 2008 (UTC)