Developments in psychology are worth keeping an eye on. You never know what new theory is coming soon to a criminal courtroom near you.
Ben Guarino has this article in the WaPo with the above subhead. The headline is "Scientists identify four personality types."
Personality tests are hugely popular, though if you ask working psychologists, they'll tell you the results are little better than astrological signs. But a new study, based on huge sets of personality data representing 1.5 million people, has persuaded one of the staunchest critics of personality tests to conclude that maybe distinct personality types exist, after all.
The most popular and notorious of the "not much better than astrology" tests is the Myers-Briggs. " 'The social psychology community is pretty in line with being anti Myers-Briggs Type personality assessments,' said Alexander Swan, a psychologist at Eureka College in Illinois who is a critic of the test." Less delicately, it's garbage.
The new approach takes the better-established Big Five personality traits and groups people into personality types based on the clustering of traits. The four types are designated "reserved," "role models," "average," and "self-centered." As to that latter type:
People who scored very high in extroversion but were below average in agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness were "self-centered." Amaral put it in a "nontechnical way": Some people are "jerks." Teenage males were more likely than average to be self-centered, but this proportion decreased with age."These 18-year-olds are going to grow up," Revelle said. "Except some people don't grow up, and they become senior political statesmen."
Or criminals. As we all know, crime rates are highest among young men. Some grow out of it and some don't.
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