Common Criticisms of Objective Personality: Series Introduction

Video Transcript:

Hello again, it has been a long time since I have created this channel.  Busyness and motivations can change but I have a lot of content I still want to share, and I finally have some motivation to do so because there have recently been some debates between representatives of Objective Personality and Socionics.  I really like both of these systems of personality and I think they both offer a lot of value that no other theories do in terms of understanding ourselves and the human race more broadly.  The debate was between Jack Oliver Aaron, who represents the Socionics society he leads called World Socionics Society, and Binyamin Tsadik who was teaching and debating for Objective Personality, a system he has interviews lots of people for.  I’m going to split this video up into a series of discussions about common criticisms of Objective Personality and try to have a fair discussion of them.  Before I get into the meat of the discussion, I want to mention what I see as valuable about Socionics and Objective Personality (this is my Fi in terms of Objective Personality, as experienced practitioners are sure to notice).  Hopefully I will also give some compelling reasons that will serve to encourage others to explore these interesting systems of human categorization.

Out of all theories, Socionics has an especially elegant theoretical coherence that can even be understood in terms of mathematics like group theory.  This coherence is used to type people in different kinds of models aided by the precision of mathematico-logical reasoning.  There are models like Model A and Model G that use the aspect-positional method or functional-positional method, which means that they type people based on sorting out which functions or aspects fit into certain positions in the model, such as the Creative function or the Role function.  It can be amazing to observe how consistent these match-ups between the function and the position are in reflecting the behavior of people, but because Socionics is so complex, there is still a lot of disagreement between schools.  In addition, there are combinatorial-dichotomous models, which are similar to the coins in Objective Personality.  In Socionics, there are a lot of dichotomies that characterize the types and are used to type people, such as the Jungian dichotomies and various Reinin dichotomies which tend to be subject to more dispute.  With all of this theoretical richness and debate, Socionics has been understood in terms of energy dynamics and behavior, team building, relationships, career building, archetypes, mathematics, physics, history, sociology, and more.  I think it can be said that there is no typology that has produced as varied and rich of content as Socionics.  That’s partly a positive thing, but you can also get lost in so much theory and content if you are not careful.

Objective Personality is a much newer typology that appeared on the scene recently from the research of Dave Superpowers and his wife Shannon.  They worked with 16 type MBTI for many years in their online businesses.  They were convinced there was something to this MBTI theory because taking into account the types in their marketing strategy continued to pay off financially.  However, they were frustrated with many things:

1)   the amount of contradictory theories and information about typology

2)   so much unverifiable personal opinion

3)   so many grandiose claims

4)   self-assessment and personal opinion being treated as fact

5)   all the verbal debating that never seemed to go anywhere

6)   and basically how no one was doing the painstaking work to make personality typology more scientific and objective

So they set out to create an experiment where they typed people in separate rooms and tried to come to the same result independently.  They tracked their hits and misses and refined their definitions more and more until they could be used consistently by all the participants in the experiment and these would line up to certain behavioral characteristics of people who they were typing.

Getting a high percentage of independent agreement in these experiments proved difficult at first, and required a few updates:

1)   refining and simplifying definitions of the functions

2)   adding more coins (another name for dichotomies)

3)   adding more differentiations within each type such as jumpers and the animal stack.

If you want to learn about the theory of Objective Personality, the best places to go are the main YouTube channel, Binyamin Tsadik’s channel where he does lots of interviews on the subject, or the facebook group dedicated to Objective Personality.  The point is, eventually Dave and Shannon got to a point where they claim to have achieved 90% consistency in independently typing people the same type out of all 512 types in their system.  Assuming their claims are true, that is a highly impressive achievement.  Even in spite of this, they are still in the process of training more Objective Personality Operators until they can get at least 10, and they are still in the process of collecting 20000 Objectively typed people.  Until that point, they aren’t interested in convincing anyone or acting like they are worthy of total scientific acceptance.

In the work they’ve already done, they’ve typed at least 2500 people by their method, and the patterns that they’ve already stumbled across are very impressive and serendipitous. 

Pattern 1) People who they type as the same thing frequently look remarkably alike, and they call these people Doppelgangers.  What’s surprising about this is that they don’t type based on facial reading or visual similarity.  Rather, they type based on an independent checklist of coins, and when they use that checklist, they find that people of the same type just happen to often look strikingly similar.

Pattern 2) Certain hair colors are clustering around certain types, and sometimes facial hair and male balding as well.

Pattern 3) Anxiety, depression, and other disorders are clustering around certain types.  Even physical disorders and diseases are starting to cluster around certain types.

Pattern 4) Sexual identities and preferences, including LGBT, are clustering around certain types in their spectrum.

At this point, there are likely to be even more unusual patterns that crop up.  Dave and Shannon don’t yet know what to make of these patterns, and these patterns are only anecdotes which are not advisable to use when actually typing someone since that would render the pattern circular.  That said, I think they show a lot of promise in this method.  SEEING patterns that you didn’t expect is the hallmark of true science, because you are coming across a hidden and mysterious order which you are learning about in an open ended, investigative way. These patterns, combined with the growth mindset and striving towards independent verification and greater objectivity, make a strong case that Objective Personality is worth more time, efforts and experiments for those who are interested.  It is hard to say what the end product will be, and that mystery is very exciting.

But not everyone thinks so!  Objective Personality has already attracted some criticism from various other denizens of the typology community.  Receiving this is hardly unique, since the typology community is in a very divided state with lots of mutual criticism.  Hopefully this criticism will be constructive and lead to mutual improvements and it is up to us to see that it does.  In this series, I plan to address the following criticisms of Objective Personality and people can bring more criticisms to my attention if there is more to address:

1)   the question of objectivity: to what extent is objective personality objective and to what extent is it improving objectivity and moving personality theory closer to science

2)   the value of self-reporting or self-typing vs the value of being typed by experts or being typed by other people who know you

3)   common misrepresentations of OP

4)   inter-reliability between independent typers (like Dave and Shannon) and its relationship to the validity and value of the typing

5)   the sometimes disorganization and difficult to understand nature of Objective Personality

6)   reasons vs values in Socionics and Objective Personality

7)   organizing and how that relates to introverted observers versus rationality

8)   the origin and meaning of the animals and animal stacks in Objective Personality

9)   masculine and feminine functions in Objective Personality

10)      double deciders vs double observers and its apparent tenuousness

11)      quadras and temperaments in Socionics and Objective Personality

12)      Se vs Si in Socionics and Objective Personality and how Si relates to meaning

13)      how Te relates to the tribe

14)      how these typology systems relate to archetypes and fiction

15)      how cognitive functions relate to philosophical worldviews and the dangers of bulverism

16)      energy vs information in Socionics and Objective Personality

17)      figuring out information categories abstractly versus focusing on catching behavioral patterns and building a theory around that (the chicken/egg definition and behavior problem)

I don’t know if those will happen in exactly the order that I laid them out, and it is possible that there will be even more to address.  But that’s all for now!  I’ll see you next time for the discussion of the first criticism.