There are many ways to divide people into four personality types, from the classical—sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic—to contemporary systems such as the DISC profile. The Myers-Briggs system divides people into sixteen personality types. I just recently ran across the “enneagram,” an ancient system for dividing people into nine categories.
There’s one thing advocates of all the aforementioned systems agree on: the number of basic personality types is a perfect square.
I don’t know anything about those systems, but I’m guessing they are based on two “personality-components” with n subcategries each, resulting in n² personality types.
That’s true of Myers-Briggs. There are four binary dimensions. But it would not have been true if there were another dimension, for example. It’s 2^n rather than n^2, but it works out to a square if n is even.
I don’t think the four classical personality types are based on two components. You often see them arranged into a square, but I think they’re really just a list of four types.
The enneagram is definitely not 3 by 3. It’s a list of nine personality types, not a Cartesian product of three components.
Hi John,
Actually the Enneagram does break down into 3×3, but not all presentations explain or emphasize that.
A counter example to pattern of perfect squares: Big 5
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
I think the four humors were supposed to map onto hot/cold and wet/dry axes, actually, and the classical personality types each corresponded to a preponderance of one of those humors. (Source: vague memory of Wootton’s *Bad Medicine*.)
Hehe, good observation.
Mine counter-example: Feminine / Masculine Polarity typology. 🙂
Enneagram actually have 27 types (9 main types, each type have 3 wings).
5 Love Languages also avoids the pattern.
Have always wanted to test people on multiple systems and see if they are correlated or orthogonal.
For the geek comment of the post: also applies for DnD personalities (two dimensions, three posibilities each: Chaotic-Neutral-Lawful, Bad-Neutral-Good).
Theophrastus had 30 personalities in his system:
http://www.eudaemonist.com/biblion/characters/
I suppose drawing attention to this makes me the ‘Unseasonable Man’ in his system.