MindFacets

Exploring thought, emotion and personality

Posts Tagged intro

Introducing The 4 Roles

Nov 12

Posted by Jared in The 4 Roles | No Comments

In any given situation, people are capable of taking on different roles. Often, we help contribute to a workplace or family or social situation, by joining in and enriching your little community with our own contributions.

Sometimes, though, the group starts to become dry and needs something to spice things up.  Perhaps work is slow or inefficient. Perhaps our friends or family are bored.  Contributing to the status quo isn’t going to help – someone needs to brainstorm a bright idea.

Other times, there may be a lot of contributors and ideas. Perhaps there are even too many.  There may be chaos, disorder, and disunity.  In this case, what’s needed is someone to see what’s going on and set some constructive boundaries and focus for the group, in order to channel everyone’s energies in a positive direction.

Lastly, in a worst case scenario, the group may be struggling to function at all, and even when it manages to, it is headed in the wrong direction. Perhaps a workplace is rife with arguments, and in between conflicts, everyone goes off on their own and does work that creates more problems than it solves, making the next conflict even worse. Yet another bright idea isn’t going to be welcomed, and re-channeling focus of the group wouldn’t do it either when the attitudes are so hostile. What’s needed is a total reset, a total reformation. Someone needs to say “everybody just hold on a minute,” go back to the drawing board, and re-think through how things should be.

 There you have it!  These are the four major roles of personality in MindFacets:

Read the rest of this entry »

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Introduction: Personality and a Direction for Exploration

Aug 30

Posted by Jared in MindTour Series | 1 Comment

This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series MindTour Series

 

Personality

What is personality?  Since it is a primary focus here, it is important to define how I define it. On one hand, we have awareness and will, and on the other, we have a human existence with a mind and body and everything else that goes with it. Personality is a lens that translates human existence into terms we can have a direct awareness of, and a bridge for our will to express ourselves in our world.

Personality is a term that is used for a variety of meanings. One could say that a person has a lot of personality, or no personality. Robots and machines may mimic people, but have no personality. Someone who is a big personality has a lot of charisma to project to people around them. In general, personality is a good thing. If we have a personality, it means we have unique personal traits and characteristics. The more we have to express, the more in touch with ourselves we are, and the more we are able to articulate ourselves and make choices in life that are more deeply meaningful and satisfying to our existence. Likewise, the more we are aware of the world around us, the more in touch with experience we are, being able to understand and appreciate it.

Temperament vs Personality

Temperament is different than personality in that it can change from day to day, and evolve over the span of a person’s life. While there are many ideas of what individual personality is, for the purposes of this blog, it is something integral to a person that does not change. As temperament changes, it can highlight or bring out the many different parts a person’s personality, but the personality itself is what anchors a single life in a pervading continuity, from beginning to end. It is a core part of what makes you you.

How much of a person’s personality is fixed for life is a big debate. However, I think that the question can be answered in a satisfying way with the ideas presented here. After all the ideas are presented, I plan to revisit this topic. For now it is enough to know that my goal is to account for human identity, not just human whim.

Where to look

The bridge between our will and the human experience is vast, so it is helpful to have a strategy for understanding what is going on. I think Carl G. Jung’s 8 “function-attitudes” are a great place to start. I call them cognitive processes or processes, and think they are key to understanding what is going on in the mind that gives rise to personality.

Whether someone is acting logical, cold, and calculating, or acting relational, warm, and sympathetic, he or she is employing a particular mental activity. This can seem like a simplification, but once clearly defined, Jung’s 8 processes are very powerful tools for understanding how people think, feel, understand, and express themselves.

Therefore, it is important to clearly define them. The next few pages will delve into the processes, and hopefully start giving you an idea of both how the mind works, and also personality can be typed, at least as a momentary mental activity.

  • An approach to understanding thought: ob jects and relationships

  • Perceiving Processes: 4 ways to be aware of information

  • Judging Processes: 4 ways to understand the significance of information

  • Process Pairs: combining awareness with significance to create the simplest forms of thought, producing the 16 thought styles

Since the building blocks of thought is such a foundational topic, I am always looking for ways to further an understanding of the processes, and to better explain them, whether in terms of psychology, logic (philosophy), or cognitive science. I have created a forum for ongoing discussion in this topic, and may blog more about other ways a fresh or more accurate perspective can be attained.

Note: If you are already familiar with Jung or 16-type systems, you may notice I have switched things up and present the processes in a non-traditional way, by offering alternative names and groupings. I hope this can inspire you to look at them in a fresh way.

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Welcome to the MindFacets Blog

Aug 29

Posted by Jared in MindTour Series | No Comments

This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series MindTour Series

 

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the MindFacets blog! Here I will be discussing the investigation I have been doing into personality typing and how the mind works. As some of my friends and acquaintances know, I have been compiling this kind of information for a while, and I will be sharing parts of it here.

Where I’m coming from

I started learning about personality type theories since 1998, and the ones that sparked my interest were Carl G. Jung’s Personality Types, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Millions of people take the MBTI® every year, you may have seen it or one of the other similar type systems, which I call “16-type models”. In this school of thought, there are 16 personality types, and as an example, mine is INTJ, which stands for Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, and Judging, and you can find profiles of the types on sites like http://typelogic.org.

In 1998, I came across a brand new school of thought created by Tim Miller, tentatively called the Miller Cognitive Systems Inventory (MCSI), which aims to add some more layers of depth and also remedy some issues some people have with the MBTI and other 16-type models. I explored these ideas with Tim Miller and a few others until around 2001, and then for the last 8 years, I have been working further to refine my understanding of the mind while integrating other systems of thought, in the fields of psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy.

My formal education background and work experience is software engineering, which involves making technical sense out of very complex and sometimes chaotic computer programs. People often think that is a long way from personality, but since the mind is in many ways such a computer, I have found the world of software very helpful for relating to how the mind organizes and processes information. Just as there are different styles of processing or “thinking” in a computer program, individuals also have a preferred way of thinking, and a personalized toolbox of mental tricks that they reuse over and over. In this regard, architecting software and reverse-engineering the mind (a goal of personality psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science) are similar in many ways. Since the comparison to computers may sound cold and robotic, I also should mention that I also believe emotion is very closely linked to these styles of thought, and individualized personality.

Soft vs Hard Science and Descriptive vs Definitive Models

Personality models often tend to be very descriptive. This can be good – personality described in practical terms is often more easy to apply to in real life. But when the goal is to understand more about the workings of the mind, understanding based on descriptions can be weak if it lacks specificity. When descriptions of personality are too easy to relate to and everyone can be fit into every category to some extent, and things become muddled.

I believe the 16-type models like the MBTI can be a valid and meaningful categorization of people’s personalities, especially as applied by its experts with one on one consultation. I believe that it captures a part of our identities and a facet of a primary type preference that does not change throughout our entire lives.

However, in day to day practice, when 16-type quizzes are applied as an unofficial self-assessment, they have a reputation for being somewhat wishy-washy, subject to tainting by several factors such as environment or mood or momentary preferences, and this leads to questionnaires producing different type results, raising concerns of validity, reliability and usefulness.

Another concern is how personality profiles can be vague and tend towards charicatures and stereotypes that, while useful rhetorically, are oversimplifications that always leave all people out some of the time, and some people all of the time. Talented authors may be able to capture the essence of each type, but since it is descriptive, it is very hard for people to hold this rich understanding in their minds. Since it is not something concrete that can be pinned down, like mathematics, it is a difficult topic to discuss or apply with specificity and confidence.

My hope is that the field of personality typology can be advanced by making it more rooted in specific definitions rather than descriptions, and in concrete mechanisms rather than general patterns of behaviour. I hope to see answers to the questions of how we think and emote, in terms of the style of our personality, and where the multifaceted nature of our personalities come from, and this blog exists to be an exploration of these topics, as does the open forum.

Preview of Upcoming Blog

I am not sure where this will go, and want it to be explorative and influencable by the whims of me and whoever might read or discuss. Feel free to email me questions or start discussions in the forum. If there is interest in a topic, I may move more in that direction.

On the other hand, there are already several advancements in theoretical models of personality and how the mind works, I believe, and I would like to bring them up here, starting with a different perspective of the 8 Jungian function-attitudes, which I believe are very interesting, important, and satisfying for understanding both personality types and how the mind works.

I would also like to describe the MCSI, which adds a great deal of important understanding of the structure of human personality, although I have agreed to hold off on publishing anything myself until the originators of that model get to publishing their information.

Here is a rough list of avenues that I may go down at some point:

  • Intro to Personality vs Temperament, and the angle I take to understand people

  • Workings of the mind: The building blocks of thought styles

  • Personality Structure: Where does our multifaceted nature come from?.

  • Personality Dynamics: the Mixing of personalities

  • Emotion: How thought and emotion intertwine

  • Deep Logic & Philosophy: Flows of information, Abstracting logic

  • Science: Validity of personality models, Approaches and Biases in Personality Psychology

  • Applying Personality to Specific Topics: Relationships, Software Engineering, Politics

  • Discussions of Existing Models: Socionics’ ‘j/p’ vs MBTI’s ‘J/P’ and other arbitrary categories

Fast Track to Understanding

If some of the first entries seem short and to the point, it is because I want to get you up to speed in the fastest time possible. These ideas have their value in how they empower you to understand people, so my goal is to empower you as quickly as possible in this blog, and leave more flowery discussions and examples for a later time better suited to pondering with more verbosity.

What’s Next:

I will start with a brief discussion of personality vs temperament, so that we know what I mean by personality. After that, I will begin a series on the simple building blocks of thought, that, once assembled, constitute what we can recognize as personality type.

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