Comment by sanderjd
7 years ago
I'm always skeptical of things like this that attempt to distill the full range of human personality and behavior into a simple table with four values. I haven't done any studies, but I feel like this sort of thing is disprovable by simple counter-example: as soon as I come across a single person who does not fit into this box, the universality of the box is already clearly wrong. I've come across many such people, whose behavior in the work place can't be described by the combination of two adjectives. (In fact, it's the only kind of person I've come across.)
The intention is to offer one more useful framing to look at the world with (along with all the other ways of understanding things). I think you're asking for too much if you're looking for an exhaustive and irrefutable universal classification theorem like those found in more mathematical fields.
I'm not asking or looking for that, I'm quite happy to accept the complexity of individuals and attempt to understand them on their own terms rather than trying to categorize them into a quadrant.
It is implicit in things like this that it's a generalisation suitable for discussing the case in point and not actually trying to describe the full spectrum of human behaviour. You should (and clearly do) know this. Generalisations are very powerful. I know they are unfashionable because everyone is unique and special, but you won't get very far without them.
Individuals are very difficult to predict. Populations are remarkably easy to predict.
> you won't get very far without them
In the workplace, I think the opposite is true. Understanding and treating coworkers as individuals gets one much further than this sort of incredibly granular categorization. You're bound to miss important things about people if you just think of them as a "disagreeable taker" here or an "agreeable giver" there. Most importantly, you'll miss that people not only fluctuate in personality day to day based on many factors, but indeed often change entirely over time. It's not that this kind of mumbo jumbo is "unfashionable", it's that it isn't useful.
> "Populations are remarkably easy to predict."
Could you break that down a little further?
Well it's the very essence of statistics. You probably can't predict how many of your friends will reproduce and how many offspring they will have, but you could definitely predict the average number of offspring the current population will have. Even though the "model person" with 2.1 children doesn't exist (can't exist even) it's still a thoroughly useful generalisation.