People Types

When I first meet a person I find myself trying to work them out, to asses what makes them tick. I do this so that communication is easier and to increase the chances that all parties get their desired outcome from the interaction. The key factor in understanding a persons action is an awareness of what motivates them. Trying to guess what a person is specifically aiming to achieve based on their actions and circumstances alone will usually result in a statement about what you would be doing in that situation. You can use a general understanding of what motivates a person reasonably well to predict what they will do in any given situation or what their aim is with a comment they have made.

I found that when I first tried to explain my method of analysing people and how to both record and interpret the results that I was lost for words, and so I set about categorising and visually representing things in order that I may attempt an explanation. I have found it a useful tool in making friends and influencing people, in not causing offence and in many other social and political situations.

In order to find the primary sources of motivation underlying a persons actions we must find all the possible ways in which a person is motivated and then distil those into group with commonalities until only a few useful groups exist that are possible ways to motivate an individual. I wish at this stage to make a distinction between two kinds of motivation which I shall call animal and personal. The animal motivations include eating, sleeping, finding a mate and other body regulation functions. Personal motivations are harder to define, particularly as they also include the acquisition of a mate. I would describe them as the result of being self aware, the systems we have for understanding our place in the world and our justifications for our existence. Psychologists would describe personal motivations as those which increase the self-esteem or self-worth, but these are very dependant on the outlook and upbringing of the individual. Unfortunately this essay is only concerned with personal motivation as most animal motivations behind peoples actions are very easy to spot, predict and relate to.

I shall start by describing the groups I was left with after my initial distillation process, however there is a reason that I was lost for words on my first attempt at describing this system and that is words are a clumsy and ambiguous way of describing it. The reality is far more dynamic and fluid with great variance and tolerances in each individual but I will do my best to describe them suitably.

The Achiever;

is someone who gains their self-esteem by setting themselves goals and then accomplishing them. The goals the achiever will set are based on their perception of the environment and their view of themselves. An achiever can exist in all walkers of life as any occupation will provide the opportunity to complete goals. The achiever is more inclined to base their performance on a comparison with their own previous results than those of others.

The Winner;

is a person who strives to achieve goals much like the achiever however these goals will be based on what they think other people would regard as worthy goals. In essence it is the same mechanism as with the achiever but rather than conjuring up goals for themselves they allow society to set them. As a result the winner is solely concerned with their performance in comparison to other peoples performance. It is also the case that the winner's goals may not seem to relate to the character as you might expect where as the achiever's aims will seem more in keeping with their character.

The Follower;

is someone that, like the winner seeks to outsource their goals. The difference between the goals of the follower and the winner is that the winner adopts goals that society offers to make them look good. The follower however adopts the goals of a group be it a religion, company or even another person but rather than those goals directly reflecting well on the follower they tend to further the cause of that which they follow. Followers tend to be meek and humble in contrast to the winner and the achiever. The follower prefers to give over their efforts to a greater cause that will have a more significant impact than any one single life. The feeling of being a part of a larger movement or organisation provides a sense of social security and offers a great deal of self-worth and esteem via the actions of their greater cause.

A problem that can be observed in followers is when they surrender to much of their person to the organisation. A group ethos is fine, it is cultural and had advantages for the individual. A very mild example of a followers tendency is to support a sports team. The supporter allows a portion of their desires and happiness to be entirely in the control of the team and their successes. I regard a surrendering such as this to be healthy however when taken to extremes such as religious cults or political fanatics the individuals lose their grounding. They are less able to empathise with more common human forms of motivation and struggle more with normal social interaction. Originally I had a category for this extreme form called the devoted but removed it for being superfluous and the rarity of those types of people.

The Giver;

is a person who gains self esteem through their ability to help others and make them happy. The giver has some similarities to the follower in that they exert their efforts into the furthering of the cause of something other than themselves but differ in the sense that the giver is inclined towards helping anyone or anything they deem worthy rather than a specific person or organisation. The giver has not outsourced their goals as they retain the capacity to judge who gets help and how to give it. A giver is able to affirm their existence and significance by their positive effect on others which allows them to feel good about themselves. Givers are most distressed when two people they usually offer help to are at odds with each other and seek to smooth social situations out.

The Affecter;

is someone who, like the the giver and the winner, seek to see an impact which they have had on others. While the giver wants everyone to like them and the winner wants others to want to be them, the affecter merely wishes to be able to observe that they have had an effect in some way. Affecters dislike more than any of the others groups to be excluded (perhaps givers are equally averse to exclusion but it is hard to find a situation where that will occur), achiever's do not need the approval of others to affirm their success and winners are able to look at exclusion as an affirmation of their success. Affecters may take many social roles from the funny one to the group gossip.

These five groups are not distinct nor can they be visually represented in a neat and suitable way. I have described my observations by using five groups, not because there are five mechanisms in play but because it is the best way to group people in order to understand motives. It is possible to see how someone could appear to be a giver yet in fact be motivated by either winner or achiever mechanisms. I would suggest that all people have a capacity to act as a follower and act to act as an affecter, these are human dispositions. Some are more compelled to follow or affect while others are compelled much less so. Some are compelled to follow greatly but barely compelled to act as an affecter and vice versa. The most suitable means of representing people in this way is by placing them somewhere on an arbitrary linear scale for both.

To distinguish between the winner and the achiever I would like to use the words introvert and extrovert but these are already used terms for this sort of thing and so will be confusing as my intended meaning is quite specific where as the understood psychological meaning is more general. I would say the introvert looks to themselves for approval where as the extrovert looks to others. This is why a giver can really be a winner or an achiever because they can be acting either in that way to gain the approval of others or themselves.

Introvert and extrovert are the two halves of the linear scale describing the affecter tendency. In most cases, such as the giver, the motives will be some combination of both effect. Being kind makes you feel good about yourself but also makes others think well of you and thus hits two birds with one stone (assuming you have a disposition that is not entirely polar on the described scale, which is undesirable as extremes tend to be any combination of; socially stigmatised, outcast, depressed or socially disadvantaged to some degree such as the highly insecure polar extrovert or the recluse and emphatically distant polar introvert). The affecter is essentially just quite an “extroverted” person with no specific outlet for their requirement to interact, winners and some givers however have found some agreeable outlet for their level of extrovertness, otherwise they too would be affecters.

Rather than five groups we have now two actual mechanisms in play that may be used to describe the groups; ones tendency to follow other's causes and ones requirement to observe an affect in others. Although these two scales seem to represent human social motives most accurately I find them less useful than the five arbitrary groups in assessing the actions of others. Factors not accounted for by the two scales will determine how people perceive the world and therefore how they will manifest their particular dispositions. The five groups on the other hand broadly outline a basic idea of manifestations of various combinations of positions on the two scales. Some groups account for a much larger range within the two scales than others and some groups overlap some of the same combinations to account for differing possible manifestations of them.

My five groups could be extended to allow greater depth but my preference is for the least I feel necessary. These groups are a lot like the Belbin list of the nine roles people adopt in groups or the Merrill-Wilson group of four personality types, rather than an absolute plot on a set of scales they are mix-and-match allowing you to be a bit of this and a bit of that etc. There are likely links between my groups and the groups in these other systems and, as I have shown with the extrovert/introvert idea, links with Myers-Briggs method of categorising people. As we are using clumsy language to describe something far more complicated and not entirely understood it is quite easy to appreciate how all of these existing systems are equally right and are just differing ways of viewing it. Generally the existing systems are designed for a larger scale practical use than the easing of social interaction and so focus on group team work and how best to encourage productivity. These systems focus on personality types which assuredly contain elements of that persons underlying personal motives but only in specific ways making them less useful for predictions in the larger scope of social interactions.

A combination of all available methods of grouping peoples character and disposition is likely the most accurate description of people we have available at present. The more you know about a person the more able you are to understand the nuances of their behaviour, this applies in both the application of these various ambiguous groupings and by good old fashioned spending time with people. The latter far outdoes the former as humans are so vastly diverse that no degree of groupings and categories can ever hope to fully describe an individual, only their likely tendencies. Diverse as humans may be there are finite different possible arrangements of DNA and within those combinations there will be many repeated traits. Certainly each person is then moulded by experience and nurture which will also differ but commonalities are found throughout people, in mannerisms, speech, opinions and indeed motives (facilitated in part by the follower tendency). Most things we would use to describe people may also be observed in others, it is the different combinations and ranges of these myriad building blocks that make individuals. Our own understandings of people, our interpretations of how to best group character traits and our intuition regarding people based on our life's worth of observing others will always be the best tools we have because we do not need to use language to apply it. We can try and understand other peoples systems to gain a better understanding for ourselves but it seems unlikely that we will be able to apply it to the same effect as the person who devised it. My recommendation for taking anything useful from this kind of psychology is to interpret what you read into your own way of understanding things and in a way that fits with your observations.

Returning to my model I should like to describe a possible mechanism for the alteration over time of a characters motives and to an extend their general contentedness. Imagine we set an arbitrary level for a person in each of the five groups – affecter, achiever, giver, winner and follower, to account for how much of that persons self-esteem would be gained from each groups mechanisms to optimally suit that persons disposition. I should then like to set another level in each of the groups to show the actual level they received in the course of a time period. The further below the desired levels the actual is, the more discontent the person will be. Say a winner has failed to impress anyone at all in the time period then they will be discontent. Some people have higher overall levels that they desire than others and could be described as needier although I dislike the negative connotations of the word to be happy using it in this context.

Regardless of how high any particular persons desired levels might be I predict that they will be shaped over time by the average level they achieve in each category relative to their desire such that the desired level is able to slowly shift to be more in accordance with the achieved levels. If a person who is broadly a winner with some follower dispositions fails to gain much renown or respect in their efforts over a long enough period of time but, gains greater reward from the things they have chosen to follow than they desired, then they will gradually become more of a follower and less of a winner, provided their actual levels remain roughly that way. I suspect that nurture and experience play the largest part in these dispositions but it would be curious to note any biological indicators that correlate with the trends I have described in peoples base motives.

I am not sure how useful divulging this system will be, particularly as I have not given much time to provide examples of its use, nor do I intend to as they would be too lacking in both detail and number to really paint a good picture of the usefulness of this system. First one needs to roughly assess the various levels in another and then they are able to use that knowledge to predict motive and understand actions. The latter part is largely common sense, if you know someone to be basically a pure winner and they do something not related to eating, sleeping or mating then you can be assured that the only reason they have just done what ever it was they did to either impress those in view or to impress others than will hear about those actions. Although most people are a mixture of most categories there are generally one that predominates and one can usually eliminate most other categories through the person actions not making any sense in those contexts. It is the actions that only really conform to one of the groups in terms of making sense by having a motive that enable the best predictions about a persons character. When you spot these you can comfortably say that person is in part deriving their self-esteem from this mechanism.