Personality and Culture

Here's a theory of personality that has a good evolutionary explanation and also explains typology of culture. Bottom line: you aren't stuck with the personality you've got, but it usually won't be to your benefit to change.

Personality has often been portrayed as an arbitrarily assigned characteristic, as though one’s personality were thrust upon her against her will or pulled from a grab-bag. I think it is rather a specialization like running-back or blocker, comedian or romantic lead—our genes may give us a predisposition towards one specialty over another, but, in the end, we play whatever roles need to be played.

The specialties most often associated with personality are rigor vs. open-mindedness and listening vs. experimenting. One cannot be rigorous and open-minded at the same time, nor can one simultaneously both listen and create something new. It is possible to be a generalist, practicing all four to equal degrees, but when a team needs rigor it is better served by a specialist who has given-up on open-mindedness. The same is true of the other specialties. Since individuals cannot achieve what teams can and we serve teams best as specialists, we often specialize.



Personality differs from other specializations because it is so abstract that we can apply it in any team situation; thus, we usually carry whatever personality we developed to fit our family (or other childhood team) to every other team we join thereafter. Rigor, open-mindedness, listening and experimenting are good specializations in teams because of what teams do: they work together to achieve meaningful goals. That means that teams need (1) to be motivated to try, (2) to be motivated to unify, (3) to invent meaningful goals, and (4) to recognize the most effective ways to achieve them.

The first two of these tasks are best accomplished by rigorous experimenters and open-minded listeners. People who lack ambition tend to be satisfied with what they have, so ambition is less inspired by the promise of reward than by the threat of punishment (or at least of nagging). It takes a rigorous experimenter to most effectively apply that kind of pressure. In contrast, people who need to be motivated to unify tend to expect other people to get in their way, and the threat of punishment only reinforces that expectation, so they are better motivated by the promise of reward. Reward (unlike punishment) is only effective if perceived as fair, and open-minded listeners are the only ones everyone can trust to distribute rewards fairly.

The second two tasks are best accomplished by rigorous listeners and open-minded experimenters. Since truth is most effectively found by sifting through the vast experience of the whole community, rigorous listeners are best qualified to recognize the most effective ways to achieve goals. However, goals themselves are neither “true” nor “false”—they defy rigor—and the best group goals are ones that have never been tried before, so finding them requires open-minded experimentation. Open-minded experimenters are the best qualified to invent goals likely to be meaningful to everyone.

Unlike other theories of personality, this theory suggests something about the relative frequencies with which various personalities will tend to appear. It will depend upon the social environment, and human inventions can shape that environment, shifting the relative frequencies as they can shift the relative frequencies of species in an ecosystem. Here are four inventions that shift the social environment to rebalance the distribution of personalities--these different balances create types of culture:

Invention	Issues	Risk	Oppresses	Built On
Royalty	Poor quality of materials: plagued by poverty and crime	Collapses to humility	Rigorous experimenter	Open-minded experimenter
Legalism	Poor quality of service: cannot sustain long-term effort because of employee turnover, political apathy and low birthrate	Collapses to privacy	Open-minded listener	Rigorous listener
Humility	Poor quality of life: depression and suicide replace innovation, fun, progress and diversity	Collapses to legalism	Open-minded experimenter	Open-minded listener
Privacy	Poor quality of information: excessive gambling/debt, hype, escapism, addiction and cults	Collapses to royalty	Rigorous listener	Rigorous experimenter

By “humility” I mean the fear that attempts at creativity will be met critically. Say, “Hey, I just came up with a great new idea!” in a culture of humility, and your audience is not likely to believe they really are party to anything great or new. Their doubt becomes self-fulfilling prophesy, since the people most likely to invent great new ideas, the open-minded experimenters, are not likely to develop in a culture so unwilling to be inspired. Open-minded listeners thrive because they are needed to hold the group together as it weathers the depression that follows from lack of innovation, fun and sense of purpose.

By “privacy” I mean the social norm of hiding much of our lives from each other. Privacy protects us from the criticism of rigorous listeners, but also prevents them from rescuing us from addition, hype and bad gambles. We don’t expect to find many rigorous listeners developing in a culture that is so oppressive to them; instead, since the sustainability of this culture relies on extra income to balance careless spending, we expect to find plenty of rigorous experimenters.

By “royalty” I mean mechanisms humans develop to escape natural selection, such that rather than earn power and wealth through competition, people inherit it, marry into it or gain it through tenure. With such mechanisms in place, there is no point in trying to motivate ambition—the royals needn’t do anything to get ahead, and they are the only ones who can. Rigorous experimenters, with their talent for pushing people to achieve, depress the poor and annoy the royals (which can be dangerous), so we don’t expect that personality to develop as much in royal societies. Instead, we expect to see more open-minded experimenters, for this culture would not be sustainable without someone to prevent lack of ambition from becoming a lack of sense of meaning.

By “legalism” I mean man-made systems (such as markets) for distributing the rewards of human labor. Without such a system, people would have to find leaders they could trust to distribute rewards fairly: open-minded listeners. Unlike open-minded listeners, man-made systems are bad at rewarding unity; they tend to reward achievement instead (which tends to make alliances temporary). Since open-minded listeners are given no chance to prove their trustworthiness (and since achievers are encouraged to develop a distorted sense of fairness), no one is trusted to lead. Open-minded listeners do not develop; instead, to sustain the culture, more rigorous listeners are needed to keep everyone accountable, otherwise distrust in leadership can become distrust in everyone.

This theory offers little in terms of recommendations for improving personal and group effectiveness. It suggests that people can shift their personalities much as they can switch positions on a sports team and that we should be prepared to do so when new teams form or key members leave. However, it also suggests that personality shifts that are not adaptations to one's environment will almost never improve results overall, and that any discomfort apparently resulting from personality would be blamed more accurately on social circumstances than on personality choice. The theory does imply the potentially helpful suggestion that we consider maintaining variety of personality when recruiting teams, but exactly which variety to maintain can depend upon culture. Culture, as described here, is unnatural, and too fragile to improve in any amiable way.

That is not to say that culture never changes, just that cultural change would be painful. For example, high employee turn-over (and resulting dissatisfaction with unemployment) in the United States may be less an effect of economics than of the culture of legalism. If so, the remedy may be far more painful than we expect: to "uncollapse" that culture may require accepting humility. The more natural path, leading towards escapism and addiction, may be worse.