Psychological person typologies

The whole history of human research from the system-classification positions appears as an arena of struggle between two opposite methodological directions, the purpose of which is:

• 1)    “catch” the central organizing link, a kind of motor of the whole structure, and distribute people based on the qualitative originality of these central links;

“The typological approach consists in the global perception of the individual and the subsequent reduction of the diversity of individual forms to a small number of groups that unite around a representative type”

• 2)    decompose the psyche into its component parts, understand the workings of the parts, and create a classification based on the difference in the composition and quality of the parts.

“It is necessary to reduce all character traits to the simplest mental elements and to the simplest forms of basic psychological laws, while revealing the nature of the detected connections”. To date, there are several thousand of the most diverse psychological classifications that denote certain differences between people or mental properties (qualities, characteristics).

Classifications differ in the scale of generalizations, the degree of internal consistency, the classification grounds, and so on. The logic of the development of psychological classifications dictated the parallel movement of two major scientific directions: one was called "psychology of types", and the other — "psychology of traits". Over time, both directions have moved towards each other: the psychology of types — in an attempt to understand the structure of the mental properties of each type, the psychology of traits — in an attempt to make larger and more systematic generalizations.

“As soon as it became generally accepted that the observed traits do not correspond to individual psychological entities, but are only aspects of personality or behavior, it was immediately necessary to identify the fundamental variables behind these traits. Heymans and Wirsma, as well as a number of other scientists after them, tried to solve this problem. However, all these studies were fragmentary, their results were determined by preliminary hypotheses, and the choice of traits was determined, as a rule, by the personal taste of the researcher”

An example of the development of the psychology of traits (stages):

Identification of types of love in the form of psychological traits. In Antiquity, there was a very common typology of types of love, which included agape, storage, mania, pragma, lupus and eros.

Each person, as a rule, has in his arsenal all possible types of love, but in different proportions, which can be expressed by a profile characteristic with peaks and dips.

Types of people with similar profile characteristics are grouped into a higher-level classification.

An example of the development of type psychology (stages):

Identification of groups of people who are clearly dominated by conscious cognitive operations – “Rationales” or unconscious – “Irrationals”.

Identification of particular cognitive abilities associated with rationality and irrationality. A grid is created for the profile characteristic that is characteristic of rationales and irrationals. In the course of the development of psychology as a science and as a practice, it is understood that a person is a "microcosm", in which there are all the features, properties and characteristics, but they are distributed according to certain systemic patterns that have yet to be understood.

In the modeling of psychological systems, a large place is occupied by systematics and classification.

In connection with the development of statistics in the description of the representation of a trait (or type) in society, the nature of the distribution of the trait (type) is very important. It is also important whether the differences in characteristics are quantitative or qualitative. A qualified interpretation of almost any research in the field of differential psychology requires an understanding of certain fundamental statistical concepts.

“There are at least three different theories of psychological types described by psychologists. Some authors still present types as separate mutually exclusive classes. Others use type theory as a more or less detailed theory of traits, defining types as the poles of a single continuum between which people can be distributed according to the laws of normal distribution. Followers of the third view argue that types differ from traits in that they have multimodal distributions, in which people are grouped at certain points, representing pure types”

Most often, the classification affected the characteristics associated with the sphere of social interaction, was built as a set of bipolar traits, a strong predominance of some trait created a certain emphasis in the character of a person. Characteristics of particular classifications: the lack of a clear boundary between classes, a person can move from one class to another under the influence of external and internal reasons, the number of classes depends on the setting of the author of the classification.

Examples: Socio-characterological (Theophrastus), socio-political (Plato).

One of the first typologies of man, based on his life values, is the typology of Plato, who distinguished the following types:

normal, characterized by the predominance of the higher side of the soul, the desire to search for truth;

timocratic, characterized by a strong development of ambition and a tendency to struggle;

oligarchic, characterized by avarice, greed, restraint and thrift;

democratic, its characteristic feature is moral instability, and the desire for a constant change of sensual pleasures;

tyrannical, in which the lowest, animal instincts predominate.

Private classifications are often built by practitioners on the basis of specific activities. Within the framework of any activity, you can find a large number of different classifications.