Flex_ Do Something Different - Ben [2]
64. Advantages of flex in the social domain
65. flex and world issues
flex in action – challenge
Appendix
1
Section 1:
The human habit machine
1. How many kinds of people are there?
This may seem an inauspicious beginning but a pivotal point in my academic career happened in a Chinese restaurant near Hatfield, not far from where I was working at the University of Hertfordshire. It was the late 1970s. The waiter was young and eager. He made polite conversation while serving us and he found out that I was a psychologist. When I was paying the bill, he asked if I would mind answering a question for him. I said I would if I could. His question has stayed with me in the decades since because it encapsulates a common misconception about people.
The waiter asked me this:
‘How many kinds of people are there?’
I’ll tell you the answer I gave him in due course. But I did not shy away from the question. It would have been easy to sidestep it by saying something like, ‘It depends what you mean’ or ‘What definition of “kinds” do you have in mind?’ (Psychologists always carry a whole armoury of sidestepping statements around with them.) After a little discussion, though, I knew exactly what he meant. It all became clear when the word ‘personality’ cropped up.
What is a reasonable answer? Given that we are all individuals, perhaps it could have been, ‘As many kinds as there are people in the world.’ Or even a very large number since we are all individuals. But that does not seem to be the case. Psychologists believe they have the answer to how many kinds of people there are because, in principle, people have personalities that fit into certain categories. Psychologists can, by various ways and means, fit them into a finite number of categories – usually described by between two and five personality traits. For example, in the ‘big five’ these are agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism and openness to experience.
Why should this be so? Humans are habit machines and they tend to behave predictably. People tend to behave the same in different situations. It seems safe to say that, if we know someone, we’ve a good idea of what to expect of them. We often say, ‘Oh, that’s just typical of Bill.’ Or, ‘I might have known Jenny would say that!’ In fact, we can even figure out something about a person we don’t know very well. Just being told about ‘Simon, who wears lizard skin shoes,’ might lead you to make certain assumptions about the type of person Simon is. Or hearing that ‘Lucy reacted very badly to the criticism’ would help you predict how she would respond to a cutting remark in the future.
So my answer to the waiter’s question, ‘How many kinds of people are there?’ at that time led me to tell him that empirical psychological research had come up with five ‘big’ personality traits. That’s what my academic studies had taught me. But I remember also questioning the sense of dividing personality into five categories. It seemed as absurd to me as the twelve astrological signs of horoscopes. His question led me to ponder why people should be categorised. Might they not become imprisoned by the category they were assigned to? Wouldn’t it be more important to be able to behave in the best and most appropriate way as required by the situation? Like a tree that bends with the wind, to have a fluid and flexible personality that could flex according to need?
I told the waiter I found the ‘big five’ strange and I did not know why it was such a popular idea. And I also began to suspect that assigning people to a personality type might not be such a good thing because of the dangers of it becoming self-limiting. Couldn’t people benefit from having a personality that was more dynamic and even allowed them to move between the types if circumstances required it?
Today I would have told him about flex.
2. The personality trap
On the face of it, it just doesn’t make sense for a person to behave the same way in all types of different situations. The world is constantly