The quiet King

kw: spiritual musings, human personality

I am reading a book about personality, and a comment made by someone the author interviewed set off a train of thought. When someone interviews for a job as a pastor at a certain church, if their Myers-Briggs score starts with an "I", they are told, "think twice…I am sure our Lord was an Extrovert."

I immediately thought, "Really? Read your Gospels again, fool!" Jesus frequently withdrew from the crowds that came to hear him speak, to "desert places". He often arose early to pray alone, and more than once the disciples went out looking for him. He avoided the crowds when his miracles made him popular, but spent half the night talking privately to Nicodemus. At Sychar in Samaria, he refrained from going into the city, sending his disciples to buy food.

The extroverts I know avoid time alone. Those extroverts who are spiritual much prefer prayer in a group to private prayer. A defining characteristic of an introvert is, not total avoidance of people, but the need to recharge from time spent socially, by time spent alone. Extroverts get a charge out of social contact. Some almost cannot abide periods of solitude, while introverts require them.

Jesus an introvert? Yes, most assuredly. The Bible is full of effective, introverted leaders. Moses comes first, terrified of being sent to Pharaoh. Isaiah preferred writing to speaking. Jeremiah, the "weeping prophet", tried to avoid public speaking, but found that the word of God was "a fire in my bones". Even Paul the Apostle wrote that he was despised when he spoke, and that his writing was more effective. I sympathize with that; my father trained all of us boys to speak publicly, but my experience is, I need downtime after a speech, where my more extroverted boss loves to jump right into a glad-handing working of the crowd.

In our local church, I am considered the leader (we don't have formal pastorship), yet I find delegation of almost everything suits me better than "running the show". Now being in my mid-sixties, I'd retire from it if I could. Fortunately, the congregation seems to be mainly stamped in my mold, so they understand my quietness. I think of the church here as a protected enclave from an "Olympic athlete" model of Christian life that has come to be the norm. I'd rather be in the "upper room" with a few, than in the crowded marketplace, though I can handle either one. Am I like Jesus? I don't know, but I recognize that his personality was best suited to private teaching, once a public speech had got the attention of a curious few.

We built your world, now we are claiming it

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, human personality

Eleven years ago I first took the Keirsey version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test. My type is INTP: Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinker, Perceiver. However, the tendency toward each of these items is not very great. On scales that range from -50 to +50, I am +6 for I, N, and T, and +2 for J. I was told by the test proctor that, for example, +6 on the F-T scale means something like +50-44, meaning I have strong feelings to go with my strong intellect, rather than a weak intellect and no feelings: yes, I happen to be a deep thinker who cries at weddings and sappy movies.

Just this morning, I ran through one of the free MBTI tests one can find, and on a slightly different scale, found the following (I remain INTP on balance):

• Introverted 56% vs 44% Extroverted
• iNtuitive 58% vs 42 % Sensing
• Thinking 54% vs 46% Feeling
• Perceiving 50% vs 50% Judging (Tie broken in favor of P)

This type is called the Mastermind by one research group, and the Architect by another. Does this tell me anything useful? I cannot say it bears out my life experience; my life experience is the basis for the classification, so that would be circular reasoning! Rather, it helps me identify people of similar type, and it begins to expose the conflicts that make up my life.

In the same class as I eleven years ago, there were more than twenty people. When these test results were presented to us, we'd all given permission that the whole room could know our results, so we were seated, successively, according to our scores on each axis. One woman I worked with at the time was consistently seated near the end of each arrangement. She was, for example, a 50 on the T scale. This doesn't mean she cannot have feelings, just that she never uses feelings as a basis for decision or action. In sum, for her, there is little or no inner conflict. She is comfortable with who she is.

I, on the other hand, am full of conflict. I don't just "see both sides of an argument", I see several sides that neither antagonist has thought of. I've learned to keep quiet about that most of the time. Two people in a "don't confuse me with facts" mood don't respond well to further confusion. Anyway, being rather introverted, I don't run toward a fight, I dodge out.

Laurie Helgoe (PhD) was raised in a family of ten, a noisy family as she remembers, and she was the one who most often dodged out. With strength born of maturity, she has written a marvelous book, Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life is Your Hidden Strength. A great value of the book for me is that it shows how much of the structure of society and civilization is due to the quiet work of introverts. The author also has determined that introversion is the majority tendency.

It is "common knowledge" that introverts are a distinct minority, ranging around 25% of us all. Common knowledge has it wrong. In 1998 when the Keirsey Personality Sorter had been taken by 200,000 people, 41% who'd taken it were introverts. The instructor of our class noted that introverts are less likely to self-test, because they live in their own heads already, and are more familiar with what is in there. Thus, the number was probably closer to half. Yet the book we were using stated that the "I" types in Myers-Briggs represent 25%. This turns out to be based on a guess made decades earlier. Dr. Helgoe has better figures. A representative national study done in 2001 pegs the proportion of introverts at 57% (she quotes the study but does not cite it; I wish she had cited it).

Much of the book comprises a self-help manual for the wounded introverts, who abound. America is an overtly extroverted society, for which partying and self-revelatory small talk are primary values. The key "networking" function is the cocktail party, a chamber of horrors for most introverts: what thinking person gains anything of value from standing around nibbling inedible hors-d'oeuvres and gradually getting drunk while talking of meaningless things to people one is unlikely ever to see again? An introvert prefers a more meaningful conversation with no more than two others, sitting in a corner with a side table to hold the drink she plans to ignore anyway.

Have we internalized society's values, to the point that we devalue our own? The author comforts us with her own experience: once she gained her own voice, though she listens much and says little, her boss once said, "When Laurie speaks, people listen." I identify; I have had that said about me also.

Where introverts fall flat is in repartee, except for a few (with prodigious memories) who have pre-thought out thousands of social situations and "have a million of 'em" when it comes to snappy comebacks. The few of these I know are less popular than one would think, because they don't know when to stop. I am reminded also of Steve Wozniak, in his first appearance on "Dancing With the Stars" a couple weeks ago: after his fumbling dance, he didn't just listen to the judges' comments, he had a quip in reply to each. He had more to say than all other contestants combined, and came away looking quite the fool. I am pretty sure the Woz thought he was leaving quite a different impression (Maybe he is crazy like a fox, though. While he got the lowest score from the judges, his public popularity kept him in the running).

Dr. Helgoe sees American society like the Yin-Yang symbol, in which light and dark follow each other, and each embodies a drop of the other at its heart. She sees in this the growth of us as individuals. We gain abilities "borrowed" from our opposite number. I see this in myself. Shy to the point of needing psychiatric help in my pre-teen years, I have become, as an adult, a sought-after public speaker. I've learned how to work a crowd, without feeling crowded. I know how to gain restoration in solitude; as one chapter of the book has it, "Alone is not a 4-letter word." But I still avoid situations in which I'd need to answer quickly. I simply have to think things through. I've become an incredibly hard sell to any promoter with the "limited-time offer". I know an honest deal will be here tomorrow, and if it won't, it ain't.

The best advice for the inner-directed among us, that true "quiet majority" (not quite silent), is this: don't allow anyone to blame you for your virtues. Dare to think things through, and deny the push for an immediate answer; dare to live by your own standards, and ignore those who fear your lack of conformity; dare to be a person who allows himself/herself to see farther, and eschew the hasty dreamers who can't take time to look ahead. Live richly, for your inner life is rich. It is OK to be your own best friend.

More variety than a field of snowflakes

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, sociology, human personality

I've heard debates over Nature versus Nurture all my life. Everyone has, though mostly we tune them out. Even if we're interested, the interest seldom lasts long. I long ago concluded "it's both," not as a copout, but from observation. However, I didn't think much about what "Nurture" means.

Almost a decade ago, I wrote a song that contains these lines in a chorus: "Is it nature, is it nurture?/Why should anybody care?/We are dealt the cards, but our own hand we play..." Yet in the song, I celebrated Nature (genetic endowment) more than Nurture, and assumed that Nurture was also mainly a family affair. I wrote it in my fifties, after thinking long and hard about the way I'd "become my Father" in many ways, but quite a different person in others, and not just because in those ways I had instead become my Mother. Some of "what is Me" seems to be due to neither of them, nor any ancestor. Where and how did I come by some of these things? It was a mystery to me.

Judith Rich Harris may have the key that unlocks such a mystery. She studied psychology, including at Harvard, from which she was eventually expelled as being too much the synthesist...they like specialization there. She became an independent investigator, which makes her right after my own heart. She has studied much more than psychology over the years, which I believe gives her unique insight into humanness. Her recent book No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality presents her key, or rather, three synergistic keys.

Having at present a teenage son, I've been forced to the conclusion that most of who he is, that is, his personality, was built not my my wife and me but by the world around him and his reaction to it. I don't mean just his peer group—naturally, I think him peerless, and in many ways, he is so capable that true peers are hard to find. No, I mean everyone: schoolmates, church friends, teachers, coaches, and family members (definitely in the minority). His case is not like mine; my father's oldest friends, as they get senile, mistake me for a younger him. Such will never happen with my son. My wife and I are so very different, and he is such a smooth blend of the two—in those things he does have from us—that he cannot resemble either of us very closely.

I'll cut to the chase, but you shouldn't think this will "spoil it" for you. Nobody could do that; Ms Harris writes too well, bringing too much detail, for a mere thousand-word review to steal her thunder!

Author Harris first explains and then disposes of the common list of "suspects," commonly thought to produce human personality. The vast majority of studies have focused on degrees of similarity: between identical twins, ordinary siblings, cousins, and non-relatives, including step-siblings raised together. Few have focused on differences, and nearly none have focused on Harris's key question: Why are identical twins so different?

Think about it. Everyone knows a few pairs of identical twins. Some pairs go to great lengths to seem similar, others to great lengths to be different. Yet, once you get to know them, you can always tell them apart, though you may occasionally forget which name goes with which.

A certain sub-genre of science fiction literature abounds with clones. (Definition: a clone is the collection of individual entities that share the identical geotype. Thus a pair of identical twins is one clone. The four or eight calves produced by splitting a single embryo are one clone. The sheep Dolly and the mature sheep from whose cell she was developed are one clone, though in this case, the two were of different ages; both have died). Anyway, these sci-fi clones typically have almost magical qualities, frequently of the telepathic sort. In reality, there is at least one known human four-member clone, a set of identical quadruplets...there is nothing magical about them. They are four kids who happen to look a lot alike and have many similar tastes and habits, and a very robust collection of tastes and habits that are not shared!

Judy Harris has discerned three more likely suspects, that she calls systems. Each appears to be a mental organ with a specific function. This is similar to our language organ and our face-recognition organ. People whose face-recognition organ is damaged (it is in a particular part of the brain) cannot learn to recognize faces any quicker than they learn to recognize a car key or the house they live in. If you show them a picture of a familiar face, either right-side up or upside-down, they take the same time to state who it is. For most of us, however, recognition of an upside-down picture of someone's face takes much longer. The "face" organ is tuned to people in "ordinary" orientation, not hanging by their heels.

Each System has a set of skills, and each provides its own motivation so that a person willingly does the work to develop accordingly. We are self-motivated to produce a personality that we feel will best serve our interests. The three systems observe differing things, so they sometimes work at cross-purposes. We have plenty of reasons for the inner conflict we often feel!

The first of the three is the Relationship System. It makes use of the Recognition organ, and builds up a body of knowledge about every person we've taken note of, even via hearsay. It strives to build a predictive model of a person, so we'll know how they react, and how we ought to act with them. It uses what it has, which is why first impressions are so important. It tries mightily to determine what distinguishes each indivitual from the mass of "others" yet unknown; thus it homes in on the small differences we notice, even between identical twins. Yet it also looks for patterns in each individual's behavior, so as to be better at its predictions. So, it becomes very skillful at determining a certain kind of sameness (for one person) and another kind of distinctiveness (between any person and all others).

The second of the three is the Socialization System. We seek to belong. When we have few options, we do our best to belong to the group in which we find ourselves. The desire to conform is strong. Yet, once we venture outside the home and have a group of playmates and later schoolmates, we automatically belong to at least two groups, and probably several. Our family is but one of those groups, and we are definitely socialized to certain behavior with our family members. But it turns out that our in-home socialization has almost nothing to do with the other groups to which we belong.

The very active teens (high schoolers) with whom my son spends most of his time belong to several groups: as many as three sports teams; two, three, four or more musical ensembles (stage band, marching band, jazz band, city or county performing band, rock group, private jazz ensemble...); several academic organizations (Math League, Science Olympiad, Drama club...); a church; a church youth group; plus the AP and IB students, a quarter of the student body, form a loose-knit group with specific academic and societal goals. For my son, the number of his "friends" in this gaggle of groups numbers about two hundred. Each group has different "bylaws" or "running rules", and thus a child is differently socialized by each group. My kid is like ten different people, depending on whom he's with!

Dwell on that a moment: other than a few basic habits, the effect of parental training is completely overwhelmed by the socialization requirements of such a life. My conclusion, which I think mirror's Harris's: kids only turn out like their parents if all the groups to which they belong are a lot like their parents. Only this can explain the relative success of the Amish and similar groups, in raising kids who "stick with the program." No other choices are offered. Thus also the impulse of strongly religious parents to put their children into religious schools, of the appropriate stripe, of course! Parents can strongly influence their children's personalities, but only by controlling the entire environment. If home and school are much different, the parents will learn how little influence they truly have.

Actually, there is more to it than this. We have one system to go: the Status System. This system uses information from the other two, over a longer period, to gain status or advantage within the groups we choose to stick with (or that we can't escape). This system is the strongest discriminator; it makes our differences more different, in an effort to carve out a niche of greater value. The Relationship System collects all the information about differences between all the people we know, and many people we've heard about. The Socialization System averages the information for those in a group, so we tend to conform to group norms. But the Status System uses the distinctions between ourselves and others to find areas in which we alone excel, so as to dominate, or gain status, or at least earn some measure of respect, in each group.

No matter how similar one twin is to her twin, there must be some differences, just from the effects of random events. Everyone who knows those twins will put them on distinct "pages" of their Relationship memory, and will thus treat one a little different from the other. Each twin, reacting to others' reaction to them, will emphasize any difference that seems to confer an advantage. Thus, though both are likely socialize to the same group, each will specialize within it, so both are individually respected for unique characteristics.

As it turns out, by the time a pair of twins has reached adulthood, they are about equally balanced between similarities and differences. They may share many things (tastes, habits, attitudes...), but they will differ in about the same number of things. They are more similar than nontwin siblings, who typically share only about a quarter of their tastes or attitudes.

Our desire to be "loved for myself" drives much of our personality development, particularly in Western cultures in which individuality is more valued. Yet significant events can have great effects also. I don't know what I'd be like if I'd never experienced receiving Jesus. I might have many characteristics I now have, but I'd probably be very ignorant of biblical and theological subjects, and would not have gained anything from certain spiritual people I've spent much time with. I know that in many ways I am no different than I was six years ago, when I was dying of cancer. But some things are quite different. People who've known me all along can see the difference. Some folks like it, and most don't care. A few liked me better before, and I've lost one formerly close friend as a result.

Nobody who specialized in any one psychological or sociological discipline could have produced such a synthesis. Judy Harris is just the right sort of person to bring it all together, so we can see some of the "why" and "how" of the puzzles we all face.