Thursday, April 04, 2013

New Tribes Thoughts

Steffans Personality Blog has the interesting idea of adding Tribalism to the Big Five personality measures. It clearly exists, but does not fall into any of those categories.

A lot is going to have to go into this, of course.  Can folks become less tribal or more over the years?  Can they switch tribes (because of marriage, geography, profession) and retain the same intensity, or does the leaving of one tribe make all subsequent identifications weaker?

Looks like fun.

7 comments:

  1. You know, I'm having trouble with this whole four or five dimensions of personality thing. It seems to me like there are many more dimensions, maybe dozens, and only a literary genius could begin to describe them even for a few human beings.

    That said I do think a few of the dimensions are right: extrovert/introvert, agreeableness, conscientiousness, maybe even neuroticism. But they don't begin to cover the ground.

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  2. Anonymous11:24 AM

    There is probably some overlap between tribalism and (lack of) Openness, and it will be interesting to find out how much of that is intelligence, since Openness and IQ correlate some 0.4.

    But even better would be to find a replacement of the Big Five. Some theoretically based model instead. But for now, everyone is doing research using the Big Five so that becomes the inevitable point of reference.

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  4. [Re-posted to correct typos.]

    The Myers-Briggs model (a Big Four system) has some overlap with the Big Five; four of the Five match roughly to the Myers-Briggs measures. And, being an outgrowth of Jungisn psychoanalysis, it has all the theoretical background you could wish. (How good the theory is, is another question.)

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  5. I'm afraid I would barely register on the Tribal scale.

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  6. You might like David Warren's take Faction against faction

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