Exploring Personality: A Reiteration (and a Preface)

Because there seems to be some confusion on this point, let me go back over the basis of the Enneagram again.

As a personality system, the Enneagram deals with primary motivations not behaviors. It is different from other personality profiling systems in that, because virtually every other personality system out there is based off of the Myers-Briggs to some extent, and it is a behavior based system. Yes, behaviors can change, especially over time and with maturity. That means that you may test differently on the Myers-Briggs at 40 than you did at 20. So, although the Enneagram looks at behaviors, it is not looking for behaviors, and that is a huge difference. Your primary internal motivation almost never changes. Seriously. And, no, you can't have more than one primary motivation (which is also why I hate "favorites" lists that have dozens of items on them). With the Enneagram, because it is looking past the behaviors to see what is driving them, people virtually always test the same at 40 as they did at 18. It is very rare (very) that someone's Enneagram type changes, and, if it does, it's usually because they suffered some sort of traumatic event.

Now, this does not mean that you might not get different results on an online test even from week to week, but that's because online tests are generally not very comprehensive. People want to sit down and do the thing in less than 10 minutes, so those things tend to be not very comprehensive. Added to that is the fact that people are often not very honest even with themselves or they might feel differently one day than they did the day before. A cursory 10-minute test is not going to catch those kinds of fluctuations.

However, having worked with the actual tests (the ones that take hours to complete because they have hundreds of questions) and having worked with experts who do this stuff for a living, I can speak for the veracity of the system as a whole. It's possible that personality type is fluid when you're a kid but, by the time you've made it through adolescence, your type is pretty much set. You have a primary motivation that directs the way you interact with the world. It may assert itself in different types of behaviors, mostly based upon your emotional state, but the same motivation is behind it.

And that is why this stuff works so well when developing characters for books. For making your characters believable. If you know what the motivations are for your characters, you can make them behave in believable ways. Nothing kills a book quicker than characters doing things that are, well, out of character. As I said before, "Stupidity is not the same as personality," and having a character make a stupid choice to move the plot along doesn't mean that it's a choice the character would have made. When the audience responds, "He would never have done that!" you know you've done something wrong. When they see the stupid choice coming, though, and fear it, you know you've done it right because, then, the readers are seeing the personality and the motivations of the character.

At any rate, I would suggest that you take the test, not necessarily so that you'll know what type you are, just so that you can see how it works. If you do want to know for yourself, though, be honest with your answers. I left a link to the test back in this post. If you take it, let me know what you are.

Now, on to other things! Other thing, Here's your introduction to the next triad of personality types.

Enneagram types 5, 6, and 7 make up the intellectual triad of the Enneagram. These types are data based. They are information gatherers. They tend to react to situations from a more rational viewpoint, especially when compared to the emotional triad (types 2, 3, and 4). Where other types, when asked why they did something, may say, "I don't know," the intellectuals can almost always tell you exactly why they made the decision they made and hand you the numbers to back it up. Their emotional center is fear; gathering information and making informed decisions is a way of combating that fear. The intellectuals are also attracted to ideas and ideals; relationships are less important and can sometimes be means of achieving other objectives.

Exploring Personality: Part Two -- "What's My Motivation?"

Without a doubt, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most well know personality typing system in existence. And why not? It's been around a long time. The first of its kind. It's been used by the government (heck, it may still be being used by the government), especially the military, and corporations of all sizes. It's a good indicator of patterns of behavior.

As such, it can be a useful tool for writers when trying to develop Personalities for their books. And, yes, let's call them Personalities, because not all characters have personalities. Don't get me wrong, that's not always a bad thing; two-dimensional (even one-dimensional!) characters have their place, but they are hardly Personalities.

But there's a problem... Okay, actually, there are a lot of problems. Myers-Briggs falls short of being useful in any kind of practical sense. It's the same kind of useful as deciding things like hair color: brown or blond, as in "What attitude does this Personality have: extroversion or introversion?" It will tell you behaviors, but it won't tell you motivations. At least not motivations that are more than surface motivations like:
"I want to go to a party" because the character is an extrovert. Or
"I want to stay home" because the character is an introvert.
It may as well be, "I need to put on sunscreen because I have fair skin."

Besides, Myers-Briggs is kind of clunky. I mean that in the "overly complicated" sense. It's like trying to do Calculus with a slide rule

Image by Dicklyon and used under the linked license.

instead of the calculator sitting next to you (and I had a friend in high school who used to do that just for "fun."). Having a degree in psychology, I don't say this lightly. In general, Myers-Briggs is overly complex but, then, it wasn't designed by or for lay people. It was designed by and for psychologists.

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter, which is what I'll call an elaboration of the Myers-Briggs, is somewhat better seeing as how it actually provides the information in a format that most anyone can understand. It's actually the most used personality assessment system in the world. However, the Keirsey system relies even more on behaviors, observable data, than Myers-Briggs, making it, by its very nature, more rigid. You are this or you are that. It has no room for aberrations in behavior, no room for you to act outside of type.

Which doesn't mean that it can't be useful for writers in a very general sense. Again, if you need to know how your character will act in a given situation, and you have put that character in a Keirsey box, the Keirsey system will tell you how your character should behave.

But, still, we're missing Motivation. Without Motivation, we don't really have Personality. Especially without the allowance for characters to act outside of, well, character.

Generally speaking, personality typing systems don't actually have anything to do with underlying personalities, only behaviors caused by those personalities. "When you go to a party, do you like to retreat into a corner with a small group or do you want to be the center of attention?" See, that's behavior focused. But why are you at the party to begin with? There can be all kinds of motivations for that, and that's where things begin to get interesting.

I'll admit that of all the systems I looked at during college, the Keirsey is the one I liked best. But that's because all of the other systems were just some sort of variation on the Keirsey and/or the Myers-Briggs. Based on behaviors that could be observed and measured, not any kind of internal drives.

Then, well out of school, I found the Enneagram of Personality.

The Enneagram, at its heart, is based on personal motivations and drives. Rather than express how one reacts to the world, it expresses how one acts, or attempts to act, upon the world. It also accounts for what can be seen as out of character shifts by people. For instance, have you ever run into someone you know in a place you don't normally encounter them and it seems that he's someone other person entirely? You come away thinking, "Who was that person?" The Enneagram accounts for that. The Keirsey system doesn't even attempt to.

One of the great failings in many stories, whether they be books or movies or TV shows, is a lack of understanding by the author about their own characters' motivational factors. Or, rather, the lack of any internal motivational schemes. The author needs certain things to happen for the benefit of the plot and just has some character do the necessary actions. [I don't know if the books are this way, but I know the TV show Game of Thrones is full of characters doing things that don't make any sense for them to do. There's only so much of saying "why did he do that?" that I can take.] Now, I understand moving the plot along as well as the next guy, but you need to give your characters a reason for doing the things they do; that's what makes them Personalities and not just characters.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on the Enneagram, but I have read a couple of books on it, and I think it's a great system to help authors in designing Personalities for their stories. Hopefully, this series will help give insight into why different types of people act the way they do which will, in turn, give you insight into designing realistic Personalities who do things because of internal motivations and not because of the arbitrary needs of the plot.