Personality types color attitudes, behaviors at work, home and elections

“My strongest asset by far is my temperament,” the candidate declares — merely being factual, of course, and certainly never “braggadocious.”

Thanks largely to the outsized personality and decibel level of at least one candidate running for president, this election will hinge on matters of temperament — that is, the candidate’s character and behavior. No election has focused less on issues and more on personality since hotheaded, self-serving Lord Voldemort challenged endlessly cool, prepared Dumbledore for supremacy of the wizard world. No presidential candidate has ever before bragged about the size of his hands.

Temperament matters. Here in Clark County, many believe that outgoing county councilor David Madore hoisted his own petard not because of his conservative political positions but because his utter rigidity in pursuing them even extended to vilifying county staffers who disagreed. The way he racked up enmity was not a matter of positions — it was a matter of personality.

What about you? It takes all types to make a world, the saying goes. Having some insight into your own type, and how that type tends to act, react and interact with the dizzying diversity of other types out there, can make your world a smoother, easier place to live, love, work and play.

Many employers use personality profiles to uncover applicants’ individual communication, cooperation and leadership styles; schools striving to prepare students for future success are following close behind, administering assessments aimed at increasing the taker’s self-awareness, and matching outcomes with potential career fields.

And, anybody who hangs out on social media knows that you can play around with an endless parade of cheesy, celebrity-based personality quizzes in search of deep insights like which Harry Potter or Game of Thrones or Disney or Simpsons character you most resemble.

What’s your preference, and what does it say about your essential self: Ernie or Bert? John or Paul? Steak or tofu? Dogs or cats? Hillary or Donald?

Our stars, ourselves

People have been trying to tease out their individual selves for at least as long as they’ve been gazing upwards and assuming that those mysterious objects in the sky must influence life on the ground. That’s called natal astrology, and it holds that each person’s character and fate are determined by the positions of stars and planets at the moment of their birth.

It’s fun to consider how the supposed attributes of a particular zodiac sign line up with your life. Alas, science has done sufficient sober analysis to determine that natal astrology holds about as much water as the Big Dipper.

The ancient Greeks adapted even-more-ancient ideas from India and Mesopotamia in figuring that personal disposition must result from a blend of four “bodily humors”: people dominated by blood are warm, brave, “sanguine”; people dominated by phlegm are cold, slow, “phlegmatic”; yellow bile makes you fiery and restless; black bile makes you serious, maybe even depressive. Later versions of this idea matched these four humors and temperaments with the four seasons and four essential elements — air, water, fire, earth.

Fanciful stuff. Needless to say, science easily debunked all of that, too.

Vastly simpler is the idea that there are two types of people. Type A is the energetic leader. Type B is the mellow follower. This is appealingly handy, but the model was actually developed by cardiologists who assumed that Type A is more at risk for heart troubles. There’s no validity to that — unless you also assume that Type A equals “constantly stressed out.”

Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychoanalysis, saw the personality as a trinity: a greedy and self-centered id; a moral, critical superego; and a practical, effective mediator, the ego. A growing child must move through various “psychosexual” stages where conflicts between subconscious desires and acceptable social behaviors get sorted out. A person who never resolves a particular conflict will always be stuck and struggling there; Freud called that “fixation.”

But Freud has been attacked for his own fixation on sexuality as the driver of all this; concepts like “penis envy” have not weathered well. Sometimes, critics insist, a cigar is just a cigar.

Freud’s most famous student — and critic — was Carl Jung. Jung also questioned the supremacy of the libido, and developed a far more complex theory of personality development. Today’s reigning tool for sizing up yourself is based on Jung: the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory.

Extro v. intro

Let’s design your perfect workday, shall we? Pick your preference:

• Lively meetings and teamwork — or quiet, unhassled, self-directed time?

• Logical, linear progress toward a single goal — or a happy jumble of creativity in every direction?

• Decisions based on analysis and logic — or your own intuition?

• A beeline for the spouse and kids when it’s over? Or, beers with buddies? Or, do you prefer winding down in restful peace and quiet, all by yourself?

If you lean toward the first options, you may be ESTJ: extroverted, sensing, thinking and judging. If you prefer the second answers, you’re closer to INFP: introverted, intuitive, feeling and perceiving.

Those are potential results of a personality profile with 16 possible outcomes and nearly endless nuances. Myers-Briggs is a quiz that aims to determine whether and to what extent you are:

• Extroverted or introverted.

• “Sensing” or intuitive.

• Thinking or feeling.

• “Judging” or “perceiving.”

Don’t let some of these awkward terms confuse you. “Sensing” v. intuitive means, do you rely on your senses to take in facts and details, or are you more guided by what’s already inside you — intuition, values and heart? “Judging” v. “perceiving” means, are you decisive, orderly and structured, or spontaneous, flowing and adaptable?

And, extroverted v. introverted doesn’t simply mean loud v. quiet. “It’s more complicated than that,” said Nolan Yaws-Gonzales, a career counselor who administers Myers-Briggs to students at Washington State University Vancouver. Extroversion and introversion are about your sources of energy and motivation: people and social stimulation, or solitude and reflection?

That’s not quite the same as friendliness v. shyness, Yaws-Gonzales said. Introverts love and need people just as much as extroverts, but they tend to have smaller circles of closer friends than extroverts, who cast wider nets and have an easier time with small talk.

Extroverts are in constant dialogue with the external world and its inhabitants; introverts are also busy doing dialogue — with themselves.

Not so Bosslike

Yaws-Gonzalez is a good example of a complex type, he said. So is this reporter. And so is Bruce Springsteen.

We’re all introverts. We like to be alone and reflect. But Yaws-Gonzalez also leads seminars and does public speaking. This reporter works in a busy newsroom full of people and talking, and plays on weekends in a rock-n-roll band. That’s pretty extroverted behavior. But when the workday or gig is over, both Yaws-Gonzalez and I usually need to withdraw and collapse — alone.

The Boss, who has been talking up his new autobiography lately, said his core is really not so Bosslike. Like many performers and artists, he’s actually a private and introverted person who assumes an explosive stage persona.

Understanding your personal tendencies and contradictions can be invaluable when you’re considering a college major or career path; it can also leverage a little personal peace. “Myers-Briggs seems to get at the core of people,” Yaws-Gonzalez said. “Sometimes it helps people name things they haven’t been able to name.”

But never let it box you in, he added. Myers-Briggs is one instrument among many, and its detractors say that it’s achieved “cultlike” status without being particularly scientific. Myers-Briggs, which first appeared in the 1940s, is a multimillion-dollar industry. Just ask Yaws-Gonzalez, who shelled out nearly $1,000 to take an online course and get officially certified to administer it to students and help them analyze their results.

What really troubles him, he said, is younger students who skew their answers in order to get the outcome they think they want — or their parents want. Others use their Myers-Briggs results to “prove” that their parents’ ideas about them are all wrong.

Yaws-Gonzalez recommends taking Myers-Briggs — and other personality and interest assessments — more than once in order to create an accurately multifaceted picture. Some personal traits can change with time, situation and experience, he said — for example, life’s pressing needs can train young, freewheeling “perceivers” to get a lot more structured and scheduled as they grow up. Seriously structured and scheduled workers may enjoy throwing all that away when they play. Introverts can even become newspaper reporters and rock stars.

“You may be highly organized at work,” Yaws-Gonzalez said. But given the opportunity to take a long road trip, would you still plan out every detail — or just take off?

Other things don’t change. Yaws-Gonzales likes the example of a right-handed person learning to throw with the left hand. With lots of practice, you might get pretty good at it. “But it may never be as comfortable and natural as throwing with your right,” he said.

Yuge guesses

“Throwing with your right” returns us to this pugilistic election campaign. Concern about Donald Trump’s character is widespread. Newspapers as mainstream as USA Today and as historically Republican as The Arizona Republic, The Houston Chronicle and The New Hampshire Union Leader have specifically decried his temperament. In a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 64 percent of registered voters said Trump lacks the “personality and temperament” to be president. For Clinton, that number was 40 percent.

Armchair-psychoanalyzing candidates is not new. In 1964, nearly 1,200 American psychiatrists said in a poll that presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was paranoid and unfit for office. The result was the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule,” deeming it unethical for a psychiatrists to diagnose a public figure without conducting a proper examination. This year has seen that rule severely tested, and the APA has cautioned its members to remember it. So we won’t go there, here.

But we sure can guess at both candidates’ Myers-Briggs personality types!

Trump is probably ESTP, according to many online guesstimators. He’s about as extroverted as any human being ever was. He’s forceful and passionate. Dramatic and egotistical. Uninterested in people’s feelings, except when selling them something. A risk taker and a natural-born entrepreneur.

Hillary Clinton’s personality is less gigantic, but perhaps equally reviled. Call her INTJ. Unlike most politicians, she’s not especially extroverted. That may make her public life forever awkward — a rightie throwing with the left. (Her husband, on the other hand, may be about as extroverted as her current opponent.)

CNN put this question to Clinton last year — introvert or extrovert? — and got a typical Clintonian answer.

“I am an extro-introvert,” she said. “I love all of the excitement and I like meeting people and hearing their stories. But I also like time alone. I like to think and relax and sleep and stuff like that. So I guess I’m a little of both.”

That’s either complex and honest, or just the sort of lawyerly spin that drives distrust. Your opinion probably reflects your own personality type.