Introduction. When Intuition Isn’t Enough

All of us are personality experts. Ever since childhood, we’ve been paying attention to people’s distinctive ways of being in hopes of figuring out what to expect from them. We depend on this information to get along.

The innate ability to size people up is an amazing gift that we take for granted. With it, we form an instantaneous impression of the personality of everyone we meet. This rapid intuitive process works so well that we learn to rely on it. Most of our assessments of people are formed in this automatic and unconscious way.¹

But there are times when we want to consciously evaluate someone’s personality.² We may, for example, want to understand what it is about our boss that makes us avoid her. We may want to sort through the reasons we don’t approve of our teenage daughter’s boyfriend. We may want to decide if the person we’re dating has the right stuff for a permanent relationship.

That’s when the going gets tough. The difficulty mainly arises because few of us have been taught a systematic way to assess personalities. Instead, we are constantly bombarded with a contradictory mishmash of religious, moral, literary, and psychological ideas that are hard to apply in an orderly manner. Imagine how we would struggle to do simple arithmetic if we kept getting contradictory instructions on how to work with numbers. Yet we’re expected to make sense of people without having been taught a coherent arithmetic of personality.

This lack of education may be responsible for some of our biggest mistakes. It can lead us to pick the wrong suitor, take the wrong job, or misguide our children. It can cause us to misinterpret a coworker’s intentions and become inappropriately defensive, or compliant, or aggressive. It can keep us from building satisfying relationships, gracefully avoiding conflicts, or developing plans to protect our interests by fighting back.

In this book, I describe a system for thinking about personalities that may help you avoid such mistakes. Based on decades of research, each chapter will make it easier for you to organize the data you already have about particular people and to start noticing characteristics that you may have overlooked. Sorting through this information will give you a clearer sense of each person and how to relate to them.

To get started, I will show you how to combine two vocabularies that professionals use to organize their observations. One breaks down personality into five well-defined general characteristics, such as conscientiousness and agreeableness, each of which has several components. This makes it easier to think things through using a well-defined set of words.

The other vocabulary shifts attention from these general traits to ten potentially troublesome patterns of behavior, such as compulsiveness or paranoia. Mild versions of these patterns may simply be notable parts of a well-functioning personality. But some of us have inflexible and maladaptive versions of one or a few of them, versions that frequently bring grief to those we deal with—and to ourselves. More than the rest of us, such people are prisoners of personality who are locked into ways of being they seem unable to escape.

Combining these two easy-to-learn vocabularies will not only help you make clearer assessments of everyone you meet. It will also raise questions about the reasons people get to be so different from each other. In the second part of the book, I will describe the development of the brain circuits that control our distinctive combinations of traits and patterns. I will also show that the decades-long developmental process that builds these brain circuits is strongly influenced by the two great accidents of our birth: the specific set of genes we happen to be born with and the specific world we happen to live in.

But there’s more to a personality than traits and patterns. In the third part of the book, I will turn to the values and goals that give meaning and purpose to people’s lives. To flesh out this view, I will show you how to apply universal and culture-specific standards of morality to assess a person’s character. I will also encourage you to pay attention to the stories people tell about themselves, which will help you figure out what they stand for and their sense of identity.

Systematically organizing all this information about traits, patterns, character, and identity will help you make sense of anyone. It may also influence the approach you choose to engage with them. In some cases, this may encourage you to shrug off their disquieting idiosyncrasies in favor of forgiveness and compassion. In other cases, it may alert you to telltale signs of danger so that you can take protective actions. In still other cases, it may open your heart to warm feelings of love and respect. In all cases, it will enhance your appreciation of human diversity in the same way that those who know a lot about wine, or music, or baseball get the added pleasure that comes from thoughtful attention to the details. Augmenting your pleasure in understanding and dealing with people, whether you like them or not, is the main aim of this book.