Psychological typologies

Psychological typologies are classifications used by psychologists to describe the distinctions between people. The problem of finding the essential basis for the classification of psychological types—that is, the basis of determining a broader spectrum of derivative characteristics—is crucial in differential psychology.

Historical background

Logic of development of classification hypotheses in psychology

The history of human studies from a system-classification perspective reveals a struggle between two opposing methodological approaches, each with distinct goals:
1) to "catch" the central organizing link, some kind of motor of all design, and to distribute people by the qualitative specificity of these central links;

"The typological approach consists in the global perception of the person with the following reduction of variety of individual forms to a small number of the groups uniting around the representative type".

2) to decompose the psyche to its components in order to understand the work of its parts and to create a classification based on the differences in the structure and quality of the parts.

"It is necessary to reduce all the personality character traits to the elementary mental elements and to the elementary forms of the basic psychological laws, revealing the nature of the discovered ties".

At present there are several thousand various psychological classifications that point to these or other distinctions between people, or mental characteristics, as such.
The classifications may vary in their foundational scales of generalization and degrees of internal consistency.

Classification of people and psychological characteristics

The logic of psychological classifications development demanded a parallel existence of two scientific approaches: one of which was named "psychology of types", and the other—"psychology of traits". In the course of time, both approaches shifted towards each other: the psychology of types—in attempts to understand the structure of psychological traits of every type, trait psychology—in attempts to achieve a higher system of generalizations.

"As soon as the fact that the observable traits do not correspond to separate essential psychic characteristics and rather are only aspects of the personality and behavior, received general recognition immediately appeared as the necessity to reveal the fundamental factors behind the traits. Haimans and Virsma as well as other scientists after them tried to solve the problem. However all these researches had a fragmentary character, their results have been caused by preliminary hypotheses, and the choice of traits as a rule was determined by the personal view of the researcher" R.Maily

An example of trait psychology development :

Singling out the types of love as psychology of traits. In the Antique time, the typology of the kinds of love was very popular. These kinds of love comprised:

Eros – a passionate physical and emotional love based on aesthetic enjoyment; stereotype of romantic love
Ludus – a love that is played as a game or sport; conquest
Storge – an affectionate love that slowly develops from friendship, based on similarity
Pragma – love that is driven by the head, not the heart; undemonstrative
Mania – highly volatile love; obsession; fueled by low self-esteem
Agape – selfless altruistic love; spiritual; motherly love

Every person, as a rule, possesses all the possible types of love, but in different proportion. Which can be expressed by the profile characteristic with ups and downs.
The types of people with similar profile characteristics combined into classification of higher level.
Examples of type-psychology development :

Singling out groups of people that have obvious dominance of conscious cognitive operations— "Rationals" or unconscious operations —"Irrationals".
The specific cognitive abilities connected with rationality and irrationality.
A network for the profile characteristic is worked out which is typical for rationals and irrationals.

In the course of the development of psychology as a science and a practice, the understanding has developed that the individual is a "microcosm", which has all traits, properties, and characteristics, but they are distributed according to certain systemic laws, which have yet to be discovered.

Psychological type scales

Cosmologies

Systems of views about the material and mental world is based on principles of harmony, common universal laws of the nature and mind, and those with the greatest scale and orderliness. Everything, including the principle of psychological classification, has mathematical accuracy and clearness. The typology has the subordinated role, it reflects the natural belonging to cosmic laws.
Example: Psycosmology

Formal typology

Classifications that included stable types singled out on the basis of some psychological or anatomo-physiological traits refer to formal typologies. The formal typology may have quote varies scale. Often these are typologies are based on the behavior of particulars in a certain activity.
Example: Herman Witkin in 1954 singled out types of people as field-dependent and field-independent. The field dependent do not see a simple figure in a complex geometrical background. The field independent can single out the figure from a complex geometrical background.

Dynamic typology

The dynamic typologies are connected with change and transformations of people, and with going through stages in their development.
Example: From the psychoanalytical point of view, the child in her development undergoes a number of psychosexual stages which creates a particular make up of the soul and mind, of a psychological type.
The developing person is viewed as an auto-erotic creature that receives sensual pleasure from stimulation of erogenous zones of the body by the parents or other people during the process of rearing. Freud believed that for every such stage there is a particular erogenous zone.
The person goes through certain studies in the development of self-consciousness in the search of Self. Carl Jung considered the Self to be a central archetype, the one of order and wholeness of personality. Jung called ability of humans to self-cognition and self-development as individuation confluence of her/his conscious and unconscious. The first stage of the individuation is the acquisition of the element in the structure of the personality psyche called the person or mask, which hides the real self and the unconscious.
So, the second stage of the individuation is awareness of the shadow. The third stage is meeting still other components of the psyche – called Anima and Animus. The last stage of individuation is the development of the Self, which becomes the new center of the soul, bringing unity and integrating conscious and unconscious material. All the mentioned stages intersect. Because the person constantly and repeatedly returns to old fundamental problems, individuation may be depicted as a spiral in which the person continues once and again to deal with old problems, each time in a more subtle form.

Modeling of systems of psychological types

In modeling of psychological systems the systematization and classification play a very important role.
With the development of statistics in the description of weight of the trait in society, the character of the trait distribution becomes very important. It is also important, if the distinctions of trait have a quantitative or qualitative character for the adequate interpretation of practically every research in the field of differential psychology, understanding of certain fundamental statistical concepts is required.
"There are at least three various theories of the psychological types worked out by psychologists. Some authors represent types as separate classes that exclude each other. Some others psychologists accept the theory of types as more or less detailed trait theory, defining the types as poles of one and same continuum between which people may be ranked by the law of normal distribution. The adepts of the third view believe that the types differ from the traits by having multimodal distributions in which the people are grouped with in definite points, representing pure types". Stagner, 1948.

Distribution of the traits

The normal distribution is fundamental and does not depend on cultural factors. The majority of measuring instruments are constructed so that the trait could be normalized with the normal distribution term, if distinctions are to have quantitative character. For instance, the traits which enter the base of the personality named the Big Five have a normal distribution.
Example: Extraversion/introversion. Most people have ambivalent characteristics on this scale.

Strict sets

If characteristics have qualitative rather than quantitative distinctions, they are usually described as strict sets.
Example: Right-handed people and left-handed people. The deaf and the hearing. Types in Socionics.

Nonstrict sets

It is very seldom that a certain quality is consistently absent in a psyche. Therefore, in most cases, it is useful to use mild classifications which reflect the real character of the distribution more precisely.
Example: Typology by Ernst Kretschmer or William Herbert Sheldon.

Complex models

More complex and systematized models take into account the fact that they may meet both quantitative, and qualitative distinctions or traits. The distributions of these traits have clear connections and may form types which in term will have a constant distribution in society.
Example: Psycosmology model in the context of the general, typological and individual.