Personality: An Evolved Problem-Solving Algorithm

It’s possible to conceive of life as an endless series of problems, material, social, and emotional in nature, ranging in complexity from the trivial to the profound, and our actions as solutions to those problems. In that framework, a person is an evolved problem-solving machine, built on a human biological platform, and informed by individual experience. The study of personality asks why then, when you factor out the unique individual experience, do people with similar biology come up with different solutions to similar problems.

One answer might be that we don’t actually have a single common human biology (setting aside sex differences for this discussion), but rather a biology with a handful of varying brain structures that happen to manifest as personality traits. Another answer, and I think a better hypothesis, is that the evolved and adaptive problem-solving algorithm that guides us through life is governed by a handful of subconscious axiomatic values that direct our attention, bias our perceptions, and emotionally inform our value judgements. The question of personality study then becomes, what are the most fundamental values that govern the solutions to the problems of human life? Current science hints at five.

The problems we face in life vary widely in their nature and complexity, but there are abstract elements of existence that humans have been contending with ever since the origin of consciousness, to which we’re now cognitively adapted. We’re imaginative creatures who are aware of the future, so we can look for problems in advance and contend with them strategically, or we can wait for them to actually occur and then improvise. We can always try to address problems independently, but we’re also a social species so we often have the choice to do so collaboratively instead. We deal constantly with the possibility of interpersonal conflict in our social existence, so we can either prioritize the material utility of our solutions or social harmony. We continually confront problems that require us to act before fully understanding them, in which case we can either follow our instincts or override them by consciously imposing our more abstract value judgements in the form of an articulated ethic.

This claim won’t be self-evidently true, but each of the Myers-Briggs dimensions (MBTI) and their associated observations about personality can be derived from those four preferences, which also map very well onto four of the five traits in the Five-Factor Model of personality (FFM). In the FFM terminology, an axiomatic bias for strategy yields high Openness, collaboration yields high Extraversion, harmonizing yields high Agreeableness, and articulated ethic yields high Conscientiousness. In the MBTI terminology, a preference for improvisation over strategy respectively yields Sensing/iNtuition, collaboration over independence yields Extroversion/Introversion, utilitarianism over harmonizing yields Thinking/Feeling, and ethic over instinct yields Judging/Perceiving.

The fifth dimension in the FFM, Neuroticism, is tied more directly to our emotional systems. There’s substantial overlap with the other four dimensions because of the pervasive nature of emotions, but its statistical existence indicates a fifth important axiomatic value which is easier to recognize once the other four have been more fully articulated. Neuroticism is often described as sensitivity to negative emotion. I’ll make the case though that it’s foundation is actually sensitivity to a specific set of negative emotions related to self-esteem, that it emerges from our competitive hierarchical existence, and that it takes the form of a bias between contending with the values of the hierarchy or contending with the hierarchy itself via status maneuvering. The axiomatic value controls between competence and politics in other words, with a bias towards politics tending to yield somewhat higher Neuroticism scores that are partially obscured by the dimension’s poor differentiation.

Personality is then the abstract manifestation of an instinctual problem-solving algorithm people have evolved as an adaptation to the most ancient and universal problems of human life, which directs our attention, biases our perceptions, and emotionally informs our value judgements, which is tuned in response to the most important problems in our individual developmental environment, with axiomatic biases between collaboration and independence, improvisation and strategy, harmonizing and utilitarianism, ethic and instinct, and competence and politics. In the sections that follow I’ll attempt to explicitly demonstrate how each of the personality dimensions of the FFM and MBTI can be derived from this model, and then conclude with a brief discussion of some of the immediate implications that follow related to attention, IQ scores, and personality development.

It’s important to note that I’m aware of the strong preference for the FFM in the scientific community over MBTI and appreciate the reasons for that. MBTI typically classifies personality dimensions bimodally, while each of these axiomatic values is simply a bias in favor of a particular mode of solving life and away from another. People can fall towards the extremes or the middle, so the normal distribution of the FFM is more technically accurate. The four-letter classifications of MBTI and their associated descriptions are most relevant to people who fall towards the extremes of each dimension rather than those with more balanced perspectives. In the context of the analysis of axioms though, it's the extremes that are most relevant and what I'll be describing, which is partly why I somewhat prefer MBTI here.

MBTI also provides a useful vocabulary for describing the basic archetypes of personality, and it can be helpful for people to classify themselves and others as certain distinct types even though it's a simplification. It’s also helpful because it notes the overall directionality of the biases, which is important because they indicate a fundamental disagreement in axiomatic values along with the natural directionality of our attention and interest in a given circumstance. In other words, the difference between left of center and right of center on the FFM distribution has important implications that aren't obvious from the small shift in dimensional value.

Collaboration vs. Independence: Extroversion / Introversion (Extraversion)

We always have the choice to attempt to solve our problems independently, but people encounter many problems in life that are much more effectively addressed by a group. That’s one of the main reasons we live in societies and have since before the origin of consciousness. Other people are tools we can use to solve problems, but they’re also often a source of problems and they’re not always available or reliable. Individuals have to be capable of making friends and cooperating with other people to solve larger problems, but we also have to be self-reliant in order to succeed in the world. We have to strike a balance between collaboration and independence then, and that balance defines the difference between Extroversion and Introversion respectively.

At a subconscious level collaborative Extroverts perceive other people – in part – as tools they can use to solve their problems, so they’re more likely to view their interactions with people as positive opportunities. Independently oriented Introverts experience people more as a source of problems than as a source of solutions to them. In the social sphere, Extroversion is a fundamentally more optimistic mode of being than Introversion.

This dimension is often described in terms of energy, but it’s better understood in terms of stress. The reliance collaborative Extroverts place on other people leaves them less independent than Introverts so they feel more stress in isolation. Where Extroverts primarily see the potential to make friends in social activity, independent Introverts primarily see the potential to make enemies, so Introverts feel more stress in public. We recover from stress and the energy drain associated with it where we feel safest and most confident. For Extroverts that’s around friends and for Introverts it’s away from enemies, abstractly speaking.

It’s for the same reason that collaborative Extroverts tend to seek attention in public while independent Introverts hide themselves. Extroverts want to be noticed and liked, so they externalize positivity and they’re more perceptive of the positive feelings of the people around them. Introverts want to get through social situations with a minimum of negative attention so they’re quiet and diplomatic, and more perceptive of the negative feelings of the people around them.

Extroverts are naturally more talkative than Introverts too, because collaborative problem-solving relies on communication. Collaborators incorporate more feedback from people in their thinking so they’re quicker to externalize it and tend to do so more incompletely. In contrast, the more independently oriented Introverts think with more internal dialogue and less externalization, only involving other people in the process when it becomes necessary.

Improvisation vs. Strategy: Sensing / iNtuition (Openness)

One of the defining features of consciousness is the awareness we have of the future. Humans are uniquely capable of imagining problems long before they occur and devising solutions to them in advance. That leaves us with an intrinsic problem though, because we have limited conceptual resources and the future is endlessly complex and vast. The further ahead we try to think, the more difficult it becomes and the more likely we are to be meaningfully wrong. We also have limited knowledge which means problems often arise that we couldn’t foresee, that we have to address in the moment and which are often time-sensitive. We have to strike a balance between strategy and improvisation then.

The difference between Sensing and iNtuition in MBTI – which is somewhat unhelpfully called Openness to Experience in the FFM – isn’t very easy to conceptualize because it involves so many seemingly disparate concepts. The fundamental observation to recognize is that Sensors are more oriented towards concrete action in the present that they perceive and iNtuitives more towards abstract action in the futures they imagine. This is the difference between improvisational problem-solving and strategic problem-solving, which shouldn’t be confused for the structured planning associated with the Judging/Perceiving dimension (Conscientiousness in the FFM) because both can be done more conscientiously or impulsively.

Improvisers (Sensors, or people lower in Openness) prefer to address problems at or near the moment they occur rather than think them through well in advance. Because improvisation is time-sensitive, improvisers rely on quick thinking which requires immediate access to a broad set of skills, knowledge, and experience. The depth of each of those tends to be less important than their breadth though since adaptability is more important in improvisation than optimization.

Because of the time constraints, improvisational thought is naturally more superficial than deep, however without much time to revise mistakes, immediately effective results are critical. To improvisers, the immediate details are quite important, and the bigger picture less so. The reason Sensors are so named is because improvisation requires a focus on what’s true here and now, rather than what may be true sometime in the future, somewhere else, or in some other circumstances. Concrete sensory perception is therefore much more important to improvisers than imagination.

Conversely, strategists (iNtuitives, or people high in Openness) prefer to devise courses of action well in advance of expected problems. This focus on the future requires much more imagination because that's the only place the future actually exists. Circumstances also change inevitability over time and important details emerge and disappear between conception and implementation, so successful strategists need to focus more on what’s possible or likely rather than what their senses tell them is actually true at the moment, and the more universal principles rather than the more ephemeral details.

This all results in something of a more detached, dreamlike existence than that of Sensors, who are continually more attentive to immediate physical reality. It’s also why iNtuitives tend to have more interest in art, poetry, certain forms of music, certain types of games, and certain genres of entertainment like science-fiction and fantasy. The FFM describes this dimension as “openness to experience” as a result, although it might have been more apt to call it “openness to conceptual experience” since the Sensing types tend to be very open to real-world sensory experiences like sporting events and tourism.

The primary benefit to improvisation is that it’s more intellectually efficient than strategy and therefore quicker to put into action, which is often a critical factor. When it’s not, strategies typically produce better overall solutions to problems than improvisation because of the additional investment of time and intellectual energy, but the delayed implementation adds significant complexity to the problems. In order to manage that complexity, successful strategists have to ignore the details and focus on the bigger picture, viewing problems from a more abstract perspective with a deeper level of fundamental understanding than improvisers.

The MBTI iNtuitives are so named because the deep level of abstract understanding that they rely on and develop for their topics of interest often produces leaps of insight that are difficult to follow. They emerge from a complex conceptual model of reality that exists at least partially in image, metaphor, and narrative rather than internally or externally articulated thought. New ideas and observations often immediately invoke a feeling about how well they harmonize or conflict with that model, which is what intuition really is in the emotional sense. It's immediately obvious when a specific piece doesn't fit into a puzzle after all, but much harder to articulate the reasons why.

One of the main differences commonly observed between Sensors and iNtuitives is that Sensors are more attached to tradition, while iNtuitives are more open to radical new ideas. That’s a consequence of the reliance on more imaginative complex thinking that comes from the strategic mindset of iNtuitives. Improvisation tends to be a more intellectually efficient exercise that requires quick and effective results, and often the best way to achieve success in that realm is to simply repeat actions that worked well enough in the past in similar circumstances. Sensors are fundamentally less comfortable relying on their imaginations to guide them properly through life, and also more skeptical when other people try.

The quick and effective nature of improvisation naturally makes Sensors more adaptive to unexpected change than iNtuitives however, because unexpected variables can radically destabilize a complex strategy. Strategically-minded iNtuitives are more likely to experience surprise as stressful, energy-draining, and inherently unpleasant, where the improvisationally-minded Sensors are more likely to experience it as exciting and rewarding because it's already built directly into their preferred approach to the world.

Harmonizing vs. Utilitarianism: Feeling / Thinking (Agreeableness)

One of the unavoidable consequences of our cooperative social existence is that people’s interests and opinions come into conflict from time to time, which produces emotional disharmony that can easily grow destabilizing, destructive, or even murderous if left unchecked. Power determines who wins in a tyranny. In a healthy functioning society or family though – which are the only kinds that are stable across time – people have to agree voluntarily.

One answer to the problem of emotional conflict is harmonizing, which means focusing on people’s feelings (the negative ones in particular), prioritizing them, and working towards compromise. The problem with that approach though is that sometimes people are just wrong, when being right really matters. The compromise to designing a car that explodes and one that doesn’t is a car that only explodes occasionally. In our prehistory, the compromise between a good hunting strategy and a worse one might have been just a little more starvation than necessary, and a few more children that didn’t survive the winter.

The other answer to the problem of emotional conflict is utilitarianism, where the argument settles on whatever action seems most effective in the moment and it’s up to every individual to suppress their own emotional responses in favor of the goal. Utilitarianism promotes competence and results in the highest level of material success in the short-term, but it tends to breed the kind of resentment that threatens social bonds in the medium to long term. We evolved relying deeply on those social bonds for our survival and material success, and still clearly do in the form of families, friendships, communities, workplaces, and nations.

The choice between harmonizing and utilitarianism comes down to whether you feel more threatened by the dissolution of the relationships you rely on to contend with the natural world or the challenges of the natural world itself. The MBTI Feeling types prioritize their relationships and answer harmonizing while the Thinking types prioritize effectiveness and answer utilitarianism.

The FFM calls this dimension “Agreeableness” which is somewhat apt because harmonizers tend to act more agreeably, but one of its problems is that it doesn’t adequately distinguish the more selfless types of utilitarian disagreement from outright selfishness. The internal motivation to argue on behalf of an idea that you honestly believe is best for everyone is very different from arguing for it simply because it’s yours or it benefits you. Also, part of the process of harmonizing is the willingness to argue in order to facilitate emotional compromise. Disagreement doesn’t become agreement just because it’s typically presented politely or non-confrontationally.

The MBTI language of Thinking versus Feeling is problematic too because both types think and feel in equal measure. The harmonizing Feeling types are more attentive to emotions including their own because that's in the nature of harmonizing, but thinking about feelings is still thinking. The utilitarian Thinking types work to suppress their emotions and expect others to do the same. The emotions still exist under the surface, although their impact may be blunted somewhat by the failure to dwell on them or their more active rationalization.

It’s also important to recognize that acting with consideration for emotions isn't the same thing as actually acting on your feelings, intuitions, instincts, and impulses, which are more the domain of the Judging/Perceiving dimension, or low Conscientiousness in the FFM. Harmonizing types may be more apt to act on their emotions because they value them more and are more attentive to them, but at its core harmonizing is a rational, deliberative process. It's also somewhat more outwardly oriented than inwardly since there are more outward emotional considerations in a community than inward, which is why agreeable types tend to seem more emotionally submissive, at least in the short term.

Incidentally, this personality dimension is clearly partially sex-linked and that seems to be a direct consequence of female reproductive biology. Throughout our evolutionary history, pregnant women were heavily reliant on their mates and overall community for support, especially in the later stages of pregnancy and early stages of child-rearing. Imagine giving birth 10,000 years ago, alone in the woods after nine months of pregnancy, or trying to hunt elk while carrying a crying infant. Males had no such natural period of intense dependency, so harmonizing was a more important evolutionary strategy for females, although it self-evidently had value for everyone.

Ethic vs. Instinct: Judging / Perceiving (Conscientiousness)

The choice between improvisation and strategy (the Sensing/iNtution dimension of MBTI and Openness in FFM) relates to our awareness of the future and how we choose to approach those problems we can conceptualize. We’re limited creatures though. There are practical limits to our imagination, knowledge, and cognitive abilities that put many of the consequences of our actions completely out of our conceptual grasp. That leaves the question, how do we address the problems that we’re not actually capable of solving or even predicting? How do we act when we can’t know how to act?

One answer comes directly from nature in the form of our emotional systems: instinct, intuition, feelings, desires, or impulses. Other animals can’t conceptualize the consequences of their actions at all, but they still come equipped with evolved systems that guide them through the problems of life with a certain amount of success. Ours are somewhat more complex and adaptable, but they’re fundamentally the same systems. When you don’t know what to do, you can follow the same behavioral patterns that worked well enough for your successful evolutionary ancestors by obeying your emotional systems.

The second answer is uniquely human and comes largely from culture and our collective ability to abstract behavioral consequences over long time-spans, even extending further than an individual human life. It also comes from within, in your more limited personal ability to do the same. That answer is to follow an articulated ethic (which doesn’t mean it will actually be morally right or wrong because there are both good and bad ethics). When you don’t know what to do, you can choose to trust an abstract code of behavior and follow it.

This choice is substantially reflected in MBTI’s Judging/Perceiving dimension, which is much more aptly named “Conscientiousness” in the FFM and which also captures the root axiom more accurately than MBTI. MBTI calls the more conscientious types Judgers and the more impulsive types Perceivers. It’s interesting to note that the words “conscientiousness”, “consciousness”, and “conscience” all obviously share the same root (and vocabulary is deeply important to the FFM). They’re all related to the choice we seem to have about the intentional application of our personal ethic to our behavior.

An important part of this dimension seems to clearly emerge from a culturally imposed sense of discipline. People brush their teeth and make their beds more out of habit than anything else, and we generally stop stealing and impulsively hitting others at a very young age due to proper socialization and real-world consequences. Most societies also make a concerted effort to teach children to suppress their impulses, defer gratification, and respect the law. When you remove that externally imposed effect though, there’s still an axiomatic value regarding the level of trust we place in our impulses to guide us properly through life, as opposed to our articulated values and conscious mind.

The influence of culture is impossible to fully dismiss here though because so many of our intractable problems are inseparably linked to our social interactions and tied to our existence as social animals. Part of conscientiousness manifests from our perception of how other people want to be treated, which is self-evidently linked to culture. There’s still a universality to conscientiousness though, because there’s a universality to culture that emerges from our shared human nature, which is why scientists can detect this dimension cross-culturally.

None of this is to imply that acting on impulse is inherently unethical of course. Part of the natural environment we've adapted to over our evolutionary history includes the presence of other people, the way they perceive our interactions with them, the judgements they make in response, and the consequences that accompany them. We all possess an evolved ethical sense that’s emerged from that environment, as do other social animals although ours is more complex. More conscientious people simply choose to impose an articulated ethic on top of that. That articulated ethic might be very sophisticated, or it might just be a post-hoc rationalization for the underlying emotional ethic.

While much of conscientiousness is inherently tied to the idea of articulated ethical consideration for other people, it’s also personal. That’s partially reflected in the straight-forward idea of deferred gratification, but it’s also more abstract in the understanding that if you act according to an articulated code of proper behavior, certain unimaginable problems might never materialize in front of you or solutions may emerge that you couldn’t have foreseen.

Incidentally, there’s a strong element of faith in that mindset, which is partially why conscientiousness, consciousness, conscience, and ethics all tend to be tightly linked with religion. They’re all deeply related to the question of how you should behave when the proper course of action is unknowable, and when the final consequences of your actions might seem miraculous because the chain of cause and effect is well outside of your conceptual or perceptual grasp.

It’s important to note that while conscientiousness is often looked at as something of a virtue, following an articulated ethic isn’t intrinsically positive. It depends entirely on the specific ethic. Conscientious soldiers on the wrong side of WWII followed their duty for example, acting out an articulated cultural ethic that produced destruction and atrocity on an epic scale, and many of them died as a direct consequence. It certainly didn't guide them properly through life.

There are also some inherent benefits to acting on impulse. Foremost among them and implicit in the idea is that impulses are fast. In some sense they’re the thoughts and decisions that emerge before you think, although that doesn’t place them entirely outside the realm of conscious control. There are parts of us that are much more closely linked to our biological nature, like turning to look towards something that surprises you or recoiling from pain, over which we have very little control. Our intellectual and emotional impulses are something more like muscle memory that we can train – at least to some extent – through experience over time.

Acting on impulse is also a more authentic mode of existence. The alternative is something like the conscious imposition of a filter, composed of our more articulated values, placed between our truest self and the world. If you never remove that filter it’s more difficult to connect emotionally with the people around you, because they interact largely with the ethic instead of you. It’s also simply not as much fun as acting on impulse, at least in the short-term before the negative consequences might manifest.

Competence vs. Politics: Neuroticism

Neuroticism in the FFM is often described as sensitivity to negative emotion. It’s not a very well differentiated dimension though because of the pervasive nature of emotions, and its formulation suffers from a number of intrinsic problems. First, harmonizing Feelers – agreeable people in FFM – are more attentive to emotions generally than the utilitarian Thinkers who prefer to suppress them. Part of what it means to be a utilitarian is to more strongly value emotional discipline, which is certain to be reflected in actions and personality test responses.

Second, conscientiousness is something like the imposition of a filter of articulated values between your emotional systems and the world. The less conscientious Perceivers are naturally more attentive to those emotional systems, and also more inclined to act on them. Conscientious Judging types are more emotionally reserved than Perceivers, and likely to see themselves as more emotionally stable.

Third, the collaborative Extroverts are naturally more socially optimistic than Introverts and externalize positivity in their friendlier mode of being. They also tend to have more active social-lives than Introverts, and which by their social nature tend to include more Extroverts who are also externalizing positivity. Therefore, Extroverts tend to be more attentive to positive emotion than Introverts and also surrounded by more of it.

This is especially important in comparison to iNtuitives because there are roughly three times as many Sensors in the world. Social activities tend to cater to the interests of the majority and Introverted iNtuitives tend to end up vastly underrepresented socially and somewhat isolated as a result, which tends to come with negative emotional responses. The imagination and future-focus of strategically-minded iNtuitives is also naturally more conducive to anxiety than the improvisational mindset of Sensors who live more in the moment.

Lastly, there are many people who actually have specific legitimate reasons to experience more negative emotions in their lives than average, or more volatility. A loved one might have died recently, or they might be in a failing marriage. They might be unfulfilled at work, or in continuous financial trouble. They might have chronic health problems, or substance addictions. The emotions involved are self-evidently not direct evidence of a personality dimension, although they can easily appear that way to people (or tests) ignorant of the specific circumstances because the results can be relatively stable over time – years even.

Despite all of these problems with the differentiation of the Neuroticism dimension, the statistical techniques that derived the FFM still identified a fifth important personality dimension here which implies there’s still an important and distinct axiomatic value at work in the background, strongly related to negative emotion. When you take all of the points above into account and look at the test questions, what remains of this dimension seems likely linked primarily to confidence, insecurity, and self-consciousness. The Neuroticism dimension, in other words, seems to measure sensitivity to the specific set of negative emotions associated with self-esteem.

We’ve already discussed the cooperative social nature of human existence, but it also has a self-evidently competitive nature as well. Throughout our evolutionary history we lived in an obvious hierarchy, composed of winners and losers, and that came with real consequences towards which our emotional systems are now adapted. Simply put, winners usually got to eat well and reproduce while losers often didn’t, and we’re instinctually aware of that fundamental social reality. Our emotions respond to our sense of social status, often intensely and even violently.

Incidentally, we’re not alone in that fact. It’s very well recognized that dominance plays an important role in the behavior of all social animals. Wolves fight to establish dominance, and they violently enforce their status in the pack. Humans are more sophisticated, but a lot of our behavior emerges from the same emotional motivation.

MBTI doesn’t have a dimension that measures this, but the awareness of it is quite evident in the flattering language typically found in the type descriptions. When you’re trying to explain to people what they’re like, they tend to be a lot more receptive to the positive descriptions that inflate their felt sense of status than the negative ones that reduce it. This isn’t universally true though. Some people are more sensitive to it and some are less emotionally invested and more objective.

At the axiomatic level I believe this personality dimension is the answer to the question, when competing with people in a value hierarchy, do you contend with the values or the hierarchy? Contending with the values pretty straight-forwardly means pursuing competence, competing honestly, and acting with humility. Fundamentally, it means the willingness to lose gracefully.

Contending with the hierarchy means firstly a more intense awareness that it exists, which manifests as a sensitivity to how others perceive you and the relative status of the people around you. That comes with competitive emotions like pride, shame, envy, resentment, contempt, and anger. There’s likely some contribution from a person’s actual perceived social status here, but highly successful people don’t seem to lose much of their drive for status as they achieve it.

Secondly, contending with the hierarchy means engaging in political maneuvering to either increase your own status or reduce that of your competitors, irrespective of earned position. That might actually mean playing the game straight-forwardly, but only for as long as you’re winning. Articulated values play a mitigating role, but there's likely to at least be a tendency towards defensiveness in the face of criticism and some propensity towards self-promotion. At higher levels we recognize this behavior as narcissism, which is self-evidently a core personality trait in those possessed by it.

At its heart and carried to the extreme, this is the story of Cain and Able. There’s certainly a moral consideration to this dimension, but it’s important to note that Able lost in the end, murdered by his less successful, envious and resentful brother. People who don’t pay enough attention to the hierarchy put themselves at risk, and whatever the hierarchy actually values – the ability to feed children for example – can suffer for it. Status and power exist and matter, and they’re intrinsically tied to people’s perceptions of us which is largely why negative feelings like self-consciousness and envy exist.

It’s also important to note that by its very nature this dimension tends to adversely affect the accuracy of all of the other measures on a self-reported personality test, and it’s difficult to measure directly. Status-consciousness and the resultant maneuvering is one of the main reasons people lie to both themselves and others. Pride and shame are powerful motivators because they speak directly to our instinctual sense of material and reproductive success.

Personality & Attention

Each of the personality dimensions comes with a large number of natural perceptual biases that heavily influence the direction of our attention in any given circumstance. It’s helpful to simplify them down to the fundamental elements though, so we can combine them together (using the MBTI vocabulary) and examine the overall impact.

The collaborative nature of Extroversion points attention towards communication and people, while the independent nature of Introversion points towards thought and the self. The improvisational nature of Sensing points towards the present and the physical environment, while the strategic nature of iNtuition points towards the future and imagination. The harmonizing nature of Feeling points towards people and their emotions, while the utilitarian nature of Thinking points towards material problems. The instinctual nature of Perceiving points us towards our emotional core, while conscientious Judging points us towards our articulated ethic. The status-consciousness that underlies the FFM’s Neuroticism dimension points towards people, while the alternative points towards our goals.

The social environment is naturally where we make most of our observations of people, and of ourselves in contrast. In that space, Extroverted Sensors are the most “present” of people with their attention pointed both towards the people and the environment. Introverted iNtuitives in contrast have their attention pointed at the inward world of their own imagination, so they are often physically in a room but entirely elsewhere attentionally. Both Introverted Sensors and Extroverted iNtuitives split the difference, with their attention partially in the world and partially not.

The Thinking/Feeling dimension plays a secondary role here too depending on the circumstances. In a casual social environment, the attention of the harmonizing Feeling-types points them towards the people and relationships in the room, so ESFs tend to be maximally engaged here. INFs can at least comfortably direct their imaginations to the people in the room, and the interactions between them. INTs aren’t naturally drawn to any of that though, so their attention tends to disassociate from the external world and drift deeply inward.

These effects reverse when you invert the environment, putting people into isolation with an abstract utilitarian problem to consider like the ideal design of complex system. The attention of ESFs still naturally points towards people and their conversations, the details of the immediate environment, and the emotions involved, all of which are directed away from the relevant problem. INTs on the other hand tend to be maximally engaged, because the situation suits their naturally inward, imaginative, utilitarian mode of thought. The other types tend to split the difference.

These examples are somewhat at the extremes of the social spectrum. There are many examples in the real-world that fall in between them like an engineering team collaborating on a project, or a husband sitting alone and thinking about how to improve his marriage. Each of the different types will tend to be maximally attentive and engaged under specific circumstances, and almost totally disengaged under others. The extremes are somewhat telling though. They’re why we tend to perceive ESFs as the most extroverted of the Extroverts, and INTs as the most introverted of the Introverts.

The Judging/Perceiving dimension adds another layer to this observation in the form of the emotional filter conscientiousness represents. ESFPs tend to be both maximally interested in casual social situations, and emotionally engaged. INTJs on the other hand tend to be both maximally disinterested, and emotionally reserved. In contrast and very important to note, INTJs tend to be maximally engaged in activities like personality and IQ tests, while ESFPs tend to be maximally disengaged.

Personality & IQ

The vast attentional difference between personality types is likely to influence IQ scores measurably, especially towards the extremes of personality. INTs are independent strategic utilitarians and in their natural environment solving the types of abstract problems on an IQ test. Their attention is likely to be easily focused, and they’re utilizing the same types of cognitive skills they prefer to rely on in day-to-day life.

ESFs are collaborative improvising harmonizers, so they're totally out of their element in that circumstance. They likely have to struggle to maintain their attention, and also exercise cognitive skills they're less accustomed to practicing which might mean decreased skill but almost certainly more stress. Also, without direct consequences for their test results ESFs are simply less invested and less likely to care about doing well.

That point is especially true if they're also the less conscientious and more impulsive P-types, who are more responsive to their natural emotional motivations. Conversely, the P-dimension might actually improve the motivations of INTs who are already naturally interested. It may also increase the speed at which the types answer the questions, which could improve performance if they’re more naturally inclined to overthink the questions or reduce it if they’re inclined to underthink them.

Lastly, being able to claim a high IQ typically comes with some benefit to social status, or at least a perceived benefit. The status-consciousness measured by the Neuroticism dimension may play a significant role in motivation because of that. It might also reduce the performance somewhat by directing attention to people and status and away from performance.

All of these points are just suppositions, but both IQ test results and personality are self-evidently linked to attention and motivation. Therefore, actual intellectual ability doesn't need to factor in to explain why IQ appears to be linked to personality in some ways. I’d expect that the more accurately we learn to categorize the personality dimensions, the more we’ll find significant correlations. Because of the differences in attention and motivation though, it’s also intrinsically harder to accurately characterize some personality types than others using self-reports.

Developmental Origins

Infants are born into the world with sophisticated emotional systems to guide them, but no articulated ethic. They’re utterly dependent on other people but the only collaborative ability they have is to express satisfaction or dissatisfaction. They aren’t aware of the future so they can’t strategize, but they also have no experience or knowledge to draw on in order to truly improvise. They’re incapable of suppressing their emotions for a goal and although they can’t deliberate on the emotions of others they do have some basic awareness of them. Infants and young children are instinctively competitive and self-interested, but any awareness of the social hierarchy comes later since it’s heavily linked to cognition and reproduction.

To the extent that a newborn infant even has a personality type to speak of, it consists of nothing but a complete lack of conscientiousness, a predisposition towards improvising, and tiny amounts of collaboration and harmonizing ability. That’s something like an ESFP in other words, but radical in disposition and completely undeveloped in cognitive abilities. Everything else comes as we develop.

It’s clear that we have an innate biological tendency towards a certain developmental path as we age into adulthood, but it’s also likely that a large amount of our problem-solving algorithm is a learned adaptation to the most important problems in our particular developmental environment. The classification of those problems is inherently difficult though because there’s no single source in the lives of children. We have parents of course, but also siblings, friends, classmates, academics, sports, and later on jobs and romance, to name a tiny handful, and each comes with its own set of daily problems that extend over years.

Every individual problem plays a part in how we come to perceive the world and form our axiomatic values, and no one grows up with the same set of problems, not even identical twins in the same family. There might be some important trends to observe though in particularly difficult upbringings. No one has a perfect childhood of course, but some are worse than others and more developmentally polarizing, and others are so traumatic that it's foolish to try to link them to normative personality dimensions. The childhoods that are difficult, but fall somewhat short of terrible, are the ones we have the most to learn from in this discussion.

Children obviously naturally develop more independence as they age, and that’s something we make a concerted effort to instill in them. Some children grow up in neglectful environments with very little support though, which would seem likely to drive them towards the extremes of Introversion since collaboration isn't typically possible. The same may be true of more abusive or unstable environments, where the child would learn to see people almost entirely as problems instead of solutions. Those that developed in more cooperative environments would likely tend towards Extroversion, or perhaps overly supportive environments where they were discouraged from developing their independence.

The focus strategically-minded iNtuitives place on the future in contrast to improvisationally-minded Sensors seems indicative of anxiety towards the future during development. That might come from a more unstable or dysfunctional family environment, although the personality dimension could also arise in response to parents who were more encouraging of forethought in their children, who encouraged highly imaginative activities, or who modeled strategic behavior themselves. In the case of outright abuse or neglect though, the heavy reliance on imagination instilled by a continual fear of the future might explain the stereotype of the tortured artist.

The Thinking/Feeling dimension is partially sex-linked as discussed earlier, but that’s certainly not determinative. A preference for harmonizing prioritizes relationships, which implies it’s partially an adaptation to an environment where the relationships were problematic or unstable. A preference for utilitarianism prioritizes material wellbeing, which implies it’s partially an adaptation to a more threatening material environment or one where material concerns were more relevant to life than emotional concerns, where the relationships were either stable or possibly non-existent. Active encouragement from parents or modeling by them are important factors as well of course.

Societies typically make a concerted effort to instill conscientiousness in children and convince them to follow their articulated ethic, which certainly has a large effect. Presumably it’s more effective for some children than others and is largely dependent on the severity of the consequences for failing to conform. Since this dimension is about how you act when you can’t know how to act, it also seems likely tied to unanticipated outcomes from certain behaviors. Some children may experience more traumatic consequences as a result of following their impulses for example, or from strictly following the rules when it wasn’t appropriate. Acting on impulse also often has built-in rewards, especially if children are overly sheltered from the potential negative consequences.

Presumably, everyone would rather achieve success in the hierarchy through honest competition and outright competence. That's not always possible though, especially in highly competitive environments, so status-maneuvering serves to fill the gap. High scores on the Neuroticism dimension then and the status-consciousness that comes with are likely adaptations to competitive environments where the child rarely felt competent enough. One sibling might continually outshine another for example, or highly critical parents might continually point to other more successful children as exemplars in academics or sports. Taken to its extreme this dimension seems indistinguishable from narcissistic personally disorder, and so likely has the same developmental roots.

We obviously don't stop facing new problems once we become adults, which is why personality can and does change somewhat over time. Aging from five to ten represents a doubling of experience though, which is matched by aging from 20 to 40 and then 40 to 80. Therefore, experiences in our youth tend to be much more formative than those in later life, as it becomes harder to alter axiomatic values the more data we have to internally justify them. It's only the more traumatic experiences in older age that are likely to have significant effect in a short time frame.

As we age though, we also have a tendency to see more of what the world is truly like, and develop less specialized problem-solving strategies than those that were relevant in our youth. We have a tendency to normalize in other words, and shift to a more balanced personality. It's impossible to say what constitutes the ideal balance in the overall world though, and adults still each exist in their own unique environments with their own unique problem sets, so there is no universally applicable standard for the natural balance.

Conclusion

Life is a complex problem, and animals are one of the solutions that’s evolved in response. Animals solve life entirely via their emotional systems, and as a type of animal we have that option too. For whatever reason though, humans have also evolved imagination and complex reasoning skills, which imbue us with a more intense awareness of ourselves, the people around us, and the future itself.

Reason and imagination are tools we use to solve problems but they’re also problems in and of themselves. They provide us with complex choices about how to behave, each of which require us to prioritize the most relevant perceptual data. In other words, we have to prioritize which tools we use to solve life, the ideal answer to which depends on the types of problems most relevant to each individual. We have to make those choices starting from a very young age though, with no articulated understanding of what we’re doing.

Personality is the abstract manifestation of those prioritizations, which are made at the subconscious level, as an instinctual adaptation to the particular types of problems that present themselves in our developmental environment. Although we never stop adapting and developing until the day we die, the problems we encounter when we have the least amount of experience tend to be the most formative, especially if they’re difficult or traumatic.

Personality is an evolutionary adaptation to the problems of conscious human life, which means our axiomatic values are ancient. They respond to the problems that each of our successful ancestors has had to face for hundreds of thousands of years, so they address the most abstract universal circumstances of human existence. The big five circumstances are cooperation, competition, conflict, the comprehensible, and the incomprehensible. Put as simply as possible, the most important personality dimensions we’ve identified so far arise from axiomatic biases between collaboration and independence, harmonizing and utilitarianism, competence and politics, improvisation and strategy, and finally ethic and instinct.