9 types of personalities according their culture

To be honest with ourselves we have to recognize this: We love short list articles that simplify everything. And we love much more if is about people. That is the main reason why internet has plenty of articles that are tilted like this one. But sorry folks, this article doesn't have a list, but something much more interesting...Why we love lists about "types of people" and how culture helps us to do that.

Now, If you really really really want to classify people by culture, go ahead, there are plenty of consultant services that sells lies such services, following the scientific method of flipping a coin, and use pre-judgements as theory. Otherwise, be smart and keep reading.

How we understand our world

One of the main functions of culture is to bring us explanations of how the world works. Culture (through socialization) brings us the main frame to understand everything that surrounds us. It is in that way because our brains can't handle the complexity of our world (such theories about we just use 10% of our brains- are false, we use it all, well, not everybody), so culture helps us. Otherwise we should re-invent everything. That is neither clever nor possible. Could you do it?

Just imagine that you are the only survivor of your civilization. Could you bring it back with your actual knowledge? We live surrounded by many things that we don't know where they come from neither how they were made. As nobody is specialist in everything, culture helps to fill the gaps.

Ofcourse that means some difficulties as well. As culture helps us to not think everything again, giving us some pre-constructed scheme, there is a trap of not thinking at all. Pre-built concepts, better known as prejudice, could makes our life hard as rock. Not just limiting our knowledge, but suffering by other's limited knowledge.

Luckily, a dynamic culture could avoid such issues (as scientific culture does), changing those concepts to adapt better to reality, whether is social or material.

Anyway, we simplify everything in order to put it inside our mind. Ofcourse, this applies for people too.

Azimuthal equidistante: Commonly see in UN's flag

Not scientific reasons to put north on top, but political: Australia and New Zealands version, on top and in the middle.

World maps: Literally culture brings us schemes of the world. We are probably used to Mercator world map projection, but there are many. Some are much more accurate to how real world looks like. So, Mercator is one among other cultural possibilities.

Reducing social complexity

With our actual world population (7 billion), humans cannot get to meet eachother very well. Nevertheless our system works (bad, good, but works) and we trust and live with many strangers. There is too much people to be processed by our brains, so culture helps us again, putting them into categories. And sometimes we help to improve them.

For example, some societies tend to classify people by ancestry, linage, totem or family name. That allow us to build a "mental map" to know who is who. It is certainly a pretty common system. Ancient Rome used to divide their populations in 12 tribes to identify their citizens, while in actual european (and others) aristocracy, family name is an important social classificator.

In larger societies, with more complexity, people use several categories as interest groups (religion, political parties, sport teams, etc), place (neighborhood, city, country), skin color, social class. According to that, isn't weird to find a very strict classification social system in India. With huge amount of people, with several languages, ethnics, religions, "caste system" brings certain kind of traversal order to deal with such a complexity.

Horoscope is an old people classification system by day of birth. But, Can we be reduced to just 12 kind of personalities?

It is likely that we try to make our own complexity reduction of people, trying to anticipate their behavior, get to know if someone is trustworthy. Ofcourse we put different levels of stringency and some of those categories could led to prejudice. But we hold them because allow us to deal with complexity and we'd feel disarmed and frightened without such "mental map".

So isn't strange that some sciences, as psychology, tried to sort "types of personality", and magazines and internet has plenty of "personality test" to get to know who you are. Or try to predict if we will like someone by the music they hear. But, Is it really possible classify human complexity into a couple of categories?

It looks like that humankind is much more complex, but we keep trying to reduce it to make it fit into our minds. So, What lesson we take of all of these? Besides that we love to sort people out. We have to keep in mind that when we put the world into categories, we are also doing it with ourselves. We put limits to our actions, trying or pretending to don't look like the others. I think that is enough with categories that others put on us to add some more. If we are going to use them (because are useful) is good not to be too strict, because "Whatever measure you deal out to others will be dealt back to you".

Some sources:

R. Rappaport, 1994, Spatial organization

E. Durhkeim and M. Mauss, 1902, Primitive Classification