We all know the typical mind fallacy—the bias where we assume that other people’s minds are much like our own. It happens because most of our evidence for what minds are like comes from experiencing what our own mind is like, and thus we infer from that evidence that the minds of others are not so different from ours.
The typical mind fallacy is deep-rooted and hard to change, since it’s difficult to get good evidence about what it’s really like inside other people’s heads. Even when we try, we inevitably parse the evidence through the lens of our mind’s understanding, and so may easily misunderstand when we think we’re really getting it. We can’t easily escape the “bias” that is the entirety of our lived experience, and so though we may learn theories about how other minds work, our understanding of them remains grounded in intuitions gleaned from observing just our own.
If you study the psychology of personality, it can feel like you understand that other minds are different. You learn that some people are introverted while others are extraverted. Some are more conscientious or neurotic or judgemental or open to new experiences while others are just the opposite. But in many ways, these are surface level traits of minds because many of them are surprisingly mutable. We can apply interventions like psychedelics to increase openness, meditation to decrease neuroticism, and cognitive behavioral therapy to increase extraversion.
The theory of personality traits makes it seem like people are different, but not fundamentally different. In effect it says minds are like ice cream, and personality traits are flavors. Some people are vanilla or chocolate or strawberry, others are rocky road or Cherry Garcia, but in the end they’re all ice cream, and not really that different when you get past whatever has been mixed into them.
And to be fair, minds are not totally different. There are large commonalities among the minds of all humans, mammals, and even all chordates. And yet, as it is said, mind design space is wide. Even within humans it is surprisingly wide. This just isn’t obvious because typical mind bias and distractions like standard personality theories give the impression that other minds are merely slight variations on ours.
But I’ve come to believe human minds can be quite different from one another—less like different flavors of ice cream, and more like different kinds of dessert. Only, I couldn’t see this for a long time because I didn’t have the gears to make sense of it. Luckily, I think I have found some gears, however fake they may be, in the Enneagram.
Much of the Enneagram’s value is that it aims to explain the core generators of our behavior, which necessarily means explaining how different people can have different core generators. Or, even if the generative processes turn out to be the same, it explains how the initial inputs those processes are given produce people who think and behave in wildly different ways.
It suggests that we have what it calls a core “essence”, but what I might describe as a strong, inborn prior. So strong that it’s woven into the structure of our brain and body in a way that makes it immutable without turning us into a different person. This prior sets the stage for how we approach life, determines much about what we most deeply desire, and causes fairly predictable patterns of behavior that fit into a system of types.
The Enneagram says there are 9 or 27 or more of these types. Another system might give another number. But the value is in seeing that the Enneagram isn’t just another personality theory like MBTI or Big5. Instead, it’s an attempt to show us what is in our “souls”, and once you see that no two “souls” are exactly alike, and you have a theory of the mechanics for how different “souls” make different people, it’s hard to make the mistake of believing that your own mind is typical, let alone anyone else’s.
Even if you can’t use the Enneagram to predict how people will behave with perfect accuracy—though I do think if you learn it well it can improve your predictions!—it’s a theory that has value in humbling us to the vast differences in human mind space.
Behaviorism says that people’s behaviors and thoughts are shaped by the rewards and punishments they receive. But when you think about it, a lot of rewards and punishments are delivered to us… by ourselves.
Most things that I do during the day are neither ecstatic nor painful. A more typical reward or punishment that I get is something like “feeling good about what happens” or “feeling bad about what happens”, which originates in my head. So my behavior is less shaped by the environment, and more… by myself, in a feedback loop.
There is some noise on a day to day scale, but in long term we will probably settle in some attractor—a set of behaviors and thoughts and feelings that reproduces itself over time. Self-fulfilling prophecies, behaviors that elicits predictable reactions from others, thoughts that rationalize the behaviors and in turn seem justified by the reactions we get, the skills we practice, the habits we train; that kind of stuff.
(This does not mean that anyone can choose any attractor. Biology matters, socioeconomic status matters; these are also inputs that determine the options you have and the reactions you get. But for given biology and status, there are multiple attractors available, and your situation today is mostly determined by your situation yesterday.)
Things like Enneagram can be understood as attempts to list the basic classes of attractors found around us.
When I think about Big5, my mental picture is of five different bell curves, five scales with independent sliders, where each of us gets a different setting, and that’s it. (Probably an oversimplification.) What is missing in this picture is why people sometimes change, but mostly don’t. I mean, either those five sliders are flexible, which doesn’t explain why people rarely change; or they are inflexible, which doesn’t explain why they sometimes do.
Could you expand on the difference between Enneagram and other theories? At least by appealing to subjectivity or something like “you need to get into it to get it”.
Sure. I’ll give some links shortly since I don’t want to recapitulate too much of what I’ve already written, but basically the Enneagram tries to predict your behavior based on how you orient towards being. That’s kinda vague, but the idea is that some people’s deepest desire is to love or to understand or to accomplish or something else, and when they are inevitably prevented by the world from fully doing that, they develop coping strategies that ossify as habituated behaviors, and those habituated behavior are what constitutes personality as normally understood. This is different in that most theories don’t aim to theorize a mechanism by which personality arises; they merely seek to catalog the existence of different personalities.
I wrote a few posts about the Enneagram. You can find them both here on LessWrong or grouped together here on my blog: https://www.uncertainupdates.com/t/enneagram
What I’d actually recommend you read, though, is @Valentine’s series on the Enneagram. The last post in the series is here, and it has links to the earlier posts so you can read the whole thing.
Enneagram (and MBPI before it, wildly popular in the previous milleneum) is not a very good predictive tool. Big-5 remains the best scalable predictive framing, especially when combined with IQ (or a proxy).
Enneagram may be WAY better for reflective and support uses—a guide for how to understand oneself and one’s preferences/choices, and to some extent what default communication and coordination mechanisms are likely to fit well (to be adjusted in actual relationships, it just provides a starting point).
There’s no possible small-dimensional model that’s going to be very good at showing the diversity that exists among humans, or even among culturally-similar humans.
I agree that no typing system will ever completely explain the diversity of human minds, nor is this an argument I would make. I think I disagree about it being not very predictive, but would rather say that the tool is so hard to use that it becomes non-predictive in the hands of most users, and so the Enneagram ends up looking like it doesn’t work to many people because it’s so hard for most people to understand how to use it that they misuse it and this leads to confusion. This is especially not helped by the fact that lots of Enneagram people try to use the Enneagram to prove too much, and I wish such personality theory-of-everything formulations of it didn’t exist or at least weren’t so popular, as they make the Enneagram into something more like astrology than astronomy.
That said, the pointer I mean to leave in this post (though I admit I don’t provide an in-depth argument for my point, because it’s basically a claim about what value I found in learning the Enneagram) is that it can break down the typical mind fallacy by learning it, and the only real test of that claim is to try learning it for yourself and see if you less suffer typical mind bias.
The Enneagram has less predictive validity than the system you’re criticizing. If you think personality theories flatten mind-space into flavor variations, then the Enneagram sadly is just the same typology without using personal traits as the discriminating factor. Minds tends to differ architecturally, not typologically.
We all have different representational formats, different processing modes, different gating functions on identical inputs (which has something to do with genetics and receptor expression). Types can’t capture that because types are static and minds are generative.
I’m not criticizing MBTI or Big5 or any other system. They in fact seem decent at doing exactly what they’re designed to do. I’m saying the Enneagram provides a theory that, in my estimation, provides a better model for convincing someone, once the grasp it, just how different different minds are, in that they are oriented around fundamentally different motivational structures rather than merely differences in stable-but-mutable preferences tracked by other theories. A person’s Enneagram type is mostly, as best I can tell, not mutable, and in the cases where it looks mutable, it’s often better explained by a person having accumulated many layers of coping behaviors that obscured the ability to see their type.