Book review: The Four Tendencies
What it’s all about: The Four Tendencies is a book written by Gretchen Rubin, who wrote The Happiness Project, where she categorizes people into four general categories based on how they respond to internal and external expectations.
The main idea is that there are four personality types:
- Upholder: Meets both inner and outer expectations. Can easily go through commitments that was made personally, while also follow society’s norms and rules.
- Questioners: Meets inner expectation, resists outer expectation. Only agrees to follow something if they think that it makes sense or agrees with their value. Hates arbitrary rules. Based on the quiz I should fall into this tendency.
- Obligers: Resists inner expectation, meets outer expectation. Has a hard time following through commitments or resolutions that they decide for themselves, but if it’s for others then they can sacrifice themselves.
- Rebels: Can’t keep up commitment. Does anything just based on feelings. Their greatest motivation is (Gretchen wrote this, not me) to prove other people wrong or just to disobey other people.
Well, based on the description above I think the diagram should be like this instead:
And anyone can fall anywhere in the x-y coordinates. But maybe matrices are not as sexy as Venn diagrams. Overall, I don’t really like this book. Although the book seems intriguing when I picked up the book at first, I was let down after going through a couple of the personalities and found that it’s full of confirmation bias. This stems from some of the major flaws related to how Gretchen wrote the book itself.
- Gretchen was a law graduate, and she has no background in psychology whatsoever. Although the book proposes a new framework of categorizing personalities, it was not supported by a sound scientific research. When I decided to check the references part, it only has seven of them. Seven! The back cover claims “groundbreaking analysis” but I’ve seen short opinion pieces that cites more references.
- There is an online quiz that you can take to determine which personality type you are. However, you can notice that these are leading questions, and it’s quite clear which personality type each of the four answers correspond to. If you have some preconceived notion about your personality type, then there’s a tendency to pick the answer that might give you the personality type which you think you are.
- Most of her arguments are only based on anecdotes from various people. While it’s interesting to hear how people responds to expectations, the flaw lies in the saying: “If your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail”. Since Gretchen proposes the four tendencies framework, she, and the people she talked to will then try to see everything in the limitation of the framework. Everyone (even Hermione) will immediately get pigeonholed into one of the four tendencies type. Then confimation bias will kick in, and she will then justify people’s actions because they fall into so-and-so tendency type.
- She’ll explain in great length the strength, weakness, and relationship advice for each of the four tendencies. But with only anecdotal evidence, no sound scientific support, and Gretchen’s lack of background in social science or psychology, this should be taken only as seriously as the horoscope column. Especially with how she praises upholders (hint: she identifies as one) as the ones who get things done and bashes the obligers as helpless individuals in the absence of external driving force.
- In the debate of nature versus nurture, I’m a firm believer of the nurture camp as it has been shown that neuroplasticity is possible. However, Gretchen simply says that once you fall into one of the four tendencies, then you are stuck like that for the rest of your life. Again, there is no scientific basis for this argument. If we want to go with anecdotes, when I was a kid I’m more of an obliger-upholder, but after getting hammered with critical scientific thinking during my PhD I identify more with questioner nowadays.
- According to this book, the beholder-rebel and questioner-obliger shouldn’t exist. Personally, I believe that personality types fall in a spectrum instead of in a binary fashion. Furthermore, there is another (legit) personality test that shows how personalities might shift during conflict or stress, which is evidence that your tendency can change. And let’s not forget how people behave differently in when facing different persons, which adds another dimension of complexity to personalities.
Conclusion: Gretchen’s book gives interesting anecdotes on how people responds to expectation, both internal and external. However, I would caution against pigeonholing people into one of the four tendencies and think that you have them all figured out. While I, too, am not trained in psychology or social science, I can still point out the flaw in Gretchen’s arguments and how the so-called research that becomes the foundation of this book was carried out.
