How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

Better to just get to know people individually and talk to them about their desires, capabilities and needs. But I guess that takes too much time in the corporate world, so we classify people by color (and I suspect it also sells a lot of books).

The Belbin team Roles does have some value I feel as that's derived from real results - but you should not use it prescriptivly

Red: Firey & high energy characters that act like that.

Blue: Intelligent & 'meta'. Lots of 'wizards' with that kind of personality.

Green: That might as well describe an Ent.

Yellow/White: Nice extroverted people, with a dash of self-righteousness

Black: Death and negativity.

This was exactly the same color model, although we gave names to the colors, like red was commander, blue was analyst, etc. Of course, everyone wanted to be red.

I'm sure this course was expensive, and hundreds if not thousands of people took it. It was about as useful as you would imagine. I only wish I could find those blocks, as they were fun (and safe) to throw at people.

Of course they didn't mention the original book, because if they would have, I certainly would have remembered the title!

For example, General Semantics says that the map is not the territory, which isn't the most absolutely ground-breaking thing in the world but is helpful to keep in mind, whereas Neuro-Linguistic Programming might as well be "NLP: Language is Magic!" for all of the grandiose claims it makes about controlling people using crafted speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics

GS also came into the SF world:

> During the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, general semantics entered the idiom of science fiction. Notable examples include the works of A. E. van Vogt, The World of Null-A and its sequels. [48] General semantics appear also in Robert A. Heinlein's work, especially Gulf. [49] Bernard Wolfe drew on general semantics in his 1952 science fiction novel Limbo. [50] Frank Herbert's novels Dune[51] and Whipping Star [52] are also indebted to general semantics. The ideas of general semantics became a sufficiently important part of the shared intellectual toolkit of genre science fiction to merit parody by Damon Knight and others; they have since shown a tendency to reappear in the work of more recent writers such as Samuel R. Delany, Suzette Haden Elgin and Robert Anton Wilson. In 2008, John Wright extended van Vogt's Null-A series with Null-A Continuum. William Burroughs references Korzybski's time binding principle in his essay The Electronic Revolution, and elsewhere.

Because it has some merit. It's not the complete picture of a human, but it's a shortcut that gets you in the ballpark. Kind of like a fuzzy picture coming into focus.

People can be evaluated on any spectrum: morality, intelligence, friendliness, creativity, etc. They're all useful, but an incomplete representation of the human.

There are tons of systems that try to lump people into categories. The systems that tend to get popular have enough metrics to be roughly useful but few enough to be easily remembered.

We used to lump people into two categories: good and bad, or friend or enemy. Then we figured out that people can change and be on different parts of that spectrum in different contexts. That blurry picture wasn't clear enough to help us succeed.

The danger comes when you start thinking: "Reds are jerks" or "Don't worry about what that Yellow said." and fall into that mental trap that the fuzzy picture is all there is.

While its uses in a corporate environment can be bogus, there are indeed a few discreet types of people, and most anybody that has worked/lived with/watched people in the wild can attest to that.

I don't see many people being "analytic, careful, meticulous" in one day and "let's just go at it / throw caution to the wind" the next.

At best, an "analytic, careful, meticulous" will have some rare breaks when those qualities will break down (e.g. when they fall in love or some addiction or some breaking point in their life/career).

But usually people tend to stick to some modes of behavior -- which might not be the ones in the color groups above, but they do exist and are quite consistent.

Fascinating how it's the same thing "mediums" use to say there's some person speaking to them from beyond the grave, with a message for someone whose name begin with M...

As an American it’s a little reassuring to know that despite some economic advantages, the Swedes are also just a bunch of easily impressionable idiots.

Anyone know what is happening?

Is that the sudden burst of traffic from HN triggered some kind of Amazon's fake review analysis and they took down bunch of reviews?

Over all, when a good salesman closes a deal, with the knowledge of this approach that you have been taught, it does not say, that the approach works. A good salesman uses common sense and experience in talking with people and of course adapts to the customer, but that does not mean, that he uses this special theory. (Maybe, you did perform bad, because you used the theory )

I would say, if we did a study with a control group, one group has been taught the theory, you have been taught, and the control group is not (but maybe, we tell them, take notice of the other person and try to adapt to their character), and if we notice, that the theory trained salesmen actually perform better, then we can say this framework is of any use. We still don’t know, of course, if not a different form of training could outperform this framework. Until then, it is just anecdotal evidence.

If the framework were even a tiny bit useful, wouldn’t it have made you at least an okay salesman?

Conversely, wouldn’t the great salesmen be great regardless of how valid a framework is?

Someone may be generally very detail oriented yet when they buy a car, they may be very complacent. In fact you could think that a 'more ideal' color system would look like some 4 colored Piet Mondrian painting.

Yes. People are less "unique" than they think, and some scientists (or non scientists) can come up with useful pattern matching/abstractions over people types (like in the book), while others study subtlety and small differences at another level, and are sometimes deluded that higher level personality types don't exist.

That doesn't mean that this or that theory of types is fool-proof and always applicable. But it also doesn't have to be, to be scientific (which just needs it to be falsifiable, empirical based on observation, testable, and useful for predictions).

A scientific theory != a law of nature. The former doesn't have to always hold. It could still create very useful models for predicting people behavior with success.

I often reference being introverted but it's important to understand that it's a scale and everyone is somewhere on that scale. It's not binary. But it does help explain why I get tired from over exposure to strangers, but can go for hours in the company of family and close friends.

And yeah I agree these things should only be used as guides or aides. I still feel my life changed when I first read my MBTI description. It was spooky, like someone had read my mind.

But how does that help me? It mostly doesn't. What has helped me the most daily is knowing my limits, that I have a social battery and letting myself recharge that.

And completely irrelevant to this topic my biggest aide was to understand how my stomach controlled my temper. It sounds so cliché but regular complete meals and sleep has helped me more than any psychologist.

Suppose I show you a video of someone quite talkative, monopolizing the conversation for an hour, gesturing a lot with their hands. Sounds like an extroverted person? What if I told you this was a video of an introvert giving a polished presentation? The circumstances make a big difference in how people act.

The problem is many people misapply a categorization as this behavior all the time, not this class of behaviors most of the time. So skeptical people obviously bristle at this suggestion. Furthermore, the generalizations often don't stop there, and many people usually extrapolate far more ridiculous ideas: "You're an X, so that means you aren't good at Y."

I also agree that these categorizations make sense and that something like Meyers Briggs is a 0th order approximation to something that really exists. The fact that many people declare it pseudoscience annoys me because it at least tries to be useful (although something like the Big 5 linguistic approach is a better model).

Personally, I think the most fruitful way to engage people on the topic of personality is to discuss very specific and narrow traits (like talkativeness or gesticulation). I think you are more likely to get a meaningful conversation. People of course want to know correlations, but those are tricky and you need to be slow to generalize.

I think the only thing a PhD makes you an expert in is "PhD-ing".

Don't get me wrong. I think having a PhD is a signal that you are very intelligent, I respect, work with and love people with PhDs (I disrespect the system). But if you believe this:

> Meanwhile, the percentage of frauds among self-proclaimed non-Ph.D. experts is likely close to 100%

then I would say the percentage of frauds among PhD experts is 99%. No one knows anything. Perhaps non-PhDs are better than PhDs at remembering that. PhD's don't tell you how expert someone is at something. Unless the task at hand is making PDFs. People with PhDs are all great at that.

If you look at the track record of "Psychology PhDs" in the past 100 years, I wouldn't be surprised if this fellow has done better work than more than half of them. Purely by chance, knowing nothing about his book.

I trust experience and open data more than academic credentials.

I would not be surprised if in 50 years we have a much more scientific method of doing science than the current PhD system.

The thing people really want to hear is that they are not responsible for the consequences of their actions. This is what "personality" tests do. They say that it's not our fault if we behave in a clearly destructive manner because it's our inherent personality and we are powerless to change it. This is clearly nonsense, but the absolution of guilt and pressure to admit our mistakes is so desired that gullible folks are happy to swallow it without a second thought.

Great idea! We should do that for Why We Sleep, too: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

Yes, and that works for all exact sciences. If you can somehow prove a formerly unproven mathematical conjecture, guess what, they will listen to you. You may even get prizes.

But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Since in psychology very few things can be "proven", studies are the next best things. But you cannot just spout nonsense and expect people who are actually experts in their fields to endorse you.

On a happy note, people smarter than you may make even worse mistakes.

And perhaps a trap for yourself too, if you find yourself saying things like "I could never do something like that, I'm a blue!"

To read this purely as an attack on someone's credentials out of jealousy is to have missed the meat of the criticism.

https://www.insights.com/us/products/insights-discovery/

After the test, we were even given blocks to keep at our desks so that people who interact with us knew whether we were 'blue' or 'yellow' and adapt their reactions accordingly.

I guess I should have just said I was an Aquarius or Capricorn or some such and it would have been just as scientifically accurate.

I think I found the inspiration for the DISC/color model too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Simon_El...

I'd love to see a way of creating healthy, non-discriminatory workplaces, especially in industries that are usually pretty terrible.

>The Implicit Association Test has been used in online studies to assess implicit racial attitudes in over seven million participants. Although typically used as an assessment measure, results from four pre-registered experiments (N = 940) demonstrated that completing a Race IAT exacerbates the negative implicit attitudes that it seeks to assess. Increases in White participants’ negative automatic racial evaluations of Black people were observed across two different implicit measures (SC-IAT and AMP) but did not generalize to another measure of automatic racial bias (Shooter Bias task). Results highlight an important caveat for the Race IAT, but also for many other forms of psychological assessment: that by measuring, we often perturb the system that we wish to understand.

https://psyarxiv.com/vxsj7/

EDIT: Downvoters, what's wrong with this comment? Are downvotes disagreement? If so, do you have anything to substantiate your position? If it's not disagreement, what could I do to improve the quality of my post to make it acceptable?

It's a hedge against accusations of racism.

So management can point at this and say: see? We did all we could!

There is also evidence from Sweden that attitudes towards rape and sexual assault has changed due to government policies. E.g questions such as "Is it ok to have sex with a girl who is too drunk to speak?" are answered differently today than 20 years ago.

Edit: The research is here: https://wwwsnsse.cdn.triggerfish.cloud/uploads/2017/05/sns-a... More qualified means higher level of education and more years of experience. Same metrics as used in most workplaces.

Also, I wonder why it only took someone five minutes to ask me for a source, but no one has yet to ask tenpies for a source... Some facts are easier to believe than others?

I've worked at a lot of places, and I've yet to see an anti-bias training that was more than awareness-raising. I've never ever heard any suggest more radical ideas (such as restorative justice).

While we might argue that current D&I initiatives are not working at a pace we'd prefer, I do think the literature strongly suggest that the method of informed exposure and consideration for issues other than your own tends to work. What's more, these programs are extremely inexpensive compared to more radical restructuring of companies (or the often pie-in-the-sky suggestions of folks who will die on the hill of "it is a pipeline problem").

Some examples of not-too-old research on how simple conversations and exposure can change attitudes:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/346/6215/1366

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2705986/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978008088...

P.S., it's worth noting that if you haven't scanned the scientific literature carefully, you're committing the same error as the folks who fell for this goofy color theory scam by putting your own biases and intuition above the scientific method.

We were all confused by the colors. I had a little bit of all colors. My mom used to be red but is now more of the other colors... it really is pretty useless.

I still enjoy taking "personality tests" but I try not fooling myself into thinking that MBTI, Strengths Finder, or DiSC says much more about myself than a horoscope would. If anything it might tell me a little bit about how I perceive myself, but that's not how it's sold.

Thanks to VoF for their work!

In general it helps to have a skeptical mindset, try to figure out the intent of the author by how they treat facts, do they present inconsistent arguments or gloss over relevant fallacies in the claims? Then their intent is probably more about presenting a good argument than correct representation of facts.

Another thing to be watchful for is claims that "make sense" or are "obvious", it's easy to fall in the trap of ignoring conflicting evidence when the theory sounds good.

If one hasn't studied at the university and read the real scientific papers and learned to compared the good ones to the bad ones in one's own field (and everywhere there are enough bad ones too) my impression one has no chance to be good at recognizing the difference.

And even once one learns to recognize the difference in his own area, he's typically has too much confidence to be able to repeat that in other fields.

So it's really hard. The best bet is really learning to discover what the limits of he fields are, who are real experts in the field, then read what they write etc. It's never simple. But if you're just watching a TV where something is presented as a "debate" learn to recognize what's "behind" the two only people who are shown as two "sides": behind a real scientists could be the whole scientific community, effectively all the experts in their field, and behind the guy who "sounds" better in the show can be simply... money from some specific interest group which finances an "actor" who looks good.

What's however certain is that it was always so: there were always people successfully "selling" as the nonsense as their "knowledge." I'm at the moment reading 1979 book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_Brain

and there the same tricks in selling untruths as today were already (unsurprisingly) actual.

Earlier, Asimov also attempted to debunk a lot of intentional distortions of achieved human knowledge in popular media.

Or even earlier, Mencken 1925:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010219062704/http://www.positi...

"The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex -- because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged -- and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple -- and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him."

In the article we discuss, it's also a "shortcut" the topic of the book: four colors for people, and "everything is simple, even obvious."

The most important part from the article we comment to is therefore:

"Despite the use of colours, it turned out that the “Surrounded by …” books were not based on Myers-Brigg. Instead, they built on another personality theory, the so-called DiSC model. The most noteworthy outcome of a search through the academic literature on this model was that, despite the fact that the test had been around for fifty years, there was in principle no research on whether or not it worked."

From the books about pseudo-scientific claims presented in media as "real" science I also recommend "The War On Science" by Shawn Otto:

https://milkweed.org/book/the-war-on-science

and "Merchants of Doubt" by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/merchants-of-doubt-97815969161...

In short, there are definitely enough people who earn money by "selling" falsehoods. It was never an accident.

[1] https://medium.com/@ronsoak/a-warning-against-using-disc-mye...

A challenge for Psychology in the U.S. is that Statistics is usually included in the curriculum in Spring of Senior year -- an after-thought. I've been off-and-on poking at creating a course that would put statistics immediately after Intro Psych.

In addition the things NPMaxwell listed, consider these theories/ideas: Weber/Fechner’s law, parallel vs. serial visual search, categorical perception, attentional selection, semantic priming, the coarticulation of phonemes, spatial frequency channels, and properties of sensory receptors, to name a few.

As Josh Billings is usually quoted these days, "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."

We are so sure of things that are not true that we don't bother to check.

it's like saying "the weather is bad because it rains". That's not an explanation for why the weather is bad, it's just the definition of what bad weather is.

When people are led to believe they have this or that trait because of some sort of colour schema they tend to believe that this classification is an explanation for their behaviour and has some sort of control or ontological meaning, which it has not. In reality, the behaviour is complex, dynamic, context-dependent and escapes easy classification. Which really should be obvious to anyone with a critical mind because human psychology is slightly more complicated than a test which has fewer colors than the power rangers.

Perugni, M., Costantini, G., Hughes, S., de Houwer, J. (2016). A functional perspective on personality. International Journal of Psychology, Vol. 51, №1, 33–39.

Green - Intellectual; prefers less communication generally

Blue - Emotional; likes small talk and connecting with people

Orange - Spontaneous, life of the party, hates structure/rules

Gold - Analytical, needs order, boundaries and structure, makes lists for everything

Generally you have one dominant color, and some mix of the other three as less important factors in your personality. Most software engineers tend to be Green, HR people are Blue, CEO's are Orange (outgoing, rally people around them) etc.

I actually found it to be tremendously enlightening; I can usually bucket people I know into one of the four colors pretty easily. For example my wife is a Gold; she loves literally creating lists and checking off things when she's done, and she can't stand things being out of order.

Edited for formatting

It is similarly full of ignorant proclamations that serve mainly to make people insecure about their communication skills.

Whenever I found one that didn't obviously belong to someone, I recycled it.

If these heuristics do not allow making useful predictions they are not useful. If any heuristic for splitting people into types was useful we could have stayed with zodiac signs or something. But yes, these will always be popular because people want simple solutions to complex problems and prefer simple solutions even when they don't actually work.

One claiming to be a behavioural scientist should be able to demoinstrate a history of such, even if it's an unconventional history. There is none here.

Of course, once you have already become a popular writer, people start to assume that you are the real deal, without looking into it in detail. So you can fake it 'till you make it. But you'd have to fake it.

According to the article almost none of the points hold true:

- "no scientific articles have been published about the test."

Apparently the book did not contain measurements of data or data based on that, so it wasn't written according to the scientific method. Not even close...