How much do people, on average, think about their communication style? Over time, I’ve interacted with a lot of different personality and style assessments, and it’s fairly common for the people I know to have some assessment result they use to describe themselves – whether that’s MBTI, Personalysis, DiSc, or whatever they’ve experienced. Horoscopes, even (though those have nothing to do with your actual responses to questions or situations, they can color your understanding of self, right?).
I spent a semester in an undergrad management psych class talking about how types interact, specifically the details of how MBTI-style [that’s the Extravert/Introvert, iNtuitive/Sensing, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving split, where you prefer one of each pair] type elements interact (for instance, the emphasis extraverts place on decision-making – the J/P split – vs. introverts’ emphasis on processing – the T/F duality). It was interesting at the time because conceptual systems for describing people are always interesting to me; it also gave me some fun boxes to put things in, and categorization seems like a pretty basic human impulse. As personality typing goes, the MBTI is entertaining and somewhat useful pop science; I recommend it if the field interests you.
An unintended consequence of this education is that I’ve assumed all this time that people are going to think in different, possibly patterned, ways, and part of my role as a fellow person is to try to bridge the gap between you and me.
Not everyone believes this.
There are many people who haven’t really thought about communication gaps, of course. There are also many who believe, consciously or otherwise, that it’s Everyone Else’s responsibility to figure out how to communicate with them. Some of these people are just jerks. Others think they’ve found the One True Style of communicating, and yet others think their preferences, good or bad, are fixed and immutable.
The intersection of personality types and people’s self-concept is particularly fun for interaction with those latter folk. It tends to show up as in expressions of being vs. doing (I am an introvert instead of I act introverted), as if part of a person’s identity.
The notion of some of these styles as a fixed identity rather than an adaptable behavior, while a pretty core concept in personality theory, seems to me at odds with the way real people communicate well. Let’s take an example: left to my own devices, I talk like this – I wander, I use fanciful words, I talk informally and in abstract blah blah blah.
This has not always been true & has not always served me. There have been times when a more crisp, bullet-pointed, decisive way of thinking has worked better, and other times when introspection and consideration were more important.
Similarly, I get different results from style-preference assessments at different times & in different contexts. Most people do, if they answer honestly (it’s also easy to game assessments, either by knowing them well, or by being influenced by your notion of fixed, immutable type).
Many of the things we think of as “personality” are nowhere near as solid as we think of a person being. [Er. So, there’s a whole other field of discussion about how solid individuals actually are, and it’s not really related… but that’s neat, too.] If style preference is an adaptation to circumstance, then, people have a much wider range of options open in communicating with each other.
We have the style choices we liked yesterday, the style choice someone else might like today, and the style choice we’ll actually prefer tomorrow (which, if we adapt, is some combination of the other two). I think this is delightful! If we consider our interactions with others in this way, we have so many options to allow those interactions to change us.