Ｑ80. What is temperament?

Temperament is decided by putting curiosity, competitive spirit, wariness and attachment in order of strength.

　　The subject of this book is mainly how the three layer structure of temperament, personality and individuality work to decide a person's behavior. Temperament is inborn core traits of human beings, personality is acquired experiences added to temperament, and individuality is the whole existence including intellect and knowledge etc.
　　Temperament is the inborn and unchangeable parts of a person's behavior patterns.
　　Temperament can be understood by its connection to the seven basic emotions. Out of the seven basic emotions we can exclude repulsion, hope and surprise because repulsion is the opposite of interest, hope is intellect and surprise varies little between individuals. The order of strength of the remaining four emotions, fear, interest, love, and anger gives us the different temperaments. 
　　Carry this further and interest become curiosity, anger becomes competitive spirit, fear becomes wariness and love becomes attachment. The order of strength of curiosity, competitive spirit, wariness and attachment gives us the temperaments.
　　This is not the mainstream personality classification. I am not saying that personality is divided into these four groups. Personality is decided by what kind of emotion occurs first when selecting an action.
　　When we choose an action we feel several emotions and we are attracted to several actions, but a person has only their own body, so only one action can be done. Therefore, we can predict a person's behavior based on which emotion usually wins.
　　A simple example; if you win a 1 million dollars in a lottery, what will you do?
　　If curiosity wins you may start a new hobby, and if competitive spirit wins you may invest to increase the money. If wariness wins you may save money in case you need it in the future, and if attachment wins you may use the money for your family. We can predict a person's actions in this way if we know their temperament.
　　This idea corresponds with the big five elements in personality psychology. Using statistics personality psychology found five elements of personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
　　This book interprets those five as follows: openness to experience corresponds to curiosity, conscientiousness corresponds to wariness, extraversion corresponds to competitive spirit, agreeableness corresponds to attachment, and neuroticism corresponds to the process for dealing with conflict.
　　The important point here is that neuroticism is clearly different from the other four categories. The other four categories are elements which give direction for the action, but neuroticism is an element which indicates the quantity of the actions.
　　This is supported by neuroscience, especially neurotransmitters. Attachment corresponds to sensitivity to oxytocin, curiosity corresponds to sensitivity to dopamine, wariness corresponds to sensitivity to serotonin or noradrenalin, competitive spirit corresponds to sensitivity to testosterone.


Ｑ79. What do we need to understand other people?

We need to understand ways of thinking which are different from our own.

　　After emotion, let's examine personality, which is an arrangement of emotions.
　　Why do we often misunderstand others, or get puzzled by another person's actions?
　　The answer to this problem is with our thought process. To guess what a person is thinking we usually imagine that we are the other person. In other words, we think of how we would feel if we were the other person. However, this guess will not be correct unless the other person has the same personality as us.
　　Therefore, we cannot understand people with a different personality from ours even if we stand in their position. You and other people are different people.
　　If we want to understand others we need to learn what the difference between the personalities is.
　　The Burnham Effect is famous in psychology. It is a tendency to feel that an explanation of your personality is correct when you read it. For example, you are always brooding, you have an irresponsible side, you are two-faced, or you are not steady and cannot make long commitments.
　　Human personality has a complicated structure, and normally has every kind of feature. Whether they are expressed or not is the only difference. So there is no meaning for personality descriptions such as short-tempered, or suspicious because absolutely everyone has aspects of these. If you wonder if a trait is true and think about it, you can always find it.
　　Therefore we cannot understand human personality by expressions which are ambiguous and lack conditions like those previously stated.
　　When we talk about personality, what do people truly want to know about the other person?
　　It is useless to make predictions about instances in which all people would do the same action. For example, people escape from a fire. All people do the same thing so there is no relation to personality. I think that what people want to know is what action the other person would choose from among several options.
　　So well made personality classification can predict the target person's action when he or she can freely select from options.
　　We first check whether a person is the same type as us by using a proper personality classification based on actions, and then imagine their mind, and finally we can understand another person well.