This page attempts to construct a theory of human personality based on underlying emotional needs that are thought to be built into the human brain through the process of evolution, thus being shaped by the forces of survival and the thriving of the human species. The scope of this framework is on the same order as Carl Jung’s Analytical Psychology (wikipedia link), and could be thought of as a modern, more neuroscience-based version of that framework (all links to neuroscience concepts are to compcogneuro.org).
As with Analytical Psychology, one implication of this framework is perhaps a better understanding of the kinds of processes that can be helpful in learning how to better satisfy your own emotional needs, and those with whom you interact. This shared set of emotional needs that is common to most people is perhaps a basis for Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, and the goal here is try to turn that more into the collective consciousness, where people can be more aware of all these underlying forces shaping your behavior, and thus have the possibility to use the power of the neocortex to adapt (to) their own personalities, and those they interact with.
Also see identity for the related but distinct role of social forces in driving our own internal need to establish a “place” for ourselves within the broader social context. Personality is about the more biologically-grounded, subconsious forces that drive us to behave in certain ways on a moment-to-moment basis, whereas identity is a broader sense of our place within society, that also shapes behavior, and interacts strongly with personality, but is more intrinsically associated with social groups and a sense of belonging. Also see insecurity, which interacts with both personality and identity.
There are two foundational assumptions, discussed in the next two sections, from which various personality factors can be derived.
Integrated networks
First, individuals generally try to establish integrated networks (INs) of representations about themselves (i.e., their own self model) within their own brains, and across interactions among others. This is essentially synonymous with Jung’s concept of individuation: the life-long process of trying to understand oneself, which involves recognizing and integrating one’s shadow self, which is like Dr. Jekyll’s alter ego Mr. Hyde, where all the dark, repressed thoughts and feelings go.
The modern, neuroscience flavor is based first on the idea that at every moment, the neocortex is performing constraint satisfaction processing, where all of the current sensory and internal neural activity is integrated across time (in roughly 200 ms chunks) to generate a coherent interpretation of the current situation. These attractor states then drive behavior according to these integrated interpretations. Thus, if someone can achieve a stable, integrated network of self-representations across time, they will tend to have more consistent behavior across situations, and experience a clearer sense of self-understanding. Otherwise, they will tend to be more erratic and inconsistent, and experience confusion and conflict over their own self-understanding.
Furthermore, the neocortex learns by predictive learning: we try to understand ourselves by predicting what we (and others) will do in different situations. This learning process is most successful when there is something consistent and predictable to be learned, and it will in general tend to generate more consistent and predictable internal states. Thus, it acts as an overall force driving the brain toward more stable and integrated networks of representations.
This process of integration (individuation in Jung’s terms) can be blocked by strong conflicts across different attractor states, and by attempts to avoid thinking or processing emotionally difficult thoughts and feelings (i.e., repression). This is all consistent with the intuitively familiar frameworks of Jung and Freud, in terms of the standard “hydraulic” metaphor: if you repress negative thoughts or feelings, then they do not actually go away, and instead they just build up more pressure and eventually burst out in some kind of explosive, unhealthy fashion.
There is also a black mold version of the analogy: negative emotions fester in a dark corner of your mind, like black mold, and you need to expose them to sunlight to dry everything up and kill all the spores before they start to grow and infect the rest of your brain.
The neural-mechanistic version of these metaphors is that the attractor dynamics and predictive learning forces require you to fully explore and express all aspects of what you might think and feel, and then to reflect and attempt to explicitly integrate these different aspects by “processing” them (by oneself or with the help of a therapist). Specifically, if one sees that there is an inconsistent aspect of thought or feelings across different situations, then it is generally possible to try to find a synthesis of these inconsistent thoughts and feelings, that for example requires understanding additional factors that had previously gone unrecognized.
This internal process of integration within one individual is also manifest in the attempt to develop stable, integrated networks of interpersonal social interactions. We try to understand how other people work, as well as ourselves, and try to figure out ways of behaving and interacting with others so as to make things overall more predictable and mutually-beneficial (at least for most people, most of the time).
See insecurity for discussion of this pervasive, major barrier to personal and social integration.
Social needs
Most people have a common set of emotional needs that drive their behavior to satisfy these needs, as shaped by evolution to promote the survival and “thrival” of the human species. These needs can be organized into more basic needs like food and water, and a relatively large set of socially-based needs that are essential for allowing human culture to thrive (e.g., as proposed by Maslow in his hierarchy of needs) (Tomasello, 2001). It is these social needs that most people in the modern world wrestle with the most, and they provide the foundation for this framework.
Based on various genetic and environmental factors, different people end up finding different ways of satisfying these social needs, and this is the basis of different personality factors. People with different such personality factors will tend to interact with each other in ways that end up satisfying their different needs, as they develop their integrated social networks, and their own integrated networks of self and other understanding.
The social needs are:
• Inclusion: individuals want to feel included in social groups that they identify with. Rejection from a social group is experienced in very negative terms, generally, while inclusion can drive strong positive emotions. The in-group is a group of included individuals, and the out-group is a group of excluded individuals.
• Sharing: individuals generally have a strong motivation or need to share knowledge and feelings with others within one’s various in-groups. Tomasello (2001) identified this need as particularly strong in humans, and remarkably absent in even our closest primate relatives.
• Trust: predictive reliability in the behavior of others is essential for cooperative activities within groups. Lack of trust is generally a strong factor in social exclusion.
• Respect: is a measure of social status — people want to have other members of their in-groups maintain positive feelings about themselves, and disrespect is a major insult.
• Control: over social group behavior, versus the extent to which the group controls the behavior of the individual. This factor also varies significantly based on the size of the social group, with people in general tending to cede more control to larger groups, while exerting more of their own sense of control in smaller groups. This can be seen as a manifestation of the benefits of predictability in predictive learning, but it almost certainly can go well beyond that. A general feeling of lack of control can lead to feelings of helplesness and depression.
• Nurturing: is the need to facilitate the individual growth of others, in the first instance as parents to their children, but also more broadly across mentorship and other such relationships. This does not play into the personality factors, and at least traditionally is more strong in women than men.
Temperament
Figure 1:
Illustration of the interpersonal circumplex from Wiggins (1996), organized by a bias toward positive vs. negative emotional states along the vertical axis, and social orientation (i.e., agreeableness) along the horizontal, with individual exemplars representated by the cartoons and their “mantras”.
In addition to individual variation in the way that the above social needs are satisfied, personality is widely thought to be shaped by certain basic, biologically-determined “parameters” that are evident early in development, summarized in terms of the concept of temperament. These temperament factors are thought to interact with life experiences through the course of development, resulting in a more differentiated, higher-dimensional space of personality factors in the mature adult.
The notion of temperament has a long history going back to Greek philosophy, in terms of the four humours, based on bodily fluids (blood, bile, phlegm): melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine, and choleric. These can be organized into the interpersonal circumplex (Figure 1), in terms of two main axes: a positive vs. negative emotional bias, and a social orientation bias (antisocial vs. prosocial), where the greek prototypes occupy the different quadrants (Wiggins, 1996). For example sanguine (blood) is positive and prosocial, while melancholic (which refers to black bile) is negative and antisocial (depressed).
A two-dimensional circular space can always be captured by two axes rotated at any angle, so there are many possible ways to describe this same low-dimensional temperament space, and different labels could be used for the same axes. Indeed many different taxonomies have been developed since, without a clear modern consensus emerging. For example, extraversion vs. intraversion could be used for an axis that rotates 45 degrees to capture the positive+prosocial vs. negative+antisocial axes, with the orthogonal axis being more about neuroticism (as in Eysenck, 1967).
The BIS / BAS (behavioral inhibition system / behavioral activation system) framework has been particularly influential in the neuroscience community (Gray, 1982; Carver & White, 1994; Pickering & Gray, 1999). BIS is associated with negative emotional states, while BAS is associated with positive ones, mapping onto that main axis. BIS / BAS also maps onto the behaviors of avoidance vs. approach, which can then be studied across species. One recent, ambitious project in temperament research is an attempt to directly connect dimensions of temperament with underlying neuromodulatory systems in the brain (Trofimova & Robbins, 2016; Trofimova et al., 2018).
Personality factors
We organize our discussion of the relationship between social needs and personality factors in terms of the scientifically validated big-five factor framework, which can be encoded using the OCEAN acronym: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (McCrae & Costa, 1997; McCrae et al., 2004). Each of these five factors also has 6 facets nested within it, which are generally fairly consistent with the overall factor level, but not uniformly so (Kajonius & Johnson, 2019). It is important to understand these facets to appreciate what each overall factor is actually measuring. See John A. Anderson’s home page for a link to a free, online version of the IPIP-NEO personality test that can provide you with your own scores on these big five factors.
We also reference the ever-popular Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) framework that is based closely on Jung’s framework, which has 4 factors, two of which align well with the Openness and Extraversion / Introversion factors from the big five.
One major limitation of the big-five personality factors is that they are defined statistically in terms of capturing mutually orthogonal dimensions of individual variance. This means that each individual factor must be overall statistically independent of the other factors. This can be contrasted with hierarchical models where there are higher-level factors (such as the temperamental ones) that apply at the broadest, highest level, with more specific lower-level factors then accounting for residual variance within those broader factors (e.g., Markon, 2009; Hopwood et al., 2023).
This hierarchical structure is evident in a shared emotionality dimension between extraversion and neuroticism, which both reflect a basic positive vs. negative emotional bias, and the shared prosocial vs. antisocial elements of extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The statistical reliability of the five factor model suggests that these core temperamental dimensions tend to get shaped through experience in ways that create reliable “subtypes” within a shared overall region of the lower-dimensional temperamental dimensions. It is difficult for simple statistical models to fully capture these kinds of quasi-hierarchical, quasi-factorial structures, but one can nevertheless understand them by looking at the results of factor analyses on large datasets, such as Kajonius & Johnson (2019).
Introversion / extraversion
One of the most widely-identified and scientifically-supported personality factors is introversion vs. extraversion, which were introduced by Jung, and are also central to the MBTI. In general, introverts find social interaction draining, while extroverts find it energizing. Furthermore, this factor also captures the overall positive vs. negative emotionality bias in temperament (or BIS / BAS), in terms of the facets of overall activity, assertiveness, excitement seeking, and cheerfulness. In fact, these contribute more to the overall scoring of this factor than the purely social aspects, which are captured by friendliness and gregariousness (which is defined particularly in terms of larger crowds), which clearly capture some of the prosocial vs. antisocial temperamental factor.
For the specific social aspects of this factor, there can be many environmental forces that drive individual differences on this dimension beyond the basic temperamental one, from factors that influence the general biases that others have toward an individual (e.g., attractiveness, physical or mental abilities, etc) to the extent of predictive learning and understanding about why people behave in the ways that they do: if people are more predictable, then social interaction is experienced as less effortful.
One’s status on this dimension has implications for the ability to satisfy the primary inclusion need, with extraverts likely finding it easier to be included in social groups. However, to the extent that there is an antisocial temperament (or just lack of a strong prosocial one), then the strength of this need can be reduced overall. Thus, it is possible for someone to be relatively introverted but nevertheless satisfying their reduced needs for social inclusion.
The space of all the ways in which one can end up on this dimension, including developmental trajectories, is large and complex. For example, most people think that I am an extravert, but I was extremely shy as a child, and only became more extraverted as I was able to understand and predict people’s behavior better. I was also lucky to be relatively attractive and intelligent, so that helped with overall feelings of inclusion and respect. Nevertheless, I still do not experience a strong intrinsic need to be around other people, which perhaps differentiates me from others who were more “born extraverts” (see the poem The Need for People).
Agreeableness
Agreeableness does not map well into the MBTI / Jung framework. The facets of this factor are: trust (of others), morality (low means a willingness to deceive or lie), altruism, cooperation, modesty, and sympathy, and overall it reflects the extent to which an individual is willing put the needs of others above their own. This factor is likely most strongly driven by the prosocial vs. antisocial temperament (it is essentially synonymous with that), but it is likely also shaped by experiences that drive changes in this social orientation (e.g., social alienation experiences could convert a temperamentally prosocial child into a more disagreeable adult).
In terms of social needs, it thus reflects a strong need for inclusion, and a strong sense of trust in social groups in general. It also reflects a low level of need in the control dimension, in terms of the group influence over the individual. Someone who is highly agreeable is willing to cede more of their own sense of individual control to that of the group, perhaps as a way of gaining greater inclusion. But they may not obtain greater trust or respect from others due to this, if they are perceived as being a sycophant who is being agreeable as a means to an end.
By contrast, someone who is low in agreeableness will tend to not bend to the will of the group, and be willing to sacrifice inclusion and sharing because of it. They may still retain respect for standing up for their own beliefs, and perhaps also trust for having such strong convictions.
Because the big-five factors are specifically designed to capture orthogonal dimensions of variance, an individual could be high in extraversion but not also be high in agreeableness. This is because agreeableness also strongly reflects the control and trust social needs, while extraversion is more loaded on positive emotionality, which is orthogonal to that.
Being low in agreeableness may also be beneficial for obtaining greater control over the group: people who aren’t as swayed by the opinions of others are thus in a better position to exert their own influence over others. Steve Jobs (the late CEO of Apple) is a classic example of a low-agreeableness individual who was able to exert considerable control over his employees, and still maintain respect and trust. Although different in many other respects, Donald Trump is another such example, who so clearly demonstrates the paradoxical effects of disagreeableness on trust and respect, at least among a subset of the population.
Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness does not map well into the MBTI / Jung framework. The facets of this factor are: self-efficacy, orderliness, dutifulness, achievement-striving, self-discipline, and cautiousness. Although many of these facets seem to be more associated with self-regulation, they also have a strong social motivational aspect in terms of demonstrating to others that they are virtuous in this way. Thus, they satisfy the need for respect, and also inclusion, especially in the context of following social norms and rules (e.g., the dutifulness factor loads on agreeableness nearly as much as conscientiousness; Kajonius & Johnson, 2019).
Thus, both conscientiousness and agreeableness may index individual differences in the strength of the social needs more generally: where these needs are strong, they can then out-compete against other individual needs, including the general desire to not exert unnecessary effort. People who are lower on this dimension tend to emphasize their own individual needs more, and are not as constrained by the social needs, so they may score lower on dutifulness and achievement facets.
Openness
Openness maps well statistically onto the sensing vs. intuition (S / N) dimension of MBTT, with people high in intuition corresponding to the high openness pole of this dimension. In contrast to intuition per se (and especially relative to the sensing term), the openness term better captures the essence of this dimension, which is the extent to which one is open to new experiences and challenges to their existing ideas and beliefs. The opposite pole in the big-five is closed, which reflects an individual who feels threatened by new ideas that might challenge their existing beliefs.
In many ways, this dimension can be seen as reflecting the same approach vs. avoid orientation toward ideas, that is captured in the extraversion vs. introversion toward social interactions. A person who is high in openness readily approaches new ideas, while a closed person feels insecure among these new ideas, and prefers to hold on more tightly to their existing beliefs.
As with the social version, an individual may develop along this dimension in various ways, from being someone who just doesn’t care that much about their own system of beliefs (“whatevs”) to someone who has a sufficiently broad and inclusive set of existing beliefs, that the process of incorporating new ideas represents an interesting challenge. People who are fast learners thus may be high in openness, whereas slower learning people may find new things more challenging. But slow learners who don’t aspire to understanding much may not care either way.
This dimension applies most directly to the social need of sharing: people who are low on openness are thus not motivated to engage in social sharing of information more generally, except among groups where they can be sure that the other people already share their beliefs. Thus, people who gravitate toward orthodox religions or other more conservative, rigid, strongly structured and tradition-based social groups will tend to be low in openness. Indeed, political parties reflect this personality factor, with higher openness associated with left-wing parties, and lower openness associated with right-wing parties.
Neuroticism
The final big-five factor is neuroticism, which reflects a tendency toward negative emotionality. Note that this term technically does not denote anxiety specifically, despite the common usage in this way. It also reflects more highly variable emotional responses more generally. The facets include: anxiety, anger, depression, self-consciousness, immoderation, and vulnerability. The self-consciousness facet actually loads more strongly onto the introversion dimension than it does neuroticism, reflecting a social orientation component that is otherwise absent in this factor (Kajonius & Johnson, 2019).
Also, as noted above, this factor shares a temperamental factor of positive vs. negative emotional bias with extraversion vs. introversion, particularly with respect to the depression facet (Kajonius & Johnson, 2019). This basic temperamental bias can be shaped by life experiences and development to result in different overall emotional biases and levels of emotional stability in the adult.
Neuroticism is not specifically associated with social needs, as it does not have a strong social component.
Archetypes
Jung’s framework is based on a set of archetypes, and although such low-dimensional categories are much less powerful than the combinatorial space of personality factors, prototypical categories are much easier for people to understand. Along those lines, we can understand the above personality factors in terms of the four houses of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter universe. Each such house aligns well with specific elements of the big-five dimensions, and the underlying social needs, providing a reasonably comprehensive low-dimensional “tiling” of this high-dimensional space.
• Hufflepuff: are the hard-working, friendly, cooperative, “salt of the earth” kind of people (perhaps the mother archetype in Jung’s terms). In terms of the big-five factors, they are high in agreeableness and conscientiousness, with less clear loadings on the other factors. From the social needs perspective, this means that they have overall strong social needs, particularly with respect to inclusion and trust, and are more willing to cede their own control to others.
• Slytherin: are the manipulative, disagreeable, controlling kind of people, essentially the opposites of Hufflepuffs (the Jungian jester). Thus, they are low on agreeableness most of all, and strongly unwilling to follow the crowd. Instead, they seek to exert control over others, through manipulation and cunning. They are likely to be particularly low on the morality facet of agreeableness, which indexes the willingness to lie and deceive others. The other dimensions are less relevant, but can give rise to many different subtypes, such as a high-openness individual such as Steve Jobs, vs. a low-openness one like Donald Trump. The conscientiousness factor may be high in the case of someone who seeks a high level of social cohesion, despite also wanting high levels of social control: i.e., an autocratic type of person.
• Gryffindor: are the overall “good guys” in the Harry Potter world, naturally because that is where all the protagonists are: they are brave, adventurous, risk-takers who are natural leaders who don’t actually want to lead (the Jungian hero of course, or the rebirth archetype within a restricted set of four archetypes). They are high on extraversion in terms of the high positive energy and emotion components, not necessarily in terms of the social gregariousness. They are also high on openness, corresponding to the brave, adventurous aspects. Interestingly, they are generally lower on agreeableness, but not to the same extent and in the same way as the slytherins: they don’t cede their own control to the group, but they also don’t try to control the group either, and thus have high scores on the morality facet, in opposition to the Slytherins. Thus, there are interesting similarities and differences between Gryffindor and Slytherin, as explored in the novels. Gryffindors are high on the specifically-individualized facets of conscientiousness (while being lower on the socially-oriented ones), reflecting their overall “lone wolf” kind of approach, and a reliance on their own sense of self-efficacy.
From a social needs perspective, they have lower overall social needs, reflecting a stronger individualistic orientation. Temperamentally, they are likely to be low prosocial, but not antisocial. They may gain respect and trust to the extent that they are seen as having their own strong internal compass, but may also suffer from less inclusion by virtue of being perceived as arrogant or exclusive. These are major themes in the novels.
• Ravenclaw: are defined by a high level of intelligence, which is not really a social or personality factor per se, but generally is associated with higher levels of openness (the spirit in Jungian terms). In general, the Ravenclaws are higher in introversion and also conscientiousness, which means that their intelligence is more like a “book smart” geek than the “street smart” Gryffindor (note that Hermione really fits much better with Ravenclaw than Gryffindor).
Social dyads
The key factor for forming a strongly integrated and stable social network is to have complementary social need structures, or at least not strongly conflicting ones.
Using the lower-dimensional Harry Potter space, we can consider the nature of different dyadic relationships among these 4 archetypes (see Hopwood et al., 2013; Hopwood et al., 2011 for relevant scientific studies).
• Hufflepuff + Slytherin: this is the most stable pairing of all types, because the needs are entirely complementary. The Hufflepuff needs someone to control them, and the Slytherin needs someone to control. In other terminology, this is the S & M combination (sadist vs. mascochist), which also generally maps onto top vs. bottom in the queer community, and the traditional (1950’s and before) husband and wife roles. Although they are opposites, they may develop respect for what the other has that they lack, while each satisfies the other’s basic social needs.
• Hufflepuff + Gryffindor: this is perhaps the worst possible pairing, because their social needs are strongly mismatched. The Gryffindor has low social needs, while the Hufflepuff has high ones. The Hufflepuff wants to be controlled by the Gryffindor, but the Gryffindor may not be interested in doing that at all.
• Hufflepuff + Hufflepuff: this does not present outright conflicts, but does leave the pair without someone playing the controlling role.
• Gryffindor + Gryffindor: this does not present any specific conflicts, but also may have overall less cohesion due to reduced social needs. Overall this is the best pairing for Gryffindor.
• Gryffindor + Slytherin: unlikely to work given Gryffindor not being willing to cede control to the Syltherin.
• Ravenclaw + Ravenclaw: this is the best pairing for Ravenclaw, with mutual respect for intellect and overall lack of other conflicts.
• Ravenclaw + Others: can work depending on lots of details.