PEOPLE COME IN DISCRETE PERSONALITY TYPES

Personality types are seen as useful fictions that offer a short-hand way of referring to different configurations of personality information within people in an efficient and reasonable easy to communicate labels. Two broad, almost philosophical approaches to addressing the question of the basic units of a science of personality have emerged in personality psychology: approaches focused on dimensions versus those focused on types. The question the authors tackle in this chapter concerns which of these two approaches is the more valid and useful way to organize the field of personality. The idea that people's personalities fit into discrete categories that reflect natural kinds is a myth. In other words, there is little support for the idea that personality types are distinctive forms.