Matching Myers-Briggs with our evolutionary environments

The MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) has got a bad reputation among scientists. There are a few notable exceptions, like Dario Nardi. Rereading his Neuroscience of Personality (2011), I decided to do a direct comparison between MBTI temperaments and evolutionary environments leading to the respective traits (selective pressures). Nardi uses a version of MBTI developed by Linda V. Berens. I’ll be using the same model here.

The most common MBTI temperament is the SJ, temperament. It is known for seeking stability and conformity.

Out of context, the keywords may not mean much, as we all have a need to belong or feel protective at times. As a bundle of traits, this temperament is connected to early agriculture. Michele Gelfand has shown that cultures can be plotted along a loose (higher freedom) - tight (strict rules) axes. Cultures with a long history of farming, especially irrigation farming that requires a highly collaborative effort, show a high degree of tightness, including values such as authority, hierarchy, dutifulness, and conformism. Many of the other traits are also clearly advantageous for farming: logistics, sequential (step-by-step) thinking, protective (of family and property), cautiousness, past orientation (tradition), sustaining procedures, and slow, incremental progress rather than radical change.

In contrast to agriculture, the other type of food-producing mode of subsistence, pastoralism, does not require a rigidly hierarchical organisation. On the contrary, even though there is a hierarchy, it is much more fluid and a semi-nomadic lifestyle requires much more flexibility and spontaneity than sedentary farming.

Pastoralists value freedom and don’t easily fit into a “farmer world”.  Pastoralist tribes typically view agriculture as “menial work” and don’t have many of the required adaptations. They have to be good at improvising, seizing opportunities, making spontaneous decisions and acting upon them (fast-reacting). As pastoralists have to change settlements frequently, they love variation, are rather restless and can easily adapt to new environments. Their social hierarchy is more fluid than that of farmers and they can rise in status by making an impact and taking risks. Biologically high risk-taking is correlated with a fast life-history strategy. Out of all our ancestors, pastoralists probably had the highest death rates in early adulthood.

The NT temperament was the hardest to crack for me. How do “theorists” make sense in our evolutionary history? How could stone age people have survived, sitting in their caves and brooding over problems? 

Well, they didn’t. They needed their analytical skills when hunting. Unlike the stereotype we have of hunting (physical fitness, boldness, etc.), hunting actually requires far more cerebral work than is commonly thought. Louis Liebenberg has written about the origins of modern science in hunting-tracking, which requires making hypotheses, testing them, reevaluating them. In the parlance of Jungian psychology, Ne (extraverted intuition) is just what you need when tracking an animal. Recognizing patterns and seeing possibilities is probably the number one skill you need in tracking.  Out of all subsistence strategies, hunter-gatherers needed the most knowledge (almost encyclopaedic) about the fauna and flora, which they are very good at categorising and systemizing. Hunters value competence (mastery) and independence (self-control). Being egalitarian they do not fit easily into the hierarchical world of food producers. Hunter types nowadays don’t use their analytical skills for tracking animals (they typically are averse to hunting when there is no necessity!) and are more interested in ultimate truths and scientific inquiry as well as hunting for items or solving problems in video games.

Finally, the NF temperament, the idealists. Idealists seem to defy evolutionary logic as they couldn’t thrive in a world in which success is defined in material terms. In fact, I have argued that they are a remnant of our hunter-gatherer past that is going extinct and represent the gatherer half of our forager ancestors.

Like hunters, they are individualists (unique identity) but at the same time value cooperation and harmony (caregiving evolutionary profile), like farmer types do. Hunter-gathers are idealistic in the sense of anti-materialistic too. They actively discourage material possessions as they are a hindrance in their nomadic lifestyle. Being a gatherer myself, articles like “How to travel light” or “Material minimalism” have always immediately caught my attention. They love to see potential in other people and aren’t as interested in self-promotion as pastoralist types, which makes them good mentors and diplomats. They love imagining better worlds (utopias) based on forager values of universalism and egalitarianism or worse worlds (dystopia) based on their fears of developments in the wrong directions. They are non-sequential thinkers and often have to express themselves in metaphors to make their connections understandable to other people.

I have shown here how our ancestral modes of subsistence produced the selective pressures to account for the traits of the MBTI temperaments.  

For a more scientific view of the four temperaments that gets by without using MBTI check out my book:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09LSF98WV