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infographic evolutionary neueotypes

November 08, 2026

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The psychology and biology of gifted children and highly intelligent people

Much has been written about gifted and high IQ people and to a large extent, the focus has been on their cognition, for obvious reasons. I have a gifted son and as many parents of gifted children can attest, these kids can be quite challenging for any parent: from daily chores, such as buckling up the kiddo in a car seat to the point when he or she fails in conventional schools. While cognitive psychology has been a passion of mine since my early years at university, there comes a point when you can’t explain giftedness in cognitive terms anymore. For example, when your kid prefers to cry for an hour over some simple piece of homework he could easily do in a matter of a few minutes and threatens you to run away from home. Why would an eight-year-old child say "I wish I were never born"? Such behaviour would leave any parent just puzzled and perplexed. What is the biological foundation of such seemingly irrational behaviour? Here are some traits gifted kids typically d...

The evolutionary psychology of personality

Scientists used to think that the human mind was a blank slate (John Locks’s famous tabula rasa) which was written on by culture. However, evolutionary psychology and increasingly genetics are disproving this idea. A lot of traits have a genetic component, e.g. how conscientious a person is, their parenting style, or whether they are night owls or early birds. Evolutionary psychologists used to believe that everybody is a hunter-gather psychologically speaking. However, that is not true. The few thousand years since the time farming was invented did have a genetic impact. Farmers compared to hunter-gatherers needed to be more hard-working, more conscientious (cf. Daniel Nettle ) and more defensive of their property. On the flip side, they have become less generous (but only to outgroup members), less egalitarian and more status-seeking (accumulated wealth allowed for status). As William von Hippel points out in his great book “ The Social Leap ” the highly sharing and carin...

What the Myers-Briggs distribution of types really means

NB: this article is now outdated. It was an early draft of the hunter-gatherer hypothesis and contained too many speculative ideas. I have come across a couple of explanations what the distribution of the Myers-Briggs types means. One common explanation is that you either belong to a common type (good thing, because it means you aren’t so different) or to a rare type (good thing, because you are something special). Somehow that logic doesn’t seem watertight to me, but in my experience, people often feel pride or relief when they learn about their MBTI. However, that doesn’t really answer the question. The answer is very simple, though. The distribution of types represents their past reproductive success. Looking at the below table is easy to see that there is a rough correlation between income (particularly STJ types) and reproductive success for men. However, that is true for sensors only. For intuitive men, the reverse is true: the ambitious N(T)J types hav...

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Author: Andreas Hofer

infographic evolutionary neueotypes

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