An Introduction To Personality Types And Persuasion

Understanding And Categorising Personality Types

Whilst we come in all different shapes and sizes, we are not as different as most of us would like to think. Researchers have found that behaviour is actually quite predictable, once you establish a person’s personality type.

A personality type simply means what type of person you are, how you think and what you are likely to do. Personality types are therefore a good predictor of human behaviour, and can also give you clues as to the best way a person can be persuaded.

Other benefits of knowing a persons personality type include:

Presenting information in a way that a person will best understand.
Identifying how people make decisions.
Identifying likely patterns of behaviour/responses.
Quickly establishing rapport.

As you can see, personality types enable you to quickly categorise people. In turn, this makes persuasion and social interactions that much easier and more successful, as you can then tailor your speech to meet a person’s specific needs.

How To Categorise Personalities

Below is a well know scale for assessing personality types. This was originally used in areas such as psychological research.

However the information proved to be so valuable, that it was subsequently used by advertising agencies in order to tailor advertisements to specific subsections of the population.

The personality assessment uses 4 scales, as shown below.

Personality Assessment Scale

How and where we get our energy from (E) Extrovert – (I) Introvert scale.
What type of information we pay attention to (S) Sensor- (N) Intuitive scale.
How we make decisions (T) Thinker – (F) Feeler scale.
How we resolve issues (J) Judger – (P) Perceiver scale.

Personality Scale Preferences

Each scale is subdivided into 2 choices called preferences. Most people will have an overall bias towards one preference. For example, I may be an extrovert, whilst you may be an introvert.

personality extrovert introvert

People who have an oppositional bias for each scale (i.e. they have a different preference for each scale, for example extrovert vs. introvert) tend to be very different from each other.

In this example, an extrovert would usually be much more talkative and outgoing than an introvert. Therefore the greater the dissimilarity between 2 people on the scale, the more different they are likely to be and the less chance they will get along together.

As a general rule, just remember that people like people who are like themselves.

Adopting Personality Types

When using personality types to decide upon a persuasion strategy, you should therefore try to adopt a personality that is similar to the person you are trying to persuade.

However some people may find this difficult, as we tend to communicate best in a way that comes naturally to our personality type.

It is also worth noting that if you adopt a new personality type in order to persuade someone, if you are suddenly pressured or put under stress, you will most likely revert back to your original personality type.

This is one reason why during training soldiers in the Army are suddenly woken up at random hours of the morning.

It has been shown that upon waking the solider will act as if they would when under stress, such as during a battle. Meaning that they will revert back to their original personality type.

war personality

This shows the instructor and the solider who they really are, by stripping away any false aspects/façades of their character they may have added to impress or deceive other people/themselves.

Interpreting The Personality Type Scales

When the 4 scales are taken as a whole, each preference combines to create 16 possible combinations of personality types. Each personality type uses the first letter from each preference as an abbreviation.