Color-coded personality types

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Today at work, we did various exercises relating to the "True Colors" personality categorization system. I gather it's sort of loosely derived from Keirsey, Myers-Briggs, and Jung.

In this system (as I understand it, which is extremely imperfectly) there are four colors/personality types (these are my simplified paraphrases from memory; please don't criticize the original theory based on these descriptions):

Orange
Impulsive, quick to get started on things, quick to get bored and move on.
Blue
Interested in people and how they feel about things; social; takes things personally.
Gold
Organized, methodical, rules-bound, likes process and structure.
Green
Analytical, unconcerned with feelings, likes to be left alone to do their work, likes to create frameworks.

I found two things particularly interesting about this system:

First: they said everyone has some of each, but asked us to pick which one or two colors were our main approach(es) to work, life, etc. I picked blue and green because picking three seemed to be against the spirit of what they were going for, but honestly, by the criteria they listed, I'm blue/green/gold. About 3/4 of the blue characteristics they listed applied to me, and at least half of the green and gold ones.

To me, that suggests that this system as a whole is not a good match for me. I tend to judge this sort of system by (a) what percentage of the types seem like they match me, and (b) what percentage seem like they don't. This is one reason I don't believe in astrology; I have yet to see a description of the personality types allegedly belonging to birth signs in which I strongly match my sign but strongly don't match all the others. Conversely, one reason that I do take Myers-Briggs semi-seriously is that the descriptions of the two types that I come up as in online versions of the test/sorter are pretty good matches for me, and the descriptions of the other types are not.

Second: In many of the discussions we had today, there was an implicit assumption that greens are introverts and blues are extroverts. That's an easy shorthand, but in fact I think introvert/extrovert is a separate axis from color; for example, the extrovert aspects of blue are the aspects that don't match me, and if I had to pick only one of the four colors, I'd say I'm an introvert blue.

There's lots more to be said about this stuff, but I'm barely keeping my eyes open, so off to bed go I.

5 Responses to “Color-coded personality types”

  1. textjunkie

    I’d say you are probably an introverted blue, too, but there are plenty of personality quizzes on line that take the guesswork out of it. 😉 (Apparently I’m an extroverted green-gold with a strong blue in 3rd.)

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  2. Jed

    I’ve now tried one of the online personality quizzes. It asked me to pick option A or option B on each of a series of questions; on maybe a third of the questions, I wanted to answer “both” or “it depends.”

    But in each case, I picked whichever one felt slightly more true to me. And I ended up with the following “spectrum”:

    Gold: 12
    Blue: 9
    Green: 8
    Orange: 7

    Which the test-results page said made me a Gold. It looks to me like it makes me pretty evenly spread out among the colors, especially given how many questions I could easily have answered the other way.

    (Two other online tests require that you give them your email address to take the test (which I won’t do), and several other sites (all apparently run by the same people) have given up on True Colors in favor of some other personality test, so I’ve only tried that one test.)

    Anyway, my conclusion continues to be that this test isn’t a good/useful indicator for me. It takes a mix of personality traits that match mine and ones that don’t, and distributes them across at least three of its four categories.

    I do think that the idea of thinking about the ways that different people relate to the world and to work and to other people and to tasks and such is a good idea, and can be very helpful in interacting with people who have different approaches. For example, when I (very rules-bound) work with someone who’s vehemently opposed to rules, it helps a lot for both of us to know where the other is coming from. But it seems to me that describing one of us as a Gold and the other as an Orange carries along too much other baggage. (Apparently Golds are punctual and family-oriented, for example, and Oranges are risk-takers who deal quickly with concrete problems.)

    To put it another way: I think it’s more useful for me to list the specific traits that do and don’t apply to me than for me to say I’m a partial Blue/Gold/Green with occasional touches of Orange.

    (Of course, the system takes this into account by saying that Blues can be chameleons, taking on the traits of other colors.)

    It may well be that I’m an outlier. I did, after all, major in all three divisions in college, and I’m a generalist. But there were two other people in yesterday’s group of ten who had to kind of struggle to pick two colors out of the three they were initially leaning toward, and several others in the group had two roughly equal colors, and it sounds like you (textjunkie) have two or three; all of which makes me a little skeptical about the value of this particular categorization system.

    But it also may well be that my sample space is heavily skewed, and that most people fit more neatly into exactly one main color.

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  3. Matt

    And here I thought that your employer was the sort that wouldn’t do those sorts of psychological testing things. Alas. The search continues. 🙂

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  4. textjunkie

    Gold? Really? I would have put you as a blue. Huh.

    I doubt there are many people who fit neatly into one of the four bins–everyone’s going to have either a strong showing in or at least a touch of some of the other colors. As a personality categorizer, with only four options, yeah, it leaves a lot to be desired. I’m much more impressed with the Meyers-Briggs. 🙂

    I have to wonder whether the value of these kinds of exercises in a job or any group setting, though, is basically to help underscore that no matter what you are like, there are people Not Like You whom you will have to deal with, and to offer a rough set of things to keep in mind when running into one of them, to make the interactions go more smoothly. It seems obvious, but it can be eye-opening when done right. The two times I’ve done stuff like this in a group setting of hundreds of people–once at work and once in a multi-church meeting–it was very intriguing to me to feel the ease with which I communicated/worked with the people who were in my same category, even if I had never met them before, relative to trying to work with the people in some of the other categories. (I doubt that would work so well with this set of categories, but you could see how it might if the categories were better.)

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  5. Jed

    Matt: 🙂 To be fair, they don’t normally do this kind of thing. The exercise we did was adapted from management training, where it was intended to make new managers aware that different people have different working styles and approaches. And most of my colleagues who’ve gone through the training have found it valuable.

    textjunkie: I’m one of the most rulebound and process-oriented people I know, so that aspect of Gold fits me very well. But the family and religion and punctuality aspects, not so much. 🙂

    Good points about interacting with people Not Like You. I definitely agree that that’s a very valuable thing to learn about.

    And interesting and neat re ease of working with people in the same category vs other categories. I’m now thinking there may be some axes along which it’s easier to work with people in your category, and some axes along which it’s easier to work with someone not in your category. I’ve been putting together a list of (some possible) axes; will think about that as I expand that list.

    I’m reminded of a Stanford class that I read about online at some point in which students started out by taking some kind of personality profile test that sorted them into one of three (I think) categories; then they had to work in groups of three or four people, where each group had to contain at least one person from each category. I think it was presented in the context of having more ways to approach a problem being useful/valuable than only approaching it from one direction, or something like that. But it could well have resulted in making people more aware of how difficult it can be to work with people from other personality categories—and how important it is to be aware of those differences.

    …Yesterday afternoon, my group played Settlers of Catan, and it was kinda fun to look at through a True Colors filter; in particular, I was the only (semi-)Blue in the group, and there’s been some friendly banter throughout the week along the lines of “don’t attack Jed, he’ll take it personally ’cause he’s a Blue,” but in practice in the game they all ended up attacking me. Which mostly didn’t bother me, and by the time it was starting to be irksome they noticed that I was way way behind everyone else and eased off.

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